Structuring information from BIM : A glance at bills of materials

Industrialized house-builders are moving towards an enhanced production where management of information along the value chain is critical in order to deliver housing projects on time and with the desired quality. Today digital tools and systems are used in both design and production to produce, deliver and instruct actors throughout the phases of aproject. However, the information usually exists in different islands and manual transfers are required tokeep the flow of information between IT-systems and individuals continuous. A key to improving the ability for the members in different stages of a project to work with the same information is to facilitate different views. One of the building blocks for creating bridges between the islands of information is to introduce bills of materials which can be used to organize information for different purposes. Uniting the use of building information modeling (BIM) withbills of materials (BOM) is therefore our focus in this paper. This is done in the context of industrialized house-building and the facets which it brings to the subject. The aim of this paper is to present an early endeavor into a BOM based approach for structuring information from BIM models. A demonstration tool was developed, and together with application in a case project from an industrialized house-builder, the generation of BOMs from BIM data is illustrated and discussed. The findings illustrates that we can apply different structures to the information located in our BIM models and that we can produce a BOM perspective on our products. Also, it is highlighted that we still need further studies to better understand how application of BOMs in the context of industrialized house-building is realized