MANAGING BUILDING INFORMATION AND CLIENT REQUIREMENTS IN CONSTRUCTION SUPPLY CHAIN - CONSTRUCTOR'S VIEW

Supply chain management (SCM) has been undervalued subject in the construction process. Effectiveness of the supply chain and information interaction, are fundamental requirements of the industrialised construction having immediate influence on construction productivity. Information management methodologies in the construction are not at the same level as in some other industries mainly due the fragmented project based business models. In the last 10 years, the building information model (BIM) technologies have become common in design phase and gained critical mass for credible usage as a platform for construction planning and management, and for product data management in supply chains. However, the participants in the process interpret the project information from design documents differently. Interpretation actualises in several phases of project without systematic data management. The use of intellectual information on virtual model is unsystematic and users of models exploit the data manually. The current construction process sets also restrictions to the implementation of BIM technologies, but the BIM based building design itself will improve the construction process and reduce the errors with real 3D design work, and better compatibility of design disciplines. Now the accomplishment of all these benefits is not necessarily possible. The main objective in on-going research is to develop a comprehensive BIM based product data management procedure for the supply chains in industrialised construction process. This requires the definition of the process and needed methodologies that the stakeholders in networked construction branch can apply to get product and production information in an electronically interpretable format, and update their subset of this information. In this paper, we will define the key challenges and possibilities for BIM based supply chain management between main contractor and product suppliers. This paper rests on the observations made in product group specific workshops, interviews and meetings related to three different kinds of product groups.

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