Digital quality management in construction industry within BIM projects

Abstract

The paper is focused on digital processes related to quality management within Building Information Modelling (BIM) projects. Even though BIM is among its other advantages considered helpful in the design phase to support quality management by clash detection, there has been only little improvement of quality management in the execution phase related to BIM projects, as well as limited research in this field. Despite the fact that some construction companies already use certain applications to process quality management digitally, it can be said that current practice of quality management in the construction industry is generally dependent on hand-written documents with photos and other digital media, which are in no way related to the hand-written documents. This is especially a common practice in rural areas. Therefore, these hand-written documents have to be later associated with corresponding photos and other digital media in order to make a fully transparent report for involved project stakeholders. This process requires a lot of manual and repetitive work for all involved project stakeholders, thus resulting in high error rate. With increasing number of defects, it is almost impossible to manage all defects appropriately and evaluate their statuses. That is why a new digital quality management system shall be proposed to make the process of quality management transparent and effortless for all involved project stakeholders. A digital quality management system can be associated with BIM projects, but does not necessarily has to, it can work with 2D project documentation as well as with 3D BIM models. The paper describes current practice of quality management in construction industry and outlines new possibilities of digital quality management systems in connection with BIM projects.