Factors influencing the adoption of building information modeling in the AEC Industry

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1 icccbe 2010 Nottingham University Press Proceedings of the International Conference on Computing in Civil and Building Engineering W Tizani (Editor) Factors influencing the adoption of building information modeling in the AEC Industry R Liu, R R A Issa & S Olbina University of Florida, USA Abstract Building information modeling (BIM) has received a lot of attention from both academia and the construction industry. This study identifies the factors that are influential in the decision of adopting BIM as well as their level of contribution in that decision making process. A questionnaire was distributed to the AEC industry to determine their intention of adopting BIM and their perception of the factors that influences their decision. The questionnaire is designed to figure out the relative contribution of factors that affect the adoption of BIM within three main categories: perceived benefits, internal readiness and external force. The study also investigates some of the problems and challenges faced by current BIM users. Keywords: Building Information Modeling, adoption, AEC industry, survey, user challenges 1 Introduction Building Information Modeling (BIM) is the future of the construction industry. As BIM is becoming more popular, it introduces many opportunities for the improvement of business information transfer throughout the construction process. Perceived and actual benefits have been investigated throughout many studies. However, the factors affecting the adoption of BIM for a company/organization in the AEC industry have not been fully explored for either an individual organization or collaborators within the AEC industry. BIM can only be of full benefit to AEC industry adopters once it has been more widely adopted throughout the industry. It is hard for a company to fully achieve the benefit of BIM while other partners are not using BIM. In the McGraw-Hill 2008 Smart Market Report on BIM, 48% of the BIM experts surveyed said they were tracking BIM ROI at a moderate level or above (Gudgel, 2008). For the two highlighted firms in case studies PCL and Holder, the initial ROI was 300 to 500% on projects where BIM was used. A follow-up survey of AGC BIM Forum members in November of 2008, found that the average ROI on BIM was perceived to be between 11% and 30%. In the McGraw-Hill 2009 Smart Market Report on BIM, two thirds of BIM users said that they saw positive ROI on their overall investment in BIM, 87% of expert users experienced positive ROI with BIM, 93% of BIM users believed there is potential to gain more value from BIM in the future. In anticipation of the potential benefits of BIM, organizations and companies in AEC industry have started initiatives to implement BIM. However, the decision of adopting BIM technology is not only affected by the benefit derived from BIM itself. Some other factors such as external pressure,

2 internal readiness have to be considered when organizations want to put BIM adoption on their agenda. 2 Prior research There are not many real word examples of BIM usage. Some primary reasons cited by studies include the lack of initiative and training, varied market readiness and reluctance to change the existing work practice ( Khemlani 2006). A study conducted by CIFE in 2007 found that adoption is not universal, however, and slightly more than half the 2007 respondents indicated that they were not using VDC/BIM on any projects. In addition, it found that, the majority of non-users cite lack of need, lack of request by owners, and lack of qualified providers as the most common reasons for not implementing the technology. They suggested that a profound disconnect exists between the perceptions and desires of non-users and those of users (Gilligan, 2007). The key findings of the Smart Market Report published by McGraw Hill Construction based on a survey conducted in 2009 were as follows (Gudgel, 2009): Two-thirds of BIM users said they see positive ROI on their overall investment in BIM. 87% of expert users were experiencing positive ROI with BIM. 93% of BIM users believed that there is potential to gain more value from BIM in the future From the result, it can be concluded that BIM adoption is getting more widespread in the industry every year. However, we still do not understand what the factors are that make the industry adopt BIM. Hence, the focus of this study, which is to find out what the main factors are that affect a company s decision to adopt BIM. Moreover, Ning Gu et al. (2009) studied the adoption of BIM as a collaboration platform and establishing industry standards for implementing BIM in practice. (Ning Gu et al., 2009). The adoption of new technology has many common features (Gudgel, 2008). For a broader concept of new technology adoption, please refer to the work by Chwelos et al. (2001). 3 Survey methodology The survey was conducted among the buildingsmartalliancetm list. The receivers of the survey were assumed to be more knowledgeable users than most in the AEC industry. By December 12, 2009, there total of 66 complete surveys. The respondents profiles are shown in Figure 1. As shown in Figure 1, the Survey respondents provided a broad and representative cross-section of all parties in the AEC industry including owners, architects, engineers, contractors, and consultants. In addition, respondents had a variety of positions in their companies as shown in Figure 2. Additional company information such as revenue, number of employees, BIM project and BIM platforms in use were collected and are shown in Figure 3. As shown in Figure 3, in the US AEC industry, Autodesk Revit and Naviswork are still the most widely used BIM software packages among the respondents as compared to the rest. Autodesk Revit has 70% of the whole market. Other BIM software is used by the respondents such as Onuma Planning System and Solibri. However, some respondents specified AutoCAD or SketchUp as their BIM software, which indicates that in the AEC industry, the difference between BIM and BIM software is still not clear. Some respondents perceived that BIM is equal to 3D drawing which is a misunderstanding of what BIM is (Suermann, 2009).

