Preemptive Contingency – The BIM Safety Net: How Miller Construction Company Invests in the Overall Success of a Project for All Stakeholders

It was only 8 inches into the public right-of-way. The shear wall footer was forty-two feet long, twenty-three feet wide, and four and a half feet deep. Five-hundred eighty-five square feet of formwork, two and a half tons of steel, placed exactly as specified, but the property line wasn’t on the detail plan, and the dimensions on detail plan were ever so slightly different than the scale on the floor plan. And now the formboard survey revealed the mistake. A costly holdup at a critical time for the project. The jurisdiction restricted working hours by ordinance, so there were limited options to make up for the delay.??

This was a scenario that no contractor wants to face. A minuscule discrepancy in the contract documents that snowballs into a liability and an unhappy client. The design team had not produced the Contract Documents with BIM. Consequently, when the structural engineer made a slight change to the details of the shear wall footer in question, that change was not applied to the floor plan, so the issue with the property line was not apparent. And now Miller Construction was left to deal with the consequences – or at least we would have been. Except we built our own BIM and avoided all of it.?

BIM started off as a tool for construction design professionals to produce drawings. It was intended to replace the CAD software widely used by the industry, but it came with an unexpected benefit that two-dimensional drafting software could not offer; it took the fundamental design concept of the project out of the Architect’s head and recorded it in virtual space. Prior to the arrival of BIM as a design tool, a three-dimensional project could only be represented by the two-dimensional slices that designers extracted from the vision in their own minds and put onto paper. These slices were subject to all the limitations and vulnerabilities of the human condition. They required every change in the designer’s vision to cascade down to every subsequent plan, detail, schedule, and specification in ways that project stakeholders could read and interpret accurately.? It relied on the designers’ ability to keep track of all the places where the concept was represented on paper and left cavernous spaces for problems to hide. And the potential problems only compounded with design complexity. A figurative minefield of obstacles lying in wait for one misstep. Not so with BIM. Design changes in BIM are not made to an individual drawing or a detail or a schedule or a specification. They are made to the model -- the digital manifestation of the fundamental design concept itself. And since every drawing, detail, schedule, and specification throughout the entire set of project documents is just a slice tied directly to the model, when the model changes, the documents change with it.?

This brings us back to the story of the shear wall footer. The costly issue and the unhappy client. Issues like this can’t hide from BIM. The cost of BIM for the entire project was under twenty thousand dollars. The footer, along with the rest of the structure, the finishes, the MEP were all built in a virtual environment long before the first shovel hit the dirt. When the dimensions of the footer from the structural engineer’s detail were applied to the model, the issue was immediately apparent and was able to be corrected with no cost or delay. And that wasn’t the end of it. Thirty-seven total discrepancies, oversights, clearance issues, code violations and constructability issues were all identified and addressed before any costs were incurred. And that doesn’t even include the clashes.?

One of Tom Miller’s favorite quotes comes from Abraham Lincoln: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” The quote is about efficiency and the idea that preparation yields benefits that last beyond the immediate task. BIM is a sharp axe. The up-front effort and expenditure leads to far more significant success in the long run. For Miller Construction Company, BIM as a value-added service is a no-brainer. It’s proactive reduction of risk. Preemptive spending of contingency to avoid spending tenfold later. An investment in the overall success of a project for all stakeholders.??

The story of the shear wall footer serves as a powerful reminder of the critical role that BIM plays in modern construction best practices. By investing in BIM, Miller Construction Company was able to identify and resolve potential issues before they became costly mistakes, ensuring the project's success and client satisfaction. BIM transforms the way we approach construction, turning potential pitfalls into manageable challenges and providing a safety net that traditional methods simply cannot offer. For any construction project, large or small, BIM is not just a tool—it's an essential investment in precision, efficiency, and peace of mind.?