The construction phase is the most intensive project phase in the construction industry, and progress monitoring is a crucial aspect for project management success. It involves monitoring and tracking the progress of a project’s execution, ensuring alignment with pre-designed plans, and proactively addressing on-site challenges. As the construction industry transitions from traditional practices to a more digital era, the integration of Building Information Modeling (BIM) is becoming a transformative factor that is reshaping the way construction progress is tracked and managed.
Before exploring the transformative power of BIM, it’s important to understand the challenges facing the construction industry. These challenges include coordination issues between teams and stakeholders, the ability to escalate and mitigate construction issues, transparency in documenting problem resolution processes, time and cost estimating, and the review and approval of as-built information.
The solution to these challenges is to introduce the concept of Building Information Modeling (BIM) to the monitoring construction progress. BIM acts as a digital connector, bringing all the different disciplines together, ensuring a synergy for real-time project visibility and collaborative efficiency.
Integration of time (4D) and cost (5D) within BIM environment with 3D model elements, enables element-based progress monitoring. This includes generation of informative BIM-based look-ahead plans for the time period, along with planned activities, quantities, required resources and costs, collection actual progress data and adjustment the look-ahead plan according to the actual situation on the construction site. Finally, the construction schedule is updated with actual data from site within integrated BIM environment, providing accurate monthly progress reports, accelerating the approval process executed activities.
Look-ahead plans created from this digital synergy provide insight into upcoming project milestones. Project managers can anticipate challenges, allocate resources wisely, and make proactive decisions. Based on look-ahead plans, it is easy to isolate elements that need to be done in a selected period and create selection sets from them. These look-ahead plans, together with up-to-date construction schedule, construction simulation and other relevant information (quantities, cost, resources) can be shared with the construction site through a Common Data Environment (CDE). This ensures real-time insights for on-site teams, fostering transparent communication and alignment.
Construction site teams then provide information about actual progress. By entering the progress for the monitored period of execution within an integrated 4D/5D environment, the construction schedule is automatically updated, enabling powerful insights and timely decision-making.
Advanced features such as 4D and 5D construction simulations take progress tracking to the next level. This digital prowess allows for a dynamic comparison between planned and actual progress, offering a visual representation of the construction process over time while integrating cost considerations in a three-dimensional context.
Finally, BIM-based Progress Monitoring enables informed decision-making by extracting data from an integrated BIM environment and provides project management with project insights, project status, performances, and key metrics through interactive KPI dashboards, such as monthly progress, earned value analysis, CPI and SPI analysis, delay analysis, and many others.
Check out the complete BEXEL Manager Progress Monitoring Workflow >
