Understanding Construction Industry Abbreviations: BIM, GC, ITB, LOD, QTO, and More

Okay, welcome back. Now we're going to talk about the abbreviations that we utilize within the construction industry to simplify things and in some instances it might sound a little bit more complicated. But abbreviations or acronyms are very popular throughout the industry so it's important to understand the terminology so that you could understand the conversation that's taking place while the directive or the references that are being made by one of your co-workers.

Let's start out with BIM, Building Information Modeling. It's a whole lot of words to spell it out but also what is BIM? Is BIM being utilized on the project? It doesn't really matter if it is or not but if you hear the terminology BIM, it's more than just a 3D image. It literally is an image of a project, a digital image of a project that has metadata inside of it.

Not part of this class per se but keep your eye on this. It's very important. Building Information Modeling is going to be a big part of construction in years to come and it already is for that matter.

Let's talk about CSI which is Construction Specifications Institute. This was the original 16 division structure for construction. Divisions 1 through 16 where it started out with general conditions is division 1 and it worked its way on up to division 16 that was electrical.

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We have outgrown that by leaps and bounds and it is now up to a 50 division master format that we'll touch on in just a moment. The next two are very important. GC which is short for General Contractor.

That's the contractor or the company that's going to be running the project. The other term GC's with a apostrophe s is referred to as the general conditions. Make sure that you have it clear in your mind what the differences are.

The general contractor or the GC will also have general conditions which is the cost for them to run the entire project. ITB, you may hear of this from time to time and that's the invitation to bid. No one's going to bid your job unless they get an invitation and the invitation obviously would have any documents and plans to go with so they could provide a quote for you.

So the term ITB, you'll hear it pronounced throughout the entire industry. Typically that's where you invite certain contractors to participate in a project with you. LODs, this is something that comes from the drafting side of the design world of the construction.

Architectural design levels of development as it's referred to, it's not uncommon to have a LOD of 100. That means it's very conceptual or schematic so there's not enough information to do a detailed estimate on but a good conceptual estimator will understand just enough that he needs to to come up with a budget number for that. Typically when it goes out to bid it's going to be an LOD of 300 or 350.

So 300 doesn't mean that they're 100% complete documents but an estimator can anticipate what else is required to fill in the blanks where anything may not be shown. QTO, I mentioned this earlier when we're talking about takeoff but QTO is quantity takeoff. A number of different ways of doing it.

We touched on some of those already but bottom line is you cannot start an estimate without your quantity takeoff. SOG, slab on grade for concrete, a whole lot easier to use that term but understand what it means. Sub is typically used for subcontractor, plain and simple.

WBS codes, as we touched on a little bit earlier, these are WBS codes which is the work breakdown structure, hardly ever spelled out but it not only associates with the takeoff and the estimating but associates with the schedules for the project and project management for that matter. We'll spend a little more time on WBS codes as we move further into the classes. Let's talk about file types.

We have a PDF which is a file type, portable document format and it's ideal for drawings. The only thing is it could sometimes carry a lot of extra metadata built inside of it that could make it a little bit slow. Even a resolution could be as such.

I'll talk about that more a little bit when we get into another file format but PDFs are very common. They're used throughout the industry and the beauty of it is whatever is in that PDF format is locked in. You cannot change it.

You could enhance it by coloring over it but you can't change the main content that was originally written for the PDF and that's very important when it comes to drawings, you know, your documents and your specifications. A TIFF is another file type, similar to PDF. It's a flat file except it's even flatter.

It's almost like a snapshot, has just about zero or no metadata at all inside of it and very often PDFs are converted to TIFFs because they're a lot quicker to navigate. If you want to look at 300 sheets of plans and it takes three seconds to turn each page with a PDF, you may want to convert them all to TIFFs where they can just breeze right through. They're quick, they're light but for the most part understand that PDFs are usually the documents of choice that are distributed to contractors through the general contractors as well as from the architects themselves.

As far as image types goes, there's a number of different file formats that are available. Any of them can be used that can provide the quantity takeoff that you're looking for. It doesn't matter what the file type is.

It can actually be a snapshot, a physical image of something that you take a picture of at a job site. So a number of different file images can be utilized for the quantity takeoff that provide the information required for an estimate.