Disruption claims are very common on construction projects but they are difficult to prove. One of the main reasons for this is that productivity losses associated with deployed are often extremely difficult to prove. Most claims for disruption are dealt with retrospectively and the claimant is forced to rely on project records to try and establish the root cause of the loss of productivity and quantifying the associated labor and equipment productivity losses. This makes understanding and visualizing the extent of project’s location affected by a disruption event crucial for those who review the claim submission.
Building Information Models (BIM) can provide the needed visualization and understanding of the affected project’s locations where the reported disruption event will be associated with the affected project spaces identified in the BIM model. To achieve the needed interactive space visualization, three applications will be used. The first application is PMWeb Project Management Information System (PMIS) to manage the disruption event process. The second application will be Vcad for MS Power BI from BLogic which is a solution that enables viewing IFC BIM models using MS Power BI and the third application is MS Power BI to provide the desired interactive visualization for the status of the project management processes.
When a disruption event occurs, the disruption event occurrence form created using PMWeb form builder will be used to record the details of this event. The details will include the location of the event and the project entity that was responsible for the event whether it was the consultant, contractor, or any other entity. The form will also include a field for the type of disruption event which will be selected from a predefined list of values. The list includes Improper Inspection, Delay of Approvals, Destruction of Materials, Destruction of Work, Lack of Information, Late Drawings, Stacking of Trades, Lack of Access, and Interference. The description field will be used to provide complete details of the event while the impact field will be used to describe the impact that this event has caused the claimant activities whether on-site or off-site. For each disruption event, the claimant needs to select the project schedule activity that relates to the originally planned works that were disrupted. In addition, the claimant needs to provide the start and end dates of the disruption event.
To enable the BIM Model interface, the disruption event form will have a table to capture the detail of the BIM Model Space and SpaceGuid which is a unique identification number for each space in the BIM Model. Although it is recommended to associate each disruption event with a specific space nevertheless, some disruption events could impact more than one space area in the project.
For each reported disruption event, the claimant must attach pictures of the disrupted works, disruption area as well as other documents that are relevant to the event. It is recommended to have all those pictures and documents uploaded and stored in the PMWeb document management repository. The document management repository will be configured to include folders that will be used by the claimant to capture and store all documents that will be needed to support the claim submission for each disruption event. In addition, links to RFIs and other PMWeb records that are related to the event will be linked including imported emails from MS Outlook.
A workflow will be assigned to the disruption event form to ensure that responsibility for submitting, reviewing and approving those events are properly reviewed and analyzed. The workflow will identify all needed steps, the duration for each step, responsibility for each step, actions that can be taken for each step and sequence for performing those steps. PMWeb also allows adding conditions to the workflow steps to incorporate the approval authority levels.
Using MS Power BI, the captured disruption events information in PMWeb can be accessed and associated with the project’s BIM Model which will become available using Vcad. When the viewer of the visual disruption event dashboard selects a specific disruption event or a group of disruption events by category, the displayed BIM Model will automatically shade the spaces associated with the selected disruption events in green. This interactive visualization of the disruption events along with the affected project’s spaces provides a better understanding of how those events have impacted the project’s planned completion date and cost baseline.
