Abstract
In both developing and industrialised countries, due to numerous time-related problems of construction projects, BIM-based time management, 4D BIM, plays an increasingly critical role within the industry. This study investigates the planning and scheduling problems, BIM application level, and BIM-based scheduling implementation by the lead construction companies in Turkey. Despite the critical importance of the planning department in construction companies, the planning and BIM integration levels have scarcely been investigated from the contractor perspective in Turkey. This paper presents the outcomes of 16 semi-structured interviews (SSI) with managers of the leading Turkish contractors selected from 100 of ENR’s 2019 Top 250 International Contractors list; a list of issues are outlined. The current situation escalates problems like tendering with missing project documents, examining 2D project drawings while scheduling, fragmentation, project manager’s reluctance to use and follow the project schedule, issues with updating the schedule as per construction improvements and quantities, and a lack of investment for BIM implementation. The research findings, ultimately, aim to help contractors improve their processes. Although this study’s findings are obtained from interviews with lead Turkish contractors, it is not limited in terms of geographic context since the interviewed contractors work worldwide.
Highlights
The project planning and scheduling process is key to successful project management (Pellerin and Perrier, 2019)
The planning and scheduling process becomes a substantial challenge for contractor companies, it still relies on traditional methods, and many project failures exist related to it (Derbe et al, 2020)
5 Discussion The semi-structured interviews show that leading Turkish contractors' planning departments suffer from a lack of design documents starting from the tendering process until the construction process
Summary
The project planning and scheduling process is key to successful project management (Pellerin and Perrier, 2019). It plays a significant role in determining the available resources’ flexibility and guarantees that tasks are completed logically and timely. In construction, the focus has been on developing planning tools rather than on the theoretical issues promoting its improvement (Laufer et al, 1994). This has resulted in inadequately managed projects and poor performance (Ballard, 2000; Koskela, 2000). 4D BIM simplifies construction activities’ time and space relationships and supports multi-party information sharing that is beneficial to project management (Gong et al, 2019)
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