Exploring the Deployment of Building Information Modelling (BIM) for Construction Products Management

The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector is currently faced with enormous technological and institutional transformations across the design, construction and operation stages of a project. One very important instrument to such change is the rapid pace of BIM deployment with its resultant challenges. Indeed, the BIM work processes vary across discipline, thus creating a new dramatic requirement for the way in which product data is produced, integrated and shared across the supply chain. This particularly places an unusual responsibility on the building product manufacturing sector. There has been a plethora of research on BIM adoption within construction and design practices. Not much research has been done on utilising BIM for construction products management (CPM). Research from recent case study with a construction product manufacturer provides useful insight and practical experience on lessons learnt which may be valuable in other similar contexts. The research results provide an organizational level framework with insights into how BIM can be implemented within the construction products manufacturing (CPM) sector to improve solutions at different implementation stages of the AEC sector. The findings of the study push the boundary beyond the fragmented silo style of working between product manufacturing and the construction process, and reveal the new relationships that are formed and the synchronous communication that occurs from the point of object creation through the upload unto the web repository, and ultimately, sharing the product data via the project model among the multi-organisation project team.

Keywords: Building information modelling, Construction products, Semantic web, Object repositories, Proprietary objects.