EXPECTATION OF BUILDING INFORMATION MODELLING ON CONSTRUCTION COST MANAGEMENT

Construction cost management is one of the key criteria that can be used to demonstrate the successes of project delivery from the feasibility stage to the final contract stage. Construction cost management includes the processes of (1) providing preliminary cost estimate, (2) controlling the design development within budget, (3) measuring the quantities of construction works in Bills of Quantities, (4) controlling the cost in post-contract stage which includes (a) payment assessment, (b) valuation of variation, (c) cash flow forecasting, and (4) settlement of final account. Building information modelling (BIM) provides platforms for the innovative and integrated design processes and claims to be able to provide “automated” measurement for the quantities of the designed works. This research aims to conduct a pilot study on a project of simple content, by using the platform of the BIM automated measurement, to evaluate the degree of efficiency of implementing the cost management technique under the BIM environment. Through the study, (1) the expectation of the Quantity Surveying practitioners for using BIM, and (2) the actual difficulties encountered in the different construction cost management processes particularly in the area of the manipulating and handling of the “automatic” quantities calculated from the input information/design data, will be analyzed and discussed. Data transformation in different aspects will also be recommended to improve the efficiency of cost management in the BIM environment.