4D Planning Explainer Video

This 4D planning explainer video shows you what 4D planning is, the key benefits, and some examples of 4D simulations.

What is 4D Planning?

It is a combination of BIM models with the additional dimension of time (planning). Projects are 3x more successful when 4D planning is used on a regular basis.

4D planning will help schedulers, planners and project managers to solve problems, including:

• Trade flows
• Work conflicts
• Material lay down areas
• Schedule variation
• Clash Detection

4D Planning provides a visual rather than hundreds of pages for the project schedule. This power comes with enormous advantages. One of the main advantages is to eliminate planning mistakes that cannot be detectable with traditional scheduling approaches.

Every project comes with a challenge. As projects become more complex, the challenge is defined as coordination. One of the other advantages is to increase the awareness of the project execution strategy and ensure that every project stakeholder is on the same page.

With a 4D Plan, you can coordinate all project stakeholders from clients to the trade contractors. Sometimes, clients can be non-technical staff from governmental agencies or financial institutions who wish to fund the project and those who suffer to understand what the asset will be at the end of the project. And sometimes, a key project member may have joined the project team while the project is on the way and the member may need a quick overview of the project status and future action plans. Or there may be some trade contractors who wish to participate in a tender to offer their work, but they may have a lack of understanding of where their team should align with the other trade contractors.

In order to sort out all those issues, 4D Planning is the solution. With the power of visual representation of the project schedule, even a non-technical person can easily understand where the project is and where it is headed. Therefore, the practice adds enormous value to the project by decreasing the uncertainty, and increasing the rate of success in terms of time, cost, risk, or even quality and safety! And yes, an HSE observer can detect a safety breach at the construction site and quickly highlight where the observation has been made and let the related parties know about the issue using the model.