Recommendations to BIM Approach for a Brazilian Infrastructure Contractor

Abstract

In recent years, Brazilian government issued a federal decree establishing the National Dissemination Strategy for Building Information Modelling (BIM) with the expectation that BIM will be disseminated in public works by 2028. In addition to this, the Brazilian Association of Technical Standards (ABNT) has set up a committee to generate and disseminate standardization involving the various aspects of BIM implementation. In this scenario, the objective of this paper is to investigate the BIM implementation process in a Brazilian government infrastructure studied company, and to understand how the Design as well the Consultant Firms are facing the new demands about BIM. An exploratory research through qualitative and quantitative approaches was carried out by a case study. The qualitative approach was based on a set of interviews applied with Technical Professionals and the company´s board that work at the studied company. The quantitative approach was held through an online survey questionnaire applied to the designer´s base that work with the studied company. The analysis was also based on five different guides: BIM Project Execution Planning Guide, RICS Guide, CBIC Guide, EUBIM Handbook and European Construction Sector Observatory. As a result, the paper aims to deliver a set of practical recommendations in order to help the studied company define the demands for their designer´s base so that bidding occur in the best possible way, and also to better its BIM implementation process.

Framework proposal for BIM implementation in Brazilian construction and development companies

“…In the context studied, the general process was defined by the four steps indicated by the BIM Project Execution Planning Guide: identify BIM Goals and Uses, Design the BIM Project Execution Process, Develop the Information Exchanges and Define Supporting Infrastructure for BIM Implementation (Computer Integrated Construction Research Program, 2019). This framework was defined as a basis for the process due to its focus on implementation and operationalization of the BIM concept, compared to other guides that are more focused on giving recommendations to foster BIM diffusion (Borges et al ., 2020), but other frameworks might be used for this step, according to the context and constraints of each implementation. The following paragraphs detail the process conducted on the companies studied.…”

“…Regarding construction companies, only 23.08% were using BIM (Sienge and Grant Thornton, 2020). Another study with Brazilian contractors showed that the majority of the respondents were at initial phase of BIM implementation (36.7%), with 13.3% of the companies not planning to implement BIM at all, and only 10% of the respondents stating they were in an advanced phase (Borges et al ., 2020).…”