Integration of BIM and lean concepts to improve maintenance efficiency: a case study

Operations and Maintenance (O&M) is well known for its interdisciplinary knowledge. Currently, maintenance staff usually refers to original blueprints and as-built drawings - most of which have been rendered useless by decades of upgrades and retrofits - whilst low productivity caused by deficient information transmission between the different departments leads to labour wastage and high cost. Building Information Modelling (BIM), as a powerful approach, is used as 3D information models for maintenance process visualization and coordination. However, the O&M departments are facing barriers and challenges in BIM adoption as there is no clear guidance or best practice studies from which they can learn and build up their capacity for BIM use in order to increase productivity, efficiency and quality. Lean concepts, as new management thinking has suggested, is a better maintenance process by improving the reliability of flows and waste estimation. This paper aims to apply BIM and lean concepts to practical maintenance to improve efficiency. Firstly, the paper starts by discussing and analysing the limitations of existing O&M activities in this regard. Then, an overview of the proposed approach for integrating BIM, lean concepts and maintenance is presented. Finally, a case study is chosen to verify the integrated approach. The result shows that the approach can effectively improve maintenance efficiency.