By Steve Smith, director of partnerships at Bluebeam
A revised drawing goes out on a Tuesday morning.
It reaches most of the team. One person misses it, or works from a copy downloaded the week before. Installation carries on against superseded information. Nobody catches it until Thursday. By then, the installation has been covered up or connected to other work, delaying the project and increasing costs.
The information existed, and was accurate, but it was sitting in an inbox.
Every construction professional knows a project that went sideways. A subcontractor failed to appear, materials arrived late, or the weather wiped out a fortnight. Those are visible and mostly unavoidable.
This one is neither, yet it is far more common.
I spent nearly a decade at Leica Geosystems selling the instruments that generate project data, from laser distance meters to reality capture scanners. The hardware was never the bottleneck, but what happened to the measurement after it left the device was.
That problem remains, but it has moved further down the job.
Construction’s dependence on email can be compared to healthcare’s dependence on the fax machine. Better alternatives existed for years, but familiarity and established workflows kept fax in place. Email is still used on construction projects for the same reason. It is the lowest common denominator. Switching costs fall on every firm at once, while the benefits only materialise when everyone on the project moves together.
The answer lies in procurement
Since 2017, relevant Scottish public bodies have been required to assess projects above £2 million for building information modelling through the BIM Grading Tool and comply with the result. Scottish Futures Trust guidance backs that up with consistent expectations for briefing, procurement, delivery and management of building information.
Scotland did not wait for the industry to converge on its own. It set a threshold and attached it to public money.
From North America, that looks like a head start, and I am not saying so to flatter anyone. Large parts of the US market are still arguing about whether structured information is worth requiring at all. But the requirement stops where the trouble starts.
Grading a project for BIM at the front end says nothing about where a revision lives on a wet Tuesday in month 14. A project can satisfy every requirement on paper and still lose a fortnight because the drawing that mattered went out as an attachment to 11 people, nine of whom opened it.
The cost of that gap is measurable. Research published by FMI and PlanGrid in 2018 found construction professionals lose around 14 hours a week to non-optimal activities, five and a half of them spent looking for project information. Fourteen hours. Every week. Per person.
Our own research found nearly 40% of firms struggle to manage collaboration across the full project lifecycle, particularly where design, construction and operations sit in separate silos.
Extending the principle is not complicated. It means naming in the contract, rather than in the kick-off meeting, where information lives during delivery. That could mean a common data environment, structured requests for information, controlled review and approval, and markups that every party can open, whatever they run in their own office.
That last one is where these conversations usually die, and I should be straightforward about it, because building integration partnerships is literally my job. Discount my enthusiasm accordingly.
Extending the requirement does not mean everyone on the job buys the same software. They will not, and they should not have to. A specialist trade is not going to abandon a system it has run for 15 years because a main contractor prefers something else, and no procurement rule should ask it to. The condition is that information exists in a form everyone can use, regardless of who owns what.
Get that distinction wrong and you write a rule the industry routes around.
Email will always have a place on a project. It is a good doorbell, but a terrible filing cabinet. The notification can live in an inbox, but the decision, the drawing and the audit trail should not.
Scotland has already shown it will set a standard and hold public work to it. The open question is whether that standard stops at the model or follows the information all the way down to the person holding the drawing.
