2020 BIM REPORT Canada

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As part of the two-year work on reports on the use of BIM in Canada, a new edition of the 2020 report has been published. The report details: organization, application and awareness, experiences, benefits and barriers within the application of BIM in Canada. Below I present the most important parts of the 2020 Bim Report [2].

The first survey was published in 2018 and included 252 participants and 20 in-person interviews in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). In 2019, with the support of local and national organizations such as CanBIM and BuildingSMART Canada, the scope of the second survey was extended to the national level and 398 responses were received. The third survey was distributed through various channels - mainly tBIMc, CanBIM and social media - targeting professionals across Canada. However, the participation was similar to the first study in that it only collected 222 responses. It should be noted that the surveys were mainly disseminated in the BIM community and therefore the analysis does not cover all AEC / FM industries in Canada.

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Canada remains the only G7 country without a national BIM mandate. Instead, BIM's momentum is being displaced from the inside by the design community. As BIM visibility increases, the emphasis on owners and downstream contractors shows the value of BIM processes and their performance. Governments and regulators see the potential to reduce time and bureaucracy and improve process transparency.

Awareness and knowledge of BIM practices in the AEC industry is constantly growing. Almost all (99%) of the participants knew about BIM and 82% were active BIM users. However, most of the surveys were distributed within the BIM community to respondents who already use BIM in their organizations, so these numbers do not represent the degree of BIM adoption in the AEC / FM industries in Canada. In addition, the report does not fully reflect the point of view of those working in traditional practices who have not yet adopted BIM. 72% of respondents felt confident in their knowledge of BIM, only 66% felt confident in their BIM skills. Compared to the 82% utilization rate of BIM, this indicates a need for more BIM training. Ninety percent of participating organizations have adopted BIM in their current workflow, and 80% of the remainder indicated that they plan to implement BIM in the next few years. Sharing BIM files outside the organization demonstrates how the potential of BIM as a collaboration and communication tool is being used by industry. Eighty-eight percent of participants shared their BIM files with at least one third party, with one-third of participants involving five or more pages.

The survey included specialists in a wide range of disciplines from the Canadian AEC / FM industry. As shown in Figure 4, 38% of participants work in architecture, including architects, architectural technologists and interior designers. The BIM specialization was the second most represented discipline (30% of participants), including BIM technicians / specialists, BIM coordinators / managers, and Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) coordinators / managers. It is followed by engineers, including structural, structural and mechanical engineers, and construction, including project coordinators / managers, contractors and cost estimators, each representing 10% of the participants. The remaining 12% worked in other disciplines such as education, visualization, facility management, manufacturing, real estate, software development, and law.

Almost all (99%) of the participants knew about BIM and 82% were in fact active BIM users. Of the remaining 18% who were identified as BIM non-users, only 1% were completely unaware of BIM's existence. It should be noted that the surveys were mostly disseminated in the BIM community, so the above numbers do not indicate the degree of BIM adoption in the AEC / FM industries in Canada.

• The responses of the respondents were compared in terms of:
• Using BIM and people awareness
• The use of BIM and awareness among age groups
• Confidence in the knowledge and skills of BIM How confident are you in your knowledge and skills in the field of BIM
• Adoption of BIM in organizations
• Use of BIM in organizations by size
• Frequency of BIM projects
• The frequency of BIM projects in age groups
• Number of organizations with which study participants shared BIM
• Share BIM files by organization size Number of stakeholders / organizations you share BIM with, by organization size
• BIM in the AEC / FM community
• BIM applications
• The impact of BIM on organizational processes
• Advantages of BIM
• BIM adoption barriers averaged over three years
• BIM information sources
• Canadian BIM resources
• BIM software tools
• Interoperability and OpenBIM
• The most popular applications of BIM in various disciplines
• The three most important barriers to BIM adoption among the disciplines
• Attitude of BIM Users to Non-Users versus the adoption of BIM
• Duty of BIM 
• BIM and E-permits 
• Construction and technologies of the future

Resilience to change and the slow adoption of BIM by the industry were identified as major barriers in the industry and across all categories, with 63% compliance. Participants saw barriers at the corporate level less often, perhaps because most of them had already used BIM. Nevertheless, significant capital investment, uncertainty about the benefits, and high operating costs contribute to the uncertainty of the BIM value proposition, which may prevent organizations from adopting BIM. At the individual level, more than half of the participants identified the knowledge and skills gap as the main barrier to implementing BIM.

In addition, 87% of BIM non-users and 96% of users agreed that BIM is the future of design information. But how can we get there? While the majority agreed that governments would increasingly insist on adopting BIM in the future, less agreed that BIM should be made mandatory. Only 6% of participants did not believe that BIM could improve the permitting process and help automate code compliance checking. Additional technologies affect the industry. According to the respondents, virtual and augmented reality (VR / AR) has the greatest potential to influence the industry in the next 10 years. Reality capture technologies, in particular laser scanning, are critical to efficiently creating virtual models for existing facilities. E-authorization and automated code examination also received over 80% of the support from participants. It is clear that there is widespread agreement that the technology will remain here and the AEC / FM industry will change a lot over the next decade.

Sources:

[1] pixabay.com

[2] 3 'BIM Report 2020 - BIM use pattern in Canada - Building Innovation Research Center Department of Civil + Mineral Engineering torontoBIMcommunity RESCON Residential Construction Council of Ontario AECO innovation lab - University of Toronto - 2020