1 · The risk of intervening without a reliable baseline
Before the works, the risk is that the investment is blocked: without a reliable survey of what is there, an intervention cannot even go out to tender. The firms that bid ask for drawings of structures, floor slabs and access routes in order to price the work; if there is nothing to give them, there is no bid to compare.
During the works, the risk is paid for in money and in days. When work is carried out on drawings that no longer reflect the real plant, the deviation is discovered on site — the new equipment does not fit, the anchor does not match, the installation clashes with what was there — with the crane waiting and the line stopped. That extra cost appears in no budget because it is born of a surprise.
Intervening without a reliable model of what already exists exposes you to deviations on site which, according to the sector’s own figures, can be in the order of 30%, against a maximum of around 5% when working from a prior BIM model. [estimated]
A real case shows it in a single scene: a food-processing manufacturer was going to replace two silos on the concrete base that already existed. On the as-built BIM model it was detected that the anchor plates of the new silo did not fit the base — weeks before the crane reached the site. The deviation was corrected on the drawings, not on the ground. See how it was resolved →
2 · Control: the company keeps the model
The question management asks of any technology supplier is “what do I take away if I stop working with them?”. With A3D the answer is settled in advance: the three-dimensional model remains the property of the company, delivered editable in the sector’s working formats (RVT, NWD). Unlike some suppliers that keep the model as their own, here the investment stays in-house — not tied to A3D to be able to read it in the future.
The model is delivered as the client’s property, editable and in a standard format portable to any software: the investment stays in the company, not captive to a supplier.
And the other side of control is the continuity of the supplier itself. To the reasonable question of “and if the supplier disappears?”: the firm has worked with Revit since 2003, A3D dates its first BIM implementation to 2007 and the company was incorporated in 2015, with a method applied and documented in more than 50 BIM implementations and more than 80 industrial sites scanned, in sectors ranging from food and chemicals to pharmaceuticals, beverages and water. And in any case, the model stays in-house, whether or not you depend on A3D.
3 · The real size of the decision
This is where the argument changes. The underlying objection — “I don’t see it as a need”, “I don’t see the return” — is poorly answered by defending the return on digitising the whole plant at once. A return calculation for the entire plant, full of assumptions the company cannot check for itself, is counterproductive with demanding management, which rejects it, and rightly so.
The decision that does get approved is a different, much smaller one: validating a single area, at a fixed price, before moving anything. It is not “do we approve digitising the plant?” (large spend, large uncertainty) but “do we approve checking whether this specific piece of equipment fits, before the crane arrives?” — a bounded decision that does not commit the next phase and whose result is checked in the intervention itself.
The first decision is to validate a single area, at a fixed price from ~€6,000 (estimated) — around 2% of the cost of a large intervention — decidable in a single technical meeting, with the sign-off of whoever runs the plant.
The ~2% is not a tariff or a fee: it is a rule for sizing the decision. In small interventions the ~€6,000 floor governs; in large ones, validating in 3D comes to around that 2% of the cost of the works. In both cases, the order of magnitude is that of a preliminary check, not of a plant project.
