Architectural Engineering & Construction

Business Pressures

The world is changing fast, generating new business drivers for AEC companies to respond to:

• There is a trend away from public to joint public and private financing of infrastructure and this means a move away from optimising the first cost to optimising the lifecycle cost. This results in a need for more efficiency in design and operation of the project with even more accurate monitoring and control.
• Obtaining project approval is becoming more difficult to obtain and increasingly the community is active in reviewing and monitoring infrastructure projects along with environmental organisations.
• Major infrastructure projects often use international consortia to deliver a project and this creates an even greater need for communication across continents.
• Projects are increasingly making use of design re-use and knowledge capture from previous projects both technical and commercial and this creates a need for better data management.

As a result the opportunity for PLM in AEC is enormous and the benefits to those companies that exploit the technology is immense.

The way forward is for AEC companies to look at their business needs and identify where PLM can add value, remembering the adoption of a PLM philosophy evolves over time by refining, adding or replacing functions within a business rather than through wholesale replacement of entire systems, “PLM is an environment and not a software solution”.

Business Issues facing the AEC industry

> Project Lifecycle Management (PLM)

> Building Information Management (BIMan)

> PLM Benefits

> PLM “Push or Pull”

> Can AEC benefit from lessons learnt in Auto and Aero?