In addition, a lack of quantitative measures in estimating the annual cost burden imposed by the communication disconnect hampers efforts to promote integration and automation technologies in the construction industry, NIST reports.
NIST's Building and Fire Research Laboratory and the Advanced Technology Program commissioned a study to identify and estimate the efficiency losses in the U.S. capital facilities industry resulting from insufficient management of electronic product and project data among firms and their individual computer systems, including computer-aided design, drafting technologies, 3D modeling technologies, and many Internet-based and standards-based design and project-collaboration technologies.
The findings indicated that of the $15.8 billion in costs, two-thirds are born by owners and operators. Although the focus of the study is on capital facilities, it findings speak to key stakeholders throughout the construction, architecture, and engineering industries. This study is based on an earlier report also done by NIST on the cost of interoperability in the U.S. automobile supply chain.
