ZEMCH 2019 International Conference Proceedings April.2020 | Page 347
(a)
(b)
Figure 8. (a) The summary of the 4th group of participants’ perception on the benefits of BIM for FM
functions; (b) The weighted average of the 4th group of participants’ perception on the benefits of
integrating BIM for FM.
4. Discussion
By analyzing the conducted surveys, it can be clearly noticed that many participants have long
experience duration in FM, both in FM consultancy and FM delivery. This is a very important factor in
the study that having long experience in FM will help the participant in understanding the importance
of the benefits that can be achieved by integrating BIM into FM. However, most of the participants
ranked their proficiency in using BIM for FM functions either “first” or “second” level. Yet, this should
not affect the effectiveness of participants’ responses since the first level of proficiency means having a
good understanding of BIM and being probably able to open a BIM model. Most of the participants are
working in organizations that have been established more than 10 years ago, and have 100 employees
or above, which means that the participants who contributed to the study are among the well
experienced and established organizations that have high service capacity. Most of the participated
professionals, around 42%, are working in organizations that provide FM delivery services to more
than 100 building projects.
The participants’ perception on the awareness of integrating BIM into FM industry in the UAE and
in their organizations was fluctuating between ‘Low” and “Average”, with weighted average between
3.4 and 3.6, which indicates that there should be more serious moves by the decision makers in the
country to spread the awareness of such useful integration among the organizations in the industry.
However, around 34% of the participants’ organizations have been already adopting BIM for FM
purposes, and the result therefore reflects the awareness level.
The benefits of BIM for FM functions were chosen carefully to represent a wide range of industrial
purposes of using BIM for FM, and most of the participants’ answers were fluctuating between
“Significant” and “Very Significant”. However, by comparing the four groups’ answers using the
weighted average, some differences can be identified; the groups that had the highest weighted
averages – means that their participants had more choices toward “Very Significant” – are the first and
the fourth, which are the participants with less than 10 years of experience in FM consultancy and the
participants with more than 10 years of experience in FM delivery, respectively. The weighted averages
of the two other groups were relatively lower, but is yet showing the participants’ agreement with the
significance of the benefits. The reason of this notice can be attributed to the nature of work of each
group. The first groupʹs professionals are relatively new to the field of FM consultancy with fresh
passion and better exposure to new technologies that may have them to be more bias to proof the
significance of BIM. Additionally, the fourth group’s participants are in the senior level of FM delivery
field and have to deal with complicated problems in their jobs, which might be the reason why they
showed much appreciation to the benefits of BIM for FM purposes. However, it is worthy to mention
that some benefits were chosen to have less significance in benefiting FM functions than others by some
participants, e.g. Reduction in FM data acquisition time and cost, and Reduced cost of utilities. The
Studying the Perception of Professionals in the UAE and the Benefits of Integrating BIM into FM
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