Commercial Project Design Fees with Revit - Higher or Lower?

[sparkie001]

Can't find a thread covering this so I'll start one.

Assuming that you have decent Families and templates created and have gotten over the initial learning curve, do you think bottom line design fees for commercial or institutional projects should be raised, lowered or stay the same when using Revit vs. 2D AutoCAD? By how much %? ( I know the labor per phase is more front-end loaded when using BIM).

I'm mostly interested in MEP fees but Architects are welcome too.

Thanks,

Steve

[andrew.handley782323]

Architectural fees discussions with clients so far point towards wanting to see quantifiable benefits (financial) for paying the design team an increased fee for using BIM.
Would a better approach be to sell the use of BIM on the added value it brings to the whole construction process reducing provisional sums, RFI's and time to practical completion?

Take a look at the work of the CE Avanti Project in the UK.

[sparkie001]

The Architect and client are already sold on the benefits of BIM. They are the ones that requested a proposal from us. But what is fair and reasonable?

[BIMTom]

I would expect that your accounting department has the metrics to compare and be able to answer that question.

[sparkie001]

I would expect that your accounting department has the metrics to compare and be able to answer that question.

How so? We have never done a Revit Project so we have no billing history to draw from.

Thanks for writing.

[schrodingerscat]

How so? We have never done a Revit Project so we have no billing history to draw from.

Thanks for writing.

I'd also like to know this from a perspective of BIM being generally a longer (more expensive in regards to hours worked and paid for) process, or whether it does actually cut back time spent on projects in the end (and therefore less of a cost).

[Comach]

Can't find a thread covering this so I'll start one.

Assuming that you have decent Families and templates created and have gotten over the initial learning curve, do you think bottom line design fees for commercial or institutional projects should be raised, lowered or stay the same when using Revit vs. 2D AutoCAD? By how much %? ( I know the labor per phase is more front-end loaded when using BIM).

I'm mostly interested in MEP fees but Architects are welcome too.

Thanks,

Steve

This is an interesting question - technically BIM is a process that encompasses the whole design process from conception, design, construction and finally facilities management and is a real attempt at standardizing data structures, documentation and procedural intelligence related to engineering core processes and methodologies.

Anyway getting back to the original question about fees - I think we should be charging less - in a properly streamlined work-flow it is quite conceivable to reduce project design time substantially and potentially increase efficiency with 3d cad systems. In fact I recently developed a work flow that cut a companies design time by 60% by streamlining the existing engineering design methodology then selecting the cad system that best fitted this idea - recently I have devised a method to reduce this by another 50%. This saving was not attributable specifically to 3d cad - that's just the tool that makes it possible, the saving was attributed to looking at existing engineering processes, scheduling, procurement, manufacturing, installation and working smarter.

So given all the above I think we should be lowering the fees or at best stay the same.

[mwiggins]

"So given all the above I think we should be lowering the fees or at best stay the same"

You are obviously not using Revit MEP.

[schrodingerscat]

You are obviously you’re not using Revit MEP.

Oh?

I've found that once setting up a project in Revit, and making sure the sheets are all good to go, the time it takes to actually model the project (excluding family creation) is not about the same as doing it in AutoCAD.

Although I have found that the lack of a "Divide" command slows me down considerably. This lighting layout that would take me 10 minutes in AutoCAD has now taken me about an hour (not including family creation).

[JH75]

Hi schrodingerscat,

Here is "workaround" for divide http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=10364 .

Cheers,
J