Leveraging Whole Life Cycle Costs when Utilising Building Information Modelling Technologies: Journal of 3-D Information Modeling

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is now being increasingly used as a technology tool to assist design professions in conceiving, designing, constructing and operating the built environment in many countries. The BIM model provides design professions with the framework to perform exercises in design, programming, cost and value management and concept energy analysis, in order to achieve the most economical and sustainable building solution. The BIM model though sophisticated is not extensively used to provide estimation software with the data requirements for Life Cycle Costing (LCC), such as, escalation of future expenditure and/or present value costs, discount rates and study periods. Without incorporating LCC functionality within the BIM model or in an external application with a BIM interface a complete picture of the Whole Life Cycle Costs (WLCC) cannot be generated from the outputs of the model. The authors will demonstrate in this paper the potential ability to customise traditional estimating packages with BIM take-off and database management interfaces, in order to find the best solution to provide complete Whole Life Cycle Costs Analysis (WLCCA). The authors have developed a template that can be incorporated into estimating software (with column and function customisation) to provide a more realistic WLCCA. This template was produced in consultation with one of the internationally established methodologies in Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and provides the user with the financial tools to select the most economical advantageous solution, possibly without investing in new estimating software. The authors strongly advocate the use of this WLCCA template in conjunction with estimating software on future projects utilising BIM technologies.