Assessing Digital Information Management Between Design and Production in Industrialised House-Building – A Case Study

Managing digital information in construction is commonly described through Building Information Modelling (BIM), which advocates seamless chains of information, increased coordination between different actors and a life-cycle perspective on information management. However, low adoption outside the design phase entails that handling information in production is in many cases manual and paper-based, which increases vulnerability for upstream errors materialising downstream in production. Furthermore, issues with interoperability surround many areas when managing digital information. For industrialised house-builders, the transmitter and receiver of information are in many cases integrated within the same company or based on long-term collaboration. This affects their ability to manage information and utilise design information, which implies that their strategy for digital information management (DIM) might benefit from being addressed differently compared to more traditional BIM-based approaches. In this paper, we describe and discuss an implemented DIM-solution at an industrialised house-builder in order to address the benefits and challenges with DIM when managing information from design to production. The results imply that in order for several different functions within the company to reap benefits, a customised DIM-solution adapted after the company’s specific needs is a well-suited approach forward to avoid sacrificing functionality when utilising design information.