A Quantitative Evaluation Framework for the Benefit of Building Information Modeling for Small and Medium Enterprises Leveraging Risk Management Concepts

Building Information Modeling plays an increasingly important role in today’s construction sector due to its growing prevalence among practitioners and the increasing legal obligation to use it in public projects. The general and most obvious benefits such as improved communication/coordination or rapid generation of various planning alternatives are widely accepted. However, there is a lack of a generic framework to quantify these benefits. This is especially important from the perspective of small and medium sized enterprises because larger investments - as they may occur through software and training when implementing BIM - should be balanced against a traceable return-on-investment. With a few exceptions, other research focuses on qualitative or non-monetary assessment parameters to evaluate these benefits. Such an approach may be too vague in the context of small and medium-sized enterprises to justify the necessary strategic decisions on a BIM changeover. In this study we propose a generic framework for quantitative evaluation of the BIM benefit. This evaluation is based on the BIM-impact on contingency estimation in construction risk management relying on Monte Carlo simulations. Semi-structured interviews and questionnaires with practitioners are used to evaluate how risk factors and subsequently contingencies can differ from each other in BIM-projects and Non-BIM projects.