Fees in a BIM project

[Merlin]

Hi All,
Wondering if people could add their experiences / "5 cents" on how they're modified the structure of their fees now with BIM projects. Many Directors are of an era when fees were calculated using different tools that meant different emphasis of the timing of resources (people) during a project.
What have you to say on this - do you have increased staff numbers at an earlier stage and less at others?
Does LOD impact on your fees?

[Wanderer]

Hi All,
Wondering if people could add their experiences / "5 cents" on how they're modified the structure of their fees now with BIM projects. Many Directors are of an era when fees were calculated using different tools that meant different emphasis of the timing of resources (people) during a project.
What have you to say on this - do you have increased staff numbers at an earlier stage and less at others?
Does LOD impact on your fees?

There was an interesting thread on that awhile back... might be something useful there:
https://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?92272-Commercial-Project-Design-Fees-with-Revit-Higher-or-Lower

[grantandersonvdc]

I think it's a great thread that Wanderer put into the ring. As for us, we're just starting to get BIM off the ground at our mid-size GC and I'm the only BIM-oriented employee. We only have 1 project where I am expensing my hours, other than that it's going to overhead. Major expenses (getting 2D drawings converted to a BIM model, a laser scan, etc.) will either get eaten by us or expensed to the project depending on the attitude of the owner. We figure that the money we're spending on coordinating the building is going to ensure a higher quality install with less costly mistakes, so using these things is a credit, not an expense that will put us in the red. Hope this helped.

[johnflutter]

There are a number of direct costs associated with BIM, which can affect all members of the design and project teams.

These include:

Investment in upgraded hardware (`which can be mitigated by the use of cloud services and “child” computers)
Software licensing, with individual software subscriptions costing upwards of £4,000 each per year
The salary premium of employing personnel trained in BIM software
The training of existing personnel
The scale of record keeping required – memory, storage facilities and processes that have to cover all models.
Many of these costs are incurred at the start of the project, but this is also the point at which many of the benefits can be realised.

It is important that the entire technical BIM team – members from each discipline, including the cost consultant – invest time in planning, shaping and reviewing the modelling methodology.

BIM requires a lot of data, and it needs a robust framework to make it useable and avoid abortive work.

Therefore, a model development plan should be created: this is an agreed roadmap for how usable data should be structured in the model, including project specific requirements, the software chosen for drafting and harvesting data, and the file format exchange.