The adoption of building information modelling and intelligent contract to payment process in Malaysian conventional contract

Abstract

Payment conflicts are never ending issue in Malaysian construction industry. This issue is a common scenario especially in public work project, which involves a conventional contract. The late payment and non-payment occur due to client inefficient payment administration caused by documentation and human factors. It commonly ended up causing delays in project completion. However, the revolution of Information Technology (IT) within construction industry has shown the development of various management systems, which transformed the way projects are administered. The introduction of Building Information Modelling (BIM) is one of the project management systems, which have been created to centralised knowledge sharing resource as an effective collaborative and integrated approach between inter-disciplines in construction industry. The development of digital technology of Intelligent Contracts brings great potential in BIM management to automate the contractual process and thus create possible solutions towards payment conflicts in the construction project. This paper discusses the process of payment in the conventional contractual procedure, which relate to the causes of delay in payment. It is believed that by integrating BIM and Intelligent Contract’s attributes may help to eliminate the unnecessary procedure, which prolong the payment processes. Therefore, this study is carried out to explore what are the effects of adopting BIM and Intelligent Contracts attributes in conventional payment process. This is a descriptive study and the methodology used is essentially on review of the literature in relation to payment processes in conventional contract, BIM management system and attributes of Intelligent Contract. The analysis revealed that the adoption of BIM and Intelligent Contracts attributes in payment conventional process could improve the efficiency; reduce the time by eliminating third party interference and manual signatory. In addition, the project performance is analysed intelligently as well as minimise the risks of losing information by keeping historical audit trails in automatic system repository.