I received a link from a friend that is a staff architect for REI. Talk about a nice job! Anyway, he sent me a link to an article in Building Design+Construction. They've surveyed the top 300 firms and asked, "Is BIM paying off—through cost savings, higher quality, or client satisfaction?"
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I know that from personal experience it took approximately 4 years, when I was at my previous firm, for us to start seeing the benefits of our BIM implementation. Back then, in 2004-05, we were out on the "bleeding edge" of the movement here in NorCal. It took time for our local community of professionals to get on-board and wrap our heads around what BIM was doing to our workflows and how to adapt. Read that last sentence again......BIM changed our workflow, we adapted. That was the key to our success. I believe that a large part of that process was interaction with our design partners. Once the engineers saw and heard what we were struggling with, they were able to add their input and tweak their workflows. Eventually, the entire design team was able to leverage the benefits of BIM. The return on investment was exponential.
