Building Information Modeling (BIM) Benefits and Challenges: Malaysian Construction Organization Experience

Abstract

Building Information Modeling is an innovative technology coupled with process and human interactions. BIM has been used by the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry in developed and developing countries including Malaysia. This paper aims to explore the BIM implementation in Malaysian Construction Industry. This paper begins with a literature review and then reports on the findings of case studies of selected Malaysian construction organizations, carried out with the aim to explore on existing BIM implementation establishing on the BIM applications, BIM benefits, and BIM future challenges. The review highlights on several BIM benefits regarding financial, better information, communication and coordination, respond to complexity, improved visual, improved sustainability, improved safety and also create service’s or business’s opportunities. Case study findings indicate that the BIM implementation in projects are still limited and requires more efforts to be made if the construction industry wants to gain BIM benefits. The results also indicate that although BIM implementation is considered low in the Malaysian construction industry, the participants are in a consensus of the benefits from BIM implementation, similar to those found in the literature. These benefits agreed by the participants that BIM implementation is a positive way to enhance the task efficiency in project delivery and also contribute to the higher visibility of the project, together with time and cost optimization. Furthermore, in the meantime, the organization that has the knowledge and skills in implementing BIM could benefit the opportunity in getting the new job or projects as well as being hired as the service provider in the construction industry. Nevertheless, implementing BIM is not without challenges. The data analysis had identified several challenges in regards to the implementation of BIM, which are non-technical (human and organizational culture) challenges and technical (technology) challenges. Thus, based on many future challenges for BIM, the Malaysian government and construction industry players need to collaborate and play their roles in supporting BIM development in Malaysia.

Investigating the barriers to building information modeling (BIM) implementation within the Nigerian construction industry

“…Despite BIM being acknowledged as a technology-enabled process, the majority of failures of BIM implementation, particularly within the developing economies context, can often be traced to technological related barriers and challenges (Enegbuma et al, 2014;Raouf andAl-Ghamdi, 2019: Ma et al, 2020), underpinned by business related barriers (Vass and Gustavsson, 2017;Musa et al, 2019;Vidalakis et al, 2020). This principal component accounts for 17.536% of the total variance of BIM barriers.…”

“…4.9 Component 4: process and economic-related barrier Building Information Modeling is often regarded as an innovative technology coupled with process and human interactions (Musa et al, 2019). However, the quest for BIM implementation is often hinders by stakeholders reluctance in invest in the BIM technology due to economic reasons (Saka and Chan, 2019a).…”

“…human and organizational culture) and technical (i.e. technology) challenges have also been identified as affecting the implementation of BIM (Musa et al, 2019). Likewise, Saka and Chan (2019a) identified the people/process-related barriers amongst the major challenges facing BIM adoption in Africa.…”

The Development of Building Information Modelling (BIM) Performance Model forthe Malaysian Construction Industry

“…The majority of the BIM implementation studies in Malaysia were only based on the benefits, challenges, awareness and readiness of BIM (Arif et al (2021); Othman et al (2021);Al-Ashmori et al (2020); Kong et al (2020); Roslan et al (2019); Musa et al (2019). However, there is a minimal study on BIM performance undertaken by the Malaysian construction industry due to the lack of knowledge in BIM performance evaluation.…”

An investigation of barriers to the application of building information modelling in Nigeria

“…Technical and economic factors include the complex process of learning BIM technology, the complexity of getting used to BIM technology and procedures and high costs related to the BIM software, hardware and training, with the following factor loadings:, respectively, 0.759, 0.544, 0.749. Musa et al (2019) regarded BIM as an advanced technology linked with human interactions. Nevertheless, the pursuit of BIM adoption is regularly hindered by leaders' reluctance to embrace BIM technology due to economic factors (Saka and Chan, 2019).…”