Building Information Modeling (BIM) for Project Value: Quantity Take-Off of Building Frame Approach

Purpose - Under today's increasingly complex and large-scale construction environment, building information modeling (BIM) is being recognized as an effective and dominant project management tool. To demonstrate the practical benefits of BIM application, we focused on the quantity take- off (QTO) of a building frame by BIM modeling because accurate cost management is now seen as a critical factor for project value.

Design/methodology/approach - QTO is the systematic breakdown of a project into units of work in order to evaluate the cost and time needed to complete a project. We analyze the traditional manual-based approach and the BIM-based approach to find the most practical method, and then examine comparative data from actual case projects. Particularly, a direct comparison of the QTO of building frames between two approaches reveals the accuracy and availableness of the both approaches respectively.

Findings - As a result, the BIM-based approach shows higher QTO accuracy (95%) than the manual-based approach (less than 89%). BIM also has other advantages such as allowing partial calculation, re-calculation, and design changes during production stage. Moreover, because design changes are calculated automatically by the BIM operation, drawing omissions and cost estimation errors can be reduced significantly.

Originality/value - Thus, project value can be improved by the application of BIM for cases in which all the available cost management information is handled and reproduced by different project participants.