The impact of BIM on risk management as an argument for its implementation in a construction company

This paper examines the impact of the Building Information Modeling (BIM) implementation on the construction market, where BIM is not common yet. As long as the client does not require using BIM, construction companies often struggle when trying to find arguments for BIM implementation, which would outweigh all obstacles encountered during the way. Several BIM benefits can be identified of which one of the most important is the BIM impact on risk management. The objective of this paper is to investigate the importance of risk management and BIM relations as an argument for implementation of BIM in a construction company. It focuses on the risks related to BIM implementation processes, i.e. processes related to implementing new systems in a construction company, and risks related to BIM application processes, i.e. processes related to actual BIM use in a construction company. Although there are serious threats involved in the first group, there are many opportunities emerging from the second one. Risk (threats and opportunities) identification in both of these groups and finding their correlation can then be used as a supporting argument for BIM implementation. The research methods are based on conducted surveys and literature research. These sources were analyzed and used for the case of explanation and for the identification of key risk and BIM related issues. The research reveals whether the topic of BIM related risks is mostly treated only on a common level and whether BIM regarding risk awareness of those who have not been using BIM is sufficient enough to evaluate all advantages and disadvantages of BIM implementation. In the end, the paper suggests a possible method to describe BIM related risks. The understanding of these risks and their connections allows construction companies to build arguments better when considering BIM implementation into their practice. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under he CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).