Economic Efficiency of BIM in FM

The continuous further application of the BIM method also in the use phase of buildings often fails today due to the skepticism of FM and/or owner organizations about the economic benefits of BIM use, especially but not only for existing buildings. In this chapter, the basic drivers for economic efficiency and the ROI of BIM use are first explained. This includes typical benefits of the BIM method in the planning, design and construction phase and presents the concept of “digital prototyping” and “digital lifecycle management”. This process-related view of benefits is supplemented by the quality- and resource-related view of value creation, with the advantages of the BIM method being presented by means of a low-threshold, early application of simulation methods, inter alia, with regard to the aspects of space and energy efficiency with practical examples. In the subsequent operational phase, benefits of BIM applications for reducing the process cycle times of important management processes, such as maintenance, are presented. For example, it is explained how BIM models can act as “enablers” for the use of innovative technologies such as augmented or mixed reality. Finally, examples are given of how external costs can be reduced by BIM, e.g. to avoid costs of on-site data capturing when exchanging service providers. In the last section, a new approach to the evaluation of BIM benefits is proposed. The established approach of the balanced scorecard (BSC) is transferred to the evaluation of BIM benefits. Again, it must be noted that the BIM application is usually not justified solely by financial savings. Rather, a decision must also be made depending on qualitative benefits of BIM for customers, one’s own process organization or one’s own innovation capability. The chapter ends with the presentation of a five-step approach for the practical application of the BSC-based evaluation in the context of BIM use.