3 Figure 1. Company Business Type Figure 2. Position in Company

4 Table 4. Perceived benefit rank Perceived Benefit Average score Quality Improvement 4.44 Improved Accuracy 4.34 Improved access to information 4.24 Better Communication 4.18 Enhanced Ability to Compete 4.17 Integrated Work Progress 4.15 Increased Profitability 4.14 Time Saving 3.92 Reduced claim and law issues 3.45 Reduced Communication Cost Findings and results Based on Chwelos et al. s (2001) work, the adoption of a new technology is affected heavily by three factors: perceived benefit, external forces and internal readiness. Internal readiness mainly includes IT sophistication and top management support. Since the two factors in internal readiness are not closely related, they are treated, as shown in Figure 4, separately for the purpose of this study. As shown in Figure 4, more than 50% of the respondents believed that top management support and perceived benefits are very important for BIM adoption, and 90% of them believed these two are important. Nearly 50% of the respondents thought that IT sophistication is also important. Compared with others the external forces seem to be less influential on the decision of adopting BIM. The importance of these four factors ranked by the respondents from most important to least important was as follows: 1. Top management support, 2. Perceived benefit, 3. IT sophistication, 4. External forces. The following sections will explore the factors in each category.

5 4.1 Perceived benefit As shown in Figure 5 most of the respondents graded these benefit from important to very important. The respondents perceived quality improvement as the biggest perceived benefit followed by improved accuracy, improved access to information and better communication. The ranking of these benefits are shown in Table External forces External forces indicate the influence from competitors, collaborators or other parties in their industry segment on the respondents company. There are three factors in this category. Competitive strength which means the adopter s intent of adopting BIM to remain competitive. The feedback from the respondents is shown in Figure 6. Influences from other cooperating parties as shown in Figure 7. Influences from competitors as shown in Figure 8. As shown in Figure 6, 36.4% of the respondents believed that adoption of BIM is a very important aspect in remaining competitive in the market. However, as shown in Figure 8, almost half of the respondents indicated that the pressure from other competitors is small. This reveals that their companies adopted BIM with a focus on improving their own competitive strength and were not forced by other competitors. Moreover, more than half of the respondents indicated that the influence from other parties had a big to very big impact on their decisions to adopt BIM.

6 4.3 Internal readiness In the internal readiness category, top management s attitude, financial cost of BIM, BIM personnel and BIM training hours were considered. Table 5 shows that 78% of the respondents top management was supportive of the adoption of BIM in the company and that 40% of the companies had more than 10 employees working on BIM. In addition, nearly half of the respondents employers had organized more than 51 hours of training. Table 5 Top Management Attitude Top Management Frequency Valid Percent Negative 3 4.6% Moderate % Supportive % Very supportive % Total % Table 6 Financial Cost importance Financial cost Frequency Valid Percent Not at all important 2 3.0% A little important 4 6.1% Moderate % Important % Very Important % Total % Table 7 BIM personnel BIM personnel Frequency Percent 1 to % 3 to % 6 to % More than % Total % Table 8 BIM training hour Training Hour Frequency Percent More than % % % Less than % No organized training % Others 2 3.2% Total % 5 Discussions and limitations Based on the results and analysis of the questionnaire, the main three factors that affect the AEC industry in adopting BIM are perceived benefits, external forces and internal readiness. For each category, the relative importance is considered. For example, in the perceived benefit category, quality improvement and improved accuracy were the most important factors in the respondents view. In the external forces category, the respondents intent to remain competitive in the market was

7 most important but not the pressure from competitors. Meanwhile, in the internal readiness category, top management support was considered to be the key. Since these results are based mainly on a questionnaire distributed through the buildingsmartalliancetm list, some of the respondents were BIM experts who are considered more knowledgeable than regular people in the AEC industry. So the perceptions derived from this survey may be different than those from other AEC industry surveys. 6 Problems and challenges of adopting BIM The full benefits of BIM can only be realized when its adoption becomes widespread in the AEC industry. Some of survey respondents listed the following challenges of adopting BIM in the industry: Interoperability of different discipline models on different software platforms is very limited. It is always more difficult for small organizations to adopt new technology due to relatively expensive upfront costs, thus when small subcontractors are involved in a project, it is difficult to use BIM. Top management is not supportive of implementing BIM as they do not recognize the benefit of it. Lack of clearly assigned responsibilities for the BIM BIM file sizes are too large. Transporting, manipulating, storing or sharing these large files is difficult. Some parts of most software are underdeveloped, e.g. the electrical solution. Maintaining staff with sufficient knowledge to perform facility management using BIM is difficult. Fear of sharing the model because of the responsibility associated with its use. References GILIGAN, B. and KUNZ, J., VDC use in 2007: Significant value, dramatic growth, and apparent business opportunity, Center for Integrated Facility Engineering, Report TR171. GUDGEL, J., Building Information Modeling: Transforming Design and Construction to Achieve Greater Industry Productivity McGraw-Hill SmartMarket Report. GUDGEL, J., The business value of BIM: Getting Building Information Modeling to the bottom Line" McGraw-Hill SmartMarket Report. GU, N., SINGH, V., TAYLOR, C.,LONDON, K and BRAKOVIC, L, Adopting Building Information Modeling as collaboration platform in the design industry, CAADRIA, Chiang Mai, Tailand KHEMLANI, L., BIM Symposium at the University of Minnesota, Building the Future AEC Bytes, CHWELOS, P., BENBASAT, I. and ALBERT S. DEXTER, Research report: Empirical test of an EDI AdoptionModel. Information Systems Research 12, (3): SUERMANN, P., Evaluating the impact of building information modeling (BIM) on construction.