How BIM Coordination Catches Clashes Before They Hit the Shop Floor

The most expensive place to discover that a duct run and a structural beam occupy the same three cubic feet of space is on site, with the duct already fabricated and a crew standing around waiting for a decision. The cheapest place to discover it is in a coordination model, weeks before anything gets built.

That's the entire case for BIM (Building Information Modeling) coordination: bring together the architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing models — usually built by different firms, on different schedules, with different assumptions — into one federated model, and run clash detection against all of it before fabrication starts. Software like Navisworks doesn't just flag that two objects overlap; it lets a coordination team walk through every mechanical, electrical, and structural system in 3D, sequence the installation, and confirm that what's being built in the field actually reflects what's in the model.

The clashes that get caught this way are rarely dramatic. It's a sprinkler main routed six inches too close to a cable tray. A rooftop unit whose curb doesn't line up with the structural opening beneath it. A conduit run that would have to pass through a beam that isn't going anywhere. Individually minor, but multiplied across a building's worth of systems, these are the conflicts that turn into RFIs, field rework, and schedule slip if nobody catches them until installation.

Coordination works best as an ongoing process, not a one-time check. Models get updated as design develops, new clashes get introduced as often as old ones get resolved, and the coordination model needs to be re-run against the latest versions regularly — not just once at 100% design. Done well, it turns "we'll figure it out in the field" into "we already figured it out," which is a much better position to build from.