Leveraging prefabricated construction supply chain management through building information modelling

Abstract

Prefabricated construction has been promoted as an innovative process in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry to reduce construction time and waste. Despite its capability, the adoption of prefabricated construction in Malaysia remains low due to the fragmented delivery processes among a large number of project stakeholders. Building Information Modelling (BIM) has a high capability to address these issues by centralising, coordinating, and visualising the design, timeline, and related costs for the supply chain management. Thus, this research aims to develop a process map that integrates BIM in prefabricated construction supply chain management. A 28-storey commercial building was selected as a case study to evaluate and visualise the supply chain management. A total of 405 precast families were created to develop a BIM Level of Detail (LOD) 300 model in Revit®. This model was utilised to (1) develop a work programme in Oracle® Primavera and (2) simulate the four-dimensional (4D) and five-dimensional (5D) BIM analysis in Navisworks® Manage. A process map was developed based on this case study and further validated by six expert panels. High mean scores ranging from 4.06 to 4.58 out of 5.00 were obtained for the validation process, affirming the feasibility of BIM integration in prefabricated construction to improve the supply chain management process. Generally, the experts agreed that the process map could be applied in other projects depending on the nature and suitability of the projects. Thus, future works include testing the process map in other case studies. This study contributes to a formalised process in preparing, coordinating, and simulate relevant information for prefabricated construction supply chain management.