Everyone knows that two of the biggest areas of risk on a construction project are schedule delays and cost overruns. And the primary contributor to these schedule or cost impacts can be attributed to the growing number of RFIs construction teams deal with on a daily basis. A typical project can see on average 796 RFIs and can cost over $1,080 to respond to each one of these RFIs. That means that on average it costs a project's bottom line nearly $860k just to respond to RFIs.

With steep cost and schedule implications like these, it presses the question, where are all of these RFIs coming from?

Our data science team was set to find the answer, and in their research, they found that over 70% of RFIs stem from design or documentation issues. Taking that a step further, they also found that unsuccessful projects tend to have 50% more RFIs, with a root cause in Design & Engineering or documentation issues, than successful projects.

Taking all of this data into consideration, it seems clear that if we were able to solve critical design and constructability issues earlier in the process, not only would we have far fewer actual RFIs to manage and deal with during construction, but we would also minimize the amount of cost overruns, schedule delays, or litigation issues that put a project at risk.

In construction, timing is everything. If teams don’t catch design issues early on, the cost to resolve them increases exponentially as the project continues. “As the overlap of design and construction phases continues to increase, the early identification and resolution of design issues is critical to managing risk to the construction schedule,” said James Detzel, the Director of Innovation at Austin Commercial.

The right time to make big impacts on catching design issues and reducing costly and schedule threatening RFIs should be when teams are completing their design and constructability reviews. Having the right tools to help manage this process is essential.

Today we are thrilled to announce the release of the BIM 360 Design Risk Management capability set. These capabilities use the intuitive web-based collaboration and review features built into BIM 360 Document Management as well as the machine learning and AI based technology in Construction IQ.

Watch it in Action

Tools to support design and constructability reviews is not entirely new to BIM 360. Through the Document Management module, teams have been able to manage the process of receiving, reviewing, and distributing design information. Whether through the ability to create markups or issues directly from a drawing or model, or by initiating multi-step approval workflows, the Document Management features allow teams to complete these reviews in an organized and efficient way.

Now with the application of Construction IQ, team members, like BIM / VDC Leaders and Superintendents, are able to take design and constructability reviews to the next level. Powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, Construction IQ scans through project data to surface the highest risk issues.

When launched, Construction IQ identified issues as they related specifically to safety and quality risk. With the release of Design Risk Management, Construction IQ now highlights design specific risk such as code compliance issues, issues to critical building components, errors and omissions in design and documentation as well as any overdue design issues or reviews.

“We are very excited by the promise of machine learning to analyze the unstructured data inherent to design issues and help identify those with the highest risk to the project.” James Detzel, Director of Innovation, Austin Commercial

With this level of information readily available, project leaders can take daily action to prioritize and resolve design issues before they become time-consuming RFIs and create costly changes downstream during construction. So, what all does Design Risk Management include? Here is a breakdown below of the features built into BIM 360 that will help your team supercharge design and constructability reviews: