Using BIM and EDMS technique to eliminate the lack of information flow in construction projects.

Communication management is still a challenge for the project managers, so they are always keen to use the most impactful and up-to-date communication techniques in their work. In the meantime, they must ensure that their team is properly utilizing this technology. Accordingly, the aim of this study is to identify the effect of using BIM (Building Information Modeling) technique to manage the technical information and EDMS (Electronic Documents Management System) as a documentation system (provided by a specialized company) to eliminate the lack of information flow among project participants. This will help the project managers to discover the factors affecting the performance of their team while they are using this technology and to overcome all the limitations that may reduce the efficiency of the information flow system. To achieve the aim of this study a sequential four-step methodology was implemented, starting with a review of the existing literature on the benefits of communication management and the use the of BIM and EDMS technique in projects. The second step was to prepare a survey questionnaire to confirm the advantages (obtained from the literature review) of using this technique and discover its flaws or limitations in the current construction industry and then collect data and analyze the results. 20 participants with good experience in using this technique responded a questionnaire to highlight the challenges they are facing during their work. Four types of questions were used in this study; closed-ended questions, open-ended questions, rating questions, and multiple-choice questions. As the authors practice in the existing construction industry the samples were selected through extensive communications with their colleagues in the same industry and their LinkedIn contacts. The snowball approach was considered to select some nominated samples. As a conclusion of the analysis for the collected data, the authors discovered that using BIM and EDMS technology will improve the project communication. Nevertheless, the participants stated some occasional limitations they encountered while using these systems. BIM is still unfamiliar to some stakeholders of project, and this makes them unable to properly utilize the features of this system. There are some disadvantages in using EDMS such as the system cost, file ownership, and limited capacity of the system to save large files. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]