Henry Oti

Building information modeling, or BIM, is a catch-all term for a wide array of tools and processes for creating digital representations of buildings or building components. These tools have been widely embraced for use in the construction phase of projects, but their potential has only begun to be realized in facility management and maintenance, even though these account for 85% of costs in the life cycle of a building. Organizations controlling diverse estates with multiple buildings of varying ages stand to benefit enormously from a BIM-informed approach to estate management.

The Smart Estate outlines such an approach and its potential to improve facility and estate management. Emphasizing practical applications, it moves beyond the project delivery stage to focus on the much longer — and costlier — period of building operation and maintenance. The result is a thorough and accessible guide to generating collaborative, BIM-informed methods.

The Smart Estate readers will also find:

Case studies and real-world scenarios illustrating best practices
Detailed discussion particularly suited to the needs of large-scale or public-sector organizations
Detailed step-by-step guide to developing a BIM-informed approach to a given asset portfolio
The Smart Estate is ideal for professionals in construction management and facilities management, as well as for advanced students and professionals in all construction related disciplines.

Purpose: The relative low capital cost and contributions to mitigating global warming have favoured the continuous construction and operation of nuclear power plants across the world. One critical phase in the operation of nuclear plants for ensuring safety and security of radioactive products and by-products is decommissioning. With the advent of digital twinning in the building information modelling (BIM) methodology, efficiency and safety can be improved from context-focus access to regulations pertaining demolition of structures, and cleaning-up of radioactivity inherent in nuclear stations. A BIM-driven framework to achieve a more regulation-aware and safer decommissioning of nuclear plants is proposed.
Design: The framework considers task requirements, and landscape and environmental factors in modelling demolition scenarios that characterise decommissioning processes. The framework integrates decommissioning rules/regulations in a BIM linked non-structured query system to model items and decommissioning tasks, which are implemented based on context-focused retrieval of decommissioning rules and regulations. The concept’s efficacy is demonstrated using example cases of digitalised nuclear power plants.
Findings: This approach contributes to enhancing improvements in nuclear plant decommissioning with potential for appropriate activity sequencing, risk reduction, and ensuring safety.
Originality: A BIM-driven framework hinged on querying non-structured databases to provide context-focused access to nuclear rules and regulations, and to aiding decommissioning, is new.

Design/methodology/approach This research has measured, using National Student Survey (NSS) criteria, student experiences on an interdisciplinary project on a civil engineering programme. It benchmarks the quality of learning and student understanding and perceptions of learning. The method is based upon a literature review and questionnaire survey of students.
Purpose In line with business goals of customer satisfaction, higher education institutions of learning consider excellent student experience a priority. Teaching and learning are important aspects of satisfaction that are monitored annually by universities using tools such as the NSS. NSS results are useful for educational planning and informing consumer choices. This research measured undergraduate student experiences on an interdisciplinary project using the NSS framework. Hinged on diversity, the purpose was to investigate whether full time, part time and degree apprenticeship students with varied work experience enhance their learning studying together on an interdisciplinary project.
Findings Results indicate good amounts of peer influence on learning in a simulated interdisciplinary team setting supported by a mix of diverse work experience in students’ background.
Originality/value Sections of the NSS are extended with additional questions to capture the impact that full-time, part-time and degree apprenticeship study modes, closely associated with students’ background of job experience, have on teaching and learning.

Purpose: Critics of claims about BIM’s capability to revolutionise construction industry practices, describe it as overhyped, fallacious, and therefore suggest that there is need for a more critical examination of its’ change impacts. Others have posited that the changes BIM induces are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. In this vein, a careful analysis of the nature of such changes was undertaken to distil actual changes that happened, and the type of agency that brings such changes about.
Design: Drawing from appropriate qualitative research strategies, data was collected through key informant interviews from consulting organisations in South Africa that have implemented BIM within their organisations and on projects.
Findings: Changes in organisations’ work practices were evident in their workflows, formal/informal methods of interaction, norms, leadership and authority structures, remuneration, and the way work was conceived or conceptualised. Furthermore, changes in organisational work practices do not solely occur through the direct agency of the BIM tool’s implementation. Instead, BIM-induced change occurs by delegated, conditional and needs-based agency – which are not mutually exclusive.
Originality: The nature of changes in professional work practices could be misconstrued as being solely due to the actions of agents who actively participate in implementing BIM. The discussion in the literature has been advanced from general to specific theoretical understandings of BIM-induced change, that emphasise the need for construction stakeholders to actively participate in developing the innovations that drive change in the industry rather than hand the power to drive change to BIM authoring and management application developers who have less stake in the industry.

