Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 2, Episode 18 /Nov 21, 2025
Why model health is a CFO problem, not a BIM problem
Matt Wash, BimBeats
Nov 21, 2025 /Data, BIM & Interoperability
Why model health is a CFO problem, not a BIM problem
Matt Wash is the CEO of BimBeats, an Australian company whose software reads the log files that Revit and other design tools generate, to show firms where their hours actually go. He started as a structural technician thirty years ago and has run BIM for large practices. His data is the closest thing the industry has to a time-and-motion study of design work.
Matt Wash, CEO of BimBeats, BimBeats
In this conversation
What Revit, Rhino and Grasshopper journal files reveal, including project directors spending eight hours a day inside Revit.
Matt's five-percent figure and where the rest of the model's data goes.
How clients pay for BimBeats out of software-license savings they can finally plan accurately.
His one piece of career advice: complementary digital skills make you employable for life, and switching roles is easier now than at any time in his career.
In Australia on a normal commercial tower, 5% of that information actually feeds through the entire life cycle through to operations.
Matt Wash
Chapters
What the log files show
What thirty years and thousands of log files taught Matt about design work.
BIM at the core, not the edge
Why BIM should be the core of a firm's business rather than a side function.
A founder's perspective
Running a software company after a career inside practices.
The operations insight
The discovery about administration versus design time that surprised even him.
By the numbers
Share of construction professionals' time spent on non-optimal activities: looking for information, resolving conflicts, rework
Matt's log files show project directors spending their days on administration rather than design. Autodesk and FMI measured the same thing across the industry.
Source: Autodesk and FMI, Construction Disconnected (2018) ↗Charging for automated work
How to charge for work that automation has made fast.
We don't spend that much time designing. The amount of administration tasks that don't particularly add value is so high.
Matt Wash
Takeaways
On a typical commercial tower, about five percent of the information in a BIM model reaches the people who operate the building. The other 95 percent exists to produce a drawing.
Model health is a finance problem, not a BIM problem: crashes, syncs and administration are costs the firm pays and cannot see.
If scan-to-BIM takes an hour because you automated it, you cannot charge an hour. Efficiency exposes the billing model, not the technology.
A lot of clients see AI as an opportunity to get things done cheaper because you're not spending as much time, therefore it's cheaper.
Matt Wash