The Importance of Integrating Cost Management with Building Information Modeling (BIM)

The UK construction industry has been branded as an inefficient, fragmented and non-value delivering industry by prominent critics such as Michael Latham and Sir. John Egan; both have insisted on the need to change the way the industry delivers and manages assets through integrated project processes. Sir. John Egan specifically highlighted the need for significant reduction in project time and cost. As a result, for the last few years the main emphasis within the construction industry is on integrating various project processes by using the integrated approach and enabling technologies that bring all the stakeholders in a close relationship for achieving greater success. One of the most critical project processes is the cost management that involves cost estimating, control of expenditure and cost advice on cash flow and payments. Furthermore, Building Information Modeling (BIM) has emerged as a very powerful approach and set of information technologies that allows the project stakeholders to work collaboratively on highly technical and comprehensive models using parametric design components and visualize design in 3D. The UK government has made the delivery of public procured projects through BIM mandatory from 2016. Thus, it has become critical to investigate the prospects of cost management practice in this context and determination of how BIM can help in its improvement. The aim of this paper is to examine the importance of BIM in the UK construction sector with a specific focus on cost management through a state-of-the-art review of literature in order to highlight the significance of BIM for potential improvements in area of cost management.