Building Information Model (BIM) based process mining

Techniques that improved performance in other industries are more often adopted in the construction industry such as Systems Engineering (SE). Interviews with SE experts conducted within this study have indicated that SE IT systems supports with managing their project and helps to prove that the clients specifications are realized. However it is not known if those systems support an efficient process. Practitioners indicated that a lot of people are involved in such projects who all work in parts of the IT systems but nobody has a clear overview of the total process. This study explores the possibilities of discovering parts of the design process with process mining techniques. By use of a case study at a large civil project the potential of process mining within the design phase of construction projects will be discovered. It took some time to prepare the data but valuable analytics could be done with process mining techniques. Real bottlenecks are found, process variants are discovered, social networks are exposed and improvements in the design process can be made. Due to this experimental study the process engineers realized that the organization doesn’t control the field of information- and data modelling enough. It is concluded that it is valuable to use process mining to give continuously feedback loops to the project managers at contractors. Process mining gives unique visualisations which enables refreshing insights. In addition process mining analytics did realize that some IT systems are used to store information, but those systems don’t automatically facilitate an efficient process.