INTEGRATION OF SSM AND IDEF TECHNIQUES FOR ANALYZING DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT PROCESSES

Construction documents are recognized as an essential component for making a decision and supporting on construction processes. In construction, the management of project document is a complex process due to different factors such as document types, stakeholder involvement, document flow, and document flow processes. Therefore, inappropriate management of project documents can cause several impacts on construction work processes such as delay or poor quality of work. Several information and communication technologies (ICT) were proposed to overcome problems concerning document management practice in construction projects. However, the adoption of ICT may have some limitation on the compatibility of specific document workflow. Lack of understanding on designing document system may cause many problems during the use and implementation phase. Thus, this paper proposes the framework that integrates Soft System Methodology (SSM) concept and Integrated Definition Modeling Technique (IDEF) for analyzing document management system in construction project. Research methodology is classified as the case study. Five main construction building projects are selected as case studies. The qualitative data related to problems and processes are collected by interviewing construction project participants such as main contractors, owners, consultants, and designers. The findings from case study show the benefits of using SSM and IDEF. The use of SSM can help identify the problems in managing construction document in rich picture view whereas IDEF can illustrate the document flow in construction project in details. In addition, the idea of integrating these two concepts can be used to identify the root causes of process problems at the information level. As the results, this idea can be applied to analyze and design web-based document management system in the future.