Abstract
The Industry 4.0 transition of construction requires evidence linking digital maturity to sustainability outcomes in operations management. Yet Building Information Modelling (BIM) maturity is still assessed through a priori stage models rather than the adoption patterns companies actually exhibit, and its co-occurrence with perceived sustainability performance is uncharacterised beyond single-country samples. This paper derives a typology of lifecycle BIM-use maturity in Central European construction companies and characterises how the types differ in perceived sustainability performance. Four objectives are pursued: the indicators’ dimensional structure and reliability; derivation of the typology by unsupervised learning and the support for its boundaries; each type’s sustainability profile, national composition, and incremental information beyond country and firm scale; and delimitation of the BIM–sustainability association. A structured questionnaire administered to 199 companies in Croatia, Slovakia and Slovenia over five years yielded six lifecycle BIM-use items and three perceived-sustainability items (recycling, waste, CO2), which were analysed by reliability assessment, principal component analysis, and k-means and Ward clustering with country-stratified checks. Two dimensions—adoption intensity and an end-of-life-versus-design orientation—accounted for 78.1% of the variance. The 199 independently surveyed companies exhibit only seven distinct response profiles, which bounds the typology’s resolution; no internal validity index showed an interior optimum, so the four-type solution is chosen rather than validated. The types differ systematically in perceived sustainability; the gradient holds within Croatia (with one inversion) and Slovakia but reverses in Slovenia. The typology is exploratory and perception-based—a precursor to objective lifecycle assessment rather than a substitute: the BIM-use and sustainability items are empirically proximate and failed a common-method-variance check, so their relation is descriptive co-occurrence. One result is independent of that caveat: substantial end-of-life BIM use appears in only one of the seven profiles, so the model data that circular workflows require are largely absent.