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The construction industry suffers from chronic problems such as cost overruns, delays, rework, coordination, productivity, quality, lack of innovation. (Mahalingam, Yadav & Varaprasad, 2015; Khaba, & Bhar, 2016). Due to globalization and fierce competition, leading construction companies are seeking new methods to offer more value to their customers (Ekanayake, &Sandanayake, 2017). Also, decrease in productivity in construction industry pushes practitioners to find new methods offering value (Aziz, &Hafez, 2013).
The lean practice was first implemented by Toyota Production Systems (Koskela, 1992). After the success rate of lean practices identified in terms of productivity, quality, etc., in the manufacturing industry, the first implementation of Lean Construction (LC) practices in the construction industry was performed by Koskela (1992). The author adopted lean principles that were implemented in manufacturing industry into the construction industry by eliminating some incompatible principles since construction industry differentiates from other industries due to production structure, complexity, on-site production, unique production, and features of the end product (Salem et al., 2006). LC, as a promising concept to refine operational and organizational deficiencies or wastes in construction projects, is one of these methods.
The reason for needs for LC idea is to change construction industry practices in order to obtain more contemporary industry practices, more value, and technology dissemination into industry-wide (Sarhan et al., 2018; Alves, Milberg, & Walsh, 2012). In the literature, lots of studies stated that LC implemented project management enables a reduction in project completion time, increase in project performance, and increase in productivity (Sarhan et al., 2018). To increase implementation level of LC in the industry, different concepts, analytics and tools are used with LC by the researcher and practitioners.
In the literature, BIM usage in the LC concept has been intensively investigated. In this context, the first study which mentions a synergy between BIM and LC was performed by Sacks, Koskela, Dave, and Owen (2010). The authors stated that this synergy helps the projects to get more detailed waste elimination process. In another words, these two concepts complement each other by increasing their maturity levels (Sacks et al., 2010). Oskouie, Gerber, Alves, and Becerik-Gerber (2012) acknowledged that BIM and LC integration are promising in terms of value increase and quality enhancements. Also, Mahalingham et al. (2015) stated that LC concept facilitates adoption of technological advancements into construction industry, such as Building Information Modeling (BIM). From the value point of view, BIM system helps to protect design and construction information for operation phase. According to Kelly et al. (2013), construction industry spends millions of dollars and more than thousands of man-hours for getting this information, and it causes wastage in terms of cost and labor.