Robert Merry, is an independent stone consultant and project manager who ran his own company for 17 years. He also acts as an expert witness. Here he presents his view of the stone industry this month.

Bim diddy bim diddy bim bim bim! Its been coming for some time and my stone contract ‘mole’ tells me its arrived in his office already.

Hardly small or particularly hairy and certainly not blind, he does however have the extraordinary knack of being ‘in the know’, ‘on the inside’, ‘below the radar’… able to leak insider information on stone world trends. A sort of Twitterer without the internet.

“Building Information Modelling is here,” he squeaked . “Some major contractors are now making all their supply chain BIM compliant.”

The Government originally announced the use of BIM in its Construction Strategy published in 2012. It wanted all its projects to be BIM compliant to Level 2 by 2016. The reasons why are explained in Industrial strategy: government and industry in partnership published in 2012.

I quote: “One key competitive advantage of BIM is its ability to promote greater transparency and collaboration between suppliers and thereby reduce waste (procurement, process and material) through all levels of the supply chain.”

And…

“BIM embeds key product and asset data and a 3-dimensional computer model that can be used for effective management of information throughout a project lifecycle – from earliest concept through to operation.“

The Chinese are on to it. Tsinghua University, Beijing: “BIM will be the future IT solution in China; The Chinese government is strongly supporting BIM.”

OK, so as a stone company working for some of the larger contractors, clearly you will have a working knowledge of BIM by now and be in the process of training staff and analysing costs against rewards.

But what if you’re a SME working for designers and architects and small builders? Is it worth the investment? Is it for you?

Probably not right now. Though if you have any long term urges to sell your wares into large contracting jobs you are going to come across it at some point and you probably should be aware, at least, of what it is.

The National Building Specification (NBS) National BIM Report 2015 has a wealth of information, not only outlining and explaining the different levels of BIM but supporting these with some good quality graphics. You can download the BIM Report as a PDF at bit.ly/BIM-report2015.

The main thrust of the report is the annual survey results with feedback from NBS subscribers, who are mainly specifiers and are often the building designers.

For instance, in the section on adoption and awareness of BIM, the report states that in 2013 54% were aware and currently using building information modelling, while 41% were just aware of it and 5% were neither aware of it nor using it.

A year later, 48% were aware and using and 48% just aware. The 5% remained the same. (The figures are rounded up, hence the total of 101%). So why the 11% reduction in the number using BIM? This is explained firstly by the revival of the construction market, leaving less time for companies to adopt new working practices; and secondly by Everett Rogers’ Innovation Adoption Curve. A neat bit of science this. The ‘early adopters’ become the ‘early majority’, but the take up curve falls away in later years as the ‘late majority’ and ‘laggards’ catch up.

Just in case you’re wondering, I’m definitely a laggard.

Steve Lockley, a Professor of Building Modelling at Northumbria University, argues that the issue of data validation and verification is increasingly important. As construction moves from a craft-based industry to one of advanced manufacturing with off-site lean construction, the way information is exchanged and how this is written into contracts is central – not least to avoiding litigation in the future.

It is not difficult to imagine a company supplying a product with embedded data that clashes with the embedded data in another product from a different supplier, unaware of the potential for failure.

So who exchanges what information and how much? BIM partially tackles this with something called ‘clash detection’. But there is some way still to go.

All in all, if you’re in contracting you will need to be BIM compliant. For the rest of us, I suspect there will be a rash of support companies able to offer assistance with compliance for the one-off project. But BIM is here to stay. It is part of the future of building in the UK (certainly) and probably also the rest of the World (eventually).

As my mole said, as he twitched in the bright lights of the office: “You’d be a fool to ignore it”.

Who’d have thought it! A talking mole. “Bim diddy bim diddy bim bim bim!”

Robert Merry, MCIOB, ran his own stone company for 17 years and is now an independent Stone Consultant and Project Manager. He is also an expert witness in disputes regarding stone and stone contracts. Tel: 0207 502 6353 / 07771 99762.