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.
