Digital Transformation

With its citizens living in an ever-evolving digital era, the European Union (EU) have made it their priority to create a Digital Single Economy . On the basis of a set of common digital transformation processes, the EU aim to ensure that its member’s economies can meet the many digital opportunities coming in the future.

As one of the key sectors within the European Single Market*, the construction sector contributes to nearly 9 % of the EU’s GDP and 18 million jobs ( European Commission 2018 ). The digital transformation in this sector is recognised as a key driver of sustainable development of the EU 2020 Strategy. In this strategy, Building Information Modelling (BIM) is standard bearer in the digital transformation efforts.

As such, the EU established the EU BIM Task Group with a 2-year mission to encourage the common use of BIM throughout the EU. Its objective was to produce a handbook of common principles including procurement measures, technical considerations, cultural and skills development.

The handbook is available here in 22 languages including Turkish and Japanese.

Implementation Progress

Forming a unified-BIM implementation across the European Single Market is key to finding new and unique ways of working for the future. BIM implementation can drive down costs as macro economic issues, such as an ageing population, increase national budgetary constrictions.

As such, the European Commission (EC), the executive branch of the EU, underwrote the importance of BIM for delivering public infrastructure projects in Directive 2014/24/EU on public procurement.

BIM reminds a priority for the EU as a foundation stone for growth into the future for the Single Market. Despite centralised efforts, the implementation of BIM is very fragmented throughout Europe.

European-wide Research

In their paper, Azzouz, A. & Hill, P. & Papadonikolaki, E. (2019) compared the progress of BIM implementation in 146 projects of seven European countries: Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.

The paper measures the progress of the BIM implementation in a BIM maturity score. The highest BIM maturity score is attained by Spain then followed by Netherlands. The highest maturity level is in “document/model referencing and version control” with 79 % of projects using BIM functionality (Azzouz, A. & Hill, P. & Papadonikolaki, E. 2019).

Project file naming and version control is varied: Denmark 100 %, Spain 93 %, Italy 82 %, Ireland 79 %, the Netherlands 77 %, Germany 71 % and Poland 73 %.

Another researched area was the implementation of the BIM Execution Plan, i.e. the manner by which information is exchanged and formalised in BIM processes. Across the 146 projects analysed, 45 % had BEP implementation: Denmark being 100 %, followed by Spain at 93 %.

Current Status of BIM

Given the fragmented nature of BIM in Europe, it is difficult for BIM end-users like you to navigate the different national regulations, bodies and deadlines of all the European Single Market economies.

That’s why Cloudalize has compiled the below table.