Based on conceptual models of macro-BIM adoption, several factors have been proposed as indicators of BIM maturity at the national level. Such macro-level BIM maturity indicators drive policy and the institutional imperatives for smooth adoption of BIM at the micro-level (within organisations). The Italian BIM landscape is slowly progressing with several initiatives towards meeting European Union (EU) directives. It, however, remains unclear which macro-level implementation factors are most relevant to organisations in their BIM implementation. Furthermore, there is a dearth of studies exploring the relevance of proposed macro-level BIM implementation factors to BIM implementation at the micro-level. In addressing this gap, this study uses the Italian scenario to explore the role of macro-BIM maturity factors on facilitating micro-level implementation effectiveness in design firms. To achieve this aim, an exploratory study of the literature was conducted to identify macro-level factors required at the national level for BIM implementation and ascertain which of those factors are most important to design firms through a questionnaire survey of professionals within design firms, which yielded 162 responses. The research found that steps are being undertaken to improve Italy’s macro-BIM maturity with professionals having an overall good degree of awareness and positive attitude towards BIM. Based on statistical analysis, the most important macro-level initiatives to design firms is the need for embedding BIM into education curriculum as well as availability of standard deliverables and components such as BIM objects, libraries and standards that regulate their development and use.

Purpose - To reach its full potential, Building Information Modelling (BIM) should be implemented throughout the supply chain. This study explores BIM implementation and adoption among Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the UK Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector. The paper addresses two key issues; the slow rate and lack of homogeneity of BIM adoption in the SME sector.
Design/methodology/approach - The study employs qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate BIM uptake and test for correlations between organisational features and BIM aspects. The sample includes data from SMEs, based in the South East of England, analysed by using descriptive and inferential statistics.
Findings - The results show that, although SMEs have some understanding of BIM related concepts, their familiarity with existing BIM software support systems is particularly low. Limited financial capacity is identified as the main barrier to BIM adoption while knowledge exchange initiatives as the most useful measure in facilitating further implementation. The variations of SMEs in the adoption and implementation of BIM are mostly affected by company size, professional discipline and offered services. The paper also demonstrates that a one-size-fits-all approach to BIM implementation in the AEC sector has limited potential.
Originality/value - The heterogeneity of SMEs in the AEC sector has been considered to a very limited extent. This paper considers the nature, characteristics and core business areas of SMEs as factors affecting BIM adoption and implementation.

Management of electrical and electronic waste (e-waste) becomes an increasing global concern because of rapid changing in technologies associated with tendency of people to keep up with the most recent technologies causing an increased volume rate of e-waste. This study compared and critically appraised three e-waste management models (producer responsibility, not producer responsibility, and sharing responsibility) currently applied in Malaysia and the United States of America (USA), in an attempt to explore best management practices that can be adopted in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The data presented in this paper are secondary data derived from a wide range of authoritative sources. This study recommends the sharing responsibility model to effectively manage the growing rate of e-waste in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

This Roadmap is developed for a challenging Global environment where fundamental paradigms such as data generation and analysis, are shifting at a seismic rate, while change in Construction Industries across the Globe is, in the main, confined to large-scale projects and slow. Against this background, the authors set out to also give a ‘voice’ to small-to-medium-scale projects through which the construction output Worldwide is delivered. Hence, project scale was one of the key considerations throughout this Roadmap.
Moreover, the authors conceptualized data integration by taking the realities of ‘doing business’ in construction into consideration. The emergent framework facilitates the discussion of knowledge and data integration at organisational, team, operational and technical levels across key project phases. This approach recognizes that business is done through projects but change can only come about if appropriate organizational structures and processes are put in place.
Last, but not least, the authors strived to ensure that data integration was not considered solely from a technical perspective. Organisational, team and individual aspects of data integration were integrated in the research framework. Through our work the individual’s willingness to collaborate emerged as a critical driver for high levels of integration, while our survey did identify “Reluctance to work across professional boundaries” as a major barrier to integration. Hence, we conclude that research on integration should pay due attention to the individual.