Construction timelines in the City Toronto are notoriously protracted because the city’s bloated bureaucracy comprises agencies that don’t talk to each other, thereby creating a lot of overlap. However, while a certain digital panacea has long been on the municipal government’s radar, it has conspicuously chosen to ignore it.
Building Information Modelling (BIM) technology can be used to digitize the approvals permits and rezoning processes, which presently takes around three years -- and, because time is money on a construction site, end users ultimately eat the cost -- by streamlining everything from architecture and engineering plans to communication between various parties, including municipal officials.
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BIM has proven to enhance productivity and efficiencies by cutting the time required to generate an expenditure quote by 80%, reducing unbudgeted project changes by up to 40% and increasing time savings by up to 7%. Cost estimation also falls to within 3% accuracy.
The Residential Construction Council of Ontario (RESCON) has been lobbying municipalities to digitize their permitting processes because construction timelines are getting longer, and in Toronto, where there’s an abundance of new construction but a shortage of trades, costs are ballooning. RESCON has come out as a major proponent of BIM technology, and to elucidate how stuck in the past City of Toronto officials are, Richard Lyall, President of RESCON, points out that they still use fax machines.
“Think of getting a new set of tools to do the same job, but better tools and a better way of communicating. It really augments the existing process, but it’s also really just modernization,” he said. “BIM modelling can incorporate all your purchasing and supplies and design elements, as well as all the various parts and identify them within the design itself.”
Technology concurrently eradicates human error while calculating and cataloguing the most abstruse facets of a project, like managing supply chains, forecasting, and even energy remodelling can be done in a matter of hours instead of months like it currently takes.
But as Lyall says, the most important thing is that every stakeholder can expeditiously communicate on a single platform.
“You can submit a draft and the final application ultimately goes through one portal to all the agencies that provide approvals for the project, whether it’s the transportation or conservation authorities, or the fire marshal’s office. They get it all at the same time,” Lyall said. “You have your own little network where they can all review things, for the most part, simultaneously rather than sequentially. You also have clash analysis -- when you do a complex project, you have a structural engineer and various contractors, and BIM brings it all together so they can see where the clashes are, like having a giant electrical cable that, on the design, is going through an HVAC system.”
However, as efficient as that sounds, the reality is anything but, Lyall added.
“With a paper- and emailed-based system, a lot of time is wasted because things get held up, but when you have a better-organized system that relies on technical aid, you’re not dealing with nonsense.”
Not Everyone Wants More Transparency
To be clear, implementing BIM technology wouldn’t be without its headaches. Entire departments would have to be trained -- a hulking exercise in and of itself -- and total outlays would easily cost tens of millions of dollars. Another issue is that until BIM technology becomes ubiquitous, its full suite of benefits won’t be realized.
But adoption must begin somewhere and opening up the process to all stakeholders through BIM technology would create more transparency and, therefore, accountability. But perhaps that isn’t in everyone’s best interests, surmises Jarkko Turtiainen, VP of North America for Cloudpermit, a software firm that “that empowers local governments with online land management processes.”
“I’d say they’re scared of moving in that direction and opening up for actual transparency,” Turtiainen said in reference to the City of Toronto’s building and construction department.
“I can’t say that with any show of proof that’s the reason, but in my opinion if they have nothing to hide, there are companies out there that are more than willing to provide them with software that creates transparency on both sides. It puts pressure on the builders and the applicants; everyone has to work together to get things going, but to me it says, one, they’ve looked at every e-permitting software there is and they haven’t found one yet, and two, they don’t want to go there because everything becomes transparent.”
Under the current system, a bureaucrat can send back an incomplete application -- Turtiainen estimates around 90% of filed applications omit salient information -- and work on something else, but in the digital milieu all of their activity would be logged.
The most glaring inefficiency right now is that paper applications don’t adhere to a specific standard and are, consequently, filed missing crucial information. A digital application, on the other hand, could not be submitted until all mandatory information has been provided. In such a scenario, Turtiainen says the time savings would be immense.
“Right now, it doesn’t tell the applicant what’s mandatory to fill out, so the [civil servant] will look at it and send it back to the applicant,” he said.
Nobody Talks to Each Other
One Ontario is a coalition that lobbies all levels of government to adopt technology with the goal of establishing data and information exchange between stakeholders, as well as to create a roadmap for e-permitting adoption, creating a framework for a BIM standard, and establishing a digital infrastructure exchange centre. Among its coalition members are the City of Toronto, RESCON and the Ontario Building Officials Association (OBOA), which partnered with Cloudpermit a couple of years ago. Turtiainen says the partnership between OBOA and Cloudpermit was intended to raise awareness about BIM technology with municipalities because when the latter entered the Canadian market, there were no more than 10, if even that many, municipalities in Ontario that used digital permitting platforms.
According to Arash Shahi, CEO of AECO Innovation Lab and founding member of the Toronto BIM Community, Canada is the only G20 country without a national BIM mandate, and while it’s easy to blame municipalities, he says there’s poor leadership from the provincial government.
“The province of Quebec launched a BIM mandate, Alberta is working on one, but the Ontario government is nowhere to be found,” Shahi said. “The only one missing from the coalition is the Ontario government. There’s lots of blame at the municipal level but at some point somebody needs to move past political campaigning and do something about this.
“When it comes to BIM and tech adoption, somebody needs to take action at the top because there are too many municipalities and they can’t agree on a whole lot. The last thing you want is the City of Toronto developing their own BIM strategy and the City of Markham developing their own strategy.”
If municipalities adopt different strategies and platforms, poor communication will continue reigning the day -- as will fax machines. However, One Ontario would create what Shahi calls a one-window permitting application, meaning that every municipality and relevant party would be interconnected, and applications wouldn’t need to be submitted more than once.
“We’ve done research in this space and 50-75% of the Ontario building code can automatically be checked on BIM. The twenty-first century is all about automation but unfortunately the municipalities still think about paper,” Shahi said.
Why the Time May Not be Now
BIM and paper are about as compatible as oil and water, but even in countries like Finland, a country extolled in the BIM space for its keen adoption of the software, not every jurisdiction has jumped aboard. So long as the old and new ways clash, inefficiencies will persist.
“The way I look at the whole process, you can’t run before you learn how to walk. Toronto is not using full systems yet and if they jump on a BIM platform now it will slow down the process. It won’t improve speed and transparency, but if they have a full-blown e-permitting software, it will end up speeding up the process,” Turtiainen said.
“It’s not as widely used yet. You can’t have BIM and paper. You have to go BIM and then you start getting efficiencies. The industry needs to work together with the cities and municipalities to adopt BIM technology and implement the mandate otherwise there won’t be improvement.”
Innovation Lab and the Municipal Infrastructure Council are working together to create a BIM platform that municipalities across Canada can use. While Shahi is exasperated by the snail’s pace of adoption, he is hopeful that real change is afoot.
“We’ve kept inviting municipalities to participate, and again, it’s moving very slowly,” he said, “but the infrastructure is being put in place.”
