BIMForum The cost of the pursuit: is it increasing because of IPD and BIM? How does a firm control the cost of pursuit By Mark Buckshon Special to Florida Construction News W hen the rules of the game and traditional business practices are under attack from new technologies, how do you respond? When things go right, Build- ing Information Modelling (BIM) and Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) go hand-in-hand to encourage collabora- tion, enhance design flexibility, reduce construction conflicts and change and (best of all) allow owners to truly un- derstand and manage their properties more effectively once construction is complete. The “when things go right” qualifica- tion is important, because this story is incomplete. More challenging, the im- pact of evolving technologies and prac- tices is uneven on disciplines, markets, and projects. This means that both 6 – SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015 — Florida Construction News defining the problem and discovering the solution will seem to be incredibly complex unless you “get it”. If you start from near-scratch, you will face a chal- lenging, steep and expensive learning curve (though probably not as severe as experienced by BIM/IPD pioneers just a few years ago.) “I don’t think IPD would inherently increase pursuit costs,” says former SMPS national president Craig Park (FSMPS), principal consultant at the Sextant Group in Omaha, NE. “It’s a tri- partite, contractor, and owner con- tract, and more than often it is a legal negotiation.” “BIM doesn’t increase pursuit costs (but) it increases the cost of doing business,” Park said. “The learning curve is steep in ar- chitecture – just having BIM in some ways has become a cost of entry to pursue work.” Park’s observations are reflected by several others. Cam Munro, innova- tive construction manager with Clark Builders in Edmonton, Alberta (the business is 51 percent owned by Turner Construction Company), says the difference in pursuit costs for a BIM/IPD project from conventional construction “would be similar in ac- counting, and probably would be noth- ing more than that we are just trading dollars.” “We’re spending less time on pow- erpoint presentations and binding pamphlets and spending more time on doing models that we do for pur- suit,” he said. The direct pursuit costs come out in the wash. But if you look beyond the process of pursuing the work on a day-by-day basis – that is, if you are seeking to de- velop the capacity to even reach the stage of winning BIM/IPD projects and you don’t have any experience in the field – the cost of pursuit will, of course be much higher, Munro said. The challenge, in part, is that the relative cost-benefits vary depending