Building Information Modeling

6Building Information Modeling and Lean Construction

Lauri KOSKELA¹, Saeed TALEBI², Algan TEZEL³ and Patricia TZORTZOPOULOS¹

¹School of Arts and Humanities, University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom

²School of Engineering and Built Environment, Birmingham City University, United Kingdom

³College of Engineering & Physical Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom

6.1. Introduction

The recognition of the connection between building information modeling (BIM) and Lean Construction is relatively recent. Although these fields share a common objective, namely to improve the efficiency of construction, they had been advanced by their own communities of researchers and practitioners, with practically no interaction. The synergy between these fields was first spotted on the ground by a contractor with simultaneous initiatives in BIM and Lean (Markgraff 2008):

Tocci Building Companies uses BIM as the cornerstone of its lean activities.

We’re finding that BIM is the foundational tool for implementing an efficient delivery process.

The idea of this synergy was surprising and intriguing and led to the first journal paper specifically addressing it in 2010 (Sacks et al. 2010a). In that article, 56 interactions between BIM and Lean were found. This seminal paper has now (February 2023) been cited around 900 times. Which provides evidence on the rapid proliferation of the topic. Especially, this synergy has been analyzed in more specific areas, such as operations and maintenance ...