BIM IN ASSET MANAGEMENT MONTHLY FORUM 03-10-2024
RICHARD FREER Firstly, we’re talking about working groups and workstreams. We’re not funded, everybody is a volunteer, so we have to be careful that we don’t waste time, we like people to get involved and collaborate. The working groups are strategic and will direct what working streams are actually established. And the working streams are task and finish, they have a job to do, in five or six meetings it’s done. The working groups, we have safety critical assets, PFI which is starting now, decarbonisation we’re looking at doing in the new year. The workstreams, digital records, interoperability, business case and we’re just starting a soft landings workstream very shortly. If anybody is interested in coming along to any of those just put your name in the chat. So we’re looking to identify the what, the how and the why. So, without further ado, Adam, the digital record.
ADAM SANDERS We’ve struggled with this workgroup, to be honest. Only because some of it feels quite obvious, but in many ways there’s a lot of detail there. We’ve been looking at what a digital record is and we’ve kind of broadly got it into these three areas: how are we using it, what’s the record being used for, it’s probably holding location information of some form or an asset or something about a building, the specification of it, function, how it’s serviced and managed and what the lifecycle of that asset is. So, it’s relatively straightforward information. And that record tends to either be something that’s relatively static that doesn’t change massively, some kind of specification information or design requirements, or installation certificate. Or it’s a little bit more dynamic than that and it’s actively changing and updating all of the time, so it could be it was last serviced or here is the last check record.
And those records tend to fall also into three different types of records: the readable which tends to be a document or an image, so a machine can read it, but that data isn’t necessarily structured. It could be a document that’s been scanned in, it could be a photo, yes, we can extract stuff from it but we can’t be particularly precise with it. We’ve got generated documents which are often a little bit frustrating because they tend to have come from a structured data source. So, some kind of a report, a risk assessment, a servicing record where somebody has put information in or put data in to a form, a system, and then its produced a PDF. Whereas generally when we’re trying to manage digital records we want that actual addressable data. And then we’ve got the addressable data, that structured data that’s sat within a database, it could be a spreadsheet but it’s something that we can compare to other records and we can move very easily between systems.
And the best thing is when you get a generated document, so it’s nice and easy to read for somebody that wants to pick it up, it’s quite tangible, but we’ve also got that addressable data behind it. And the key things really for the group is how people interact with that data. So, if we’re just reading it, if you’re a surveyor out on site viewing it or whether you’ve collecting and updating that, it needs to be in some kind of mobile app, format. Or are you sat behind a desk managing data or updating data, collating information from other places. And then how do you build that single source of truth which a lot of people are thinking a single source of truth is just one system, but broadly it’s trying to build and ecosystem of other systems and other data sources that work together to give you that reliable, trustworthy data records.
WILLIAM BORTHEN This is the business case working stream. Effectively, the purpose of this workstream is to build a compelling business case for better information management in the field of asset management. So, really what we’re trying to do is use all of the experience within our group and the wider BIM In Asset Management cohort to draw on experiences to define actual case studies or examples or scenarios of where challenges have been met through a lack of good information and how better information management can alleviate avoidable issues. We’ve discussed this within our group and on the screen you can see there a scenario form which is on the BIM In Asset Management website.
Really this just allows us to collate those scenarios that people have got through their experiences in a kind of formalised way. It takes 5 minutes to fill this out, you can see it’s just asking for a bit of information on what the issue is, how it can be solved, what the impact is and what’s the benefit of doing it. And we’re aiming to try and get a broad range of scenarios across the full lifecycle of an asset and across all sectors, different functional areas as well. We’ve had a few examples already put in here, but I’m just calling out to everyone on this call to try and pop into that form and add any examples that you’ve got that could help us. I think Richard is going to touch on a couple of key areas now.
RICHARD WHITTAKER Yeah, from the feedback that we’ve had we’d concentrated previously in recognising that we have to demonstrate value for money and we have to ensure that we’ve got compliance and we focused in on things like the Building Safety Act. But one of the other areas going forward and for asset management is actual as-built records that not are only provided, but are easy to access in the future. That came up a number of times, and particularly around finding warranty information. And of course that’s another area savings in relation to maintenance and asset management, if people have got access to the warranties and that sort of thing, so it helps sell the business case.
And we’ve also had feedback in relation to CDM and the client’s responsibilities. And having selling the business case is about ensuring that people are complying across the board, not just on the latest things that are a priority for lots of organisations. So, we’re looking to build within the business case the focus on that as-built side of the business. And that also links into the soft landing approach, so there is a connection between the groups.
GEORGE There’s one thing I’d like to mention, within the digital records group there’s a team of contractors who’ve been looking at how they can improve handover information. What we’re trying to do is look at how digital O&Ms can be created and we’re going to run a session in November. So, just flagging up if anybody is interested in that, knowing how we could help that process, I think that would be good if you put the name in the chat and we can let you know.
RICHARD BACON On that handover documentation, very much on the record drawings, one of the most key bits of it is that whatever information is provided because this is a problem that we come across on an almost daily basis, that it is amendable. It’s all well and good sending people loads of records, if drawings and things aren’t amendable it just means that you’ve got someone recreating a drawing to be able to do any future changes. So, that’s one of the key bits that contractors need to bear in mind is if they’re sending us something across make sure we can change it later if there is a change to the building.
RICHARD WHITTAKER Yeah, that’s relevant and I’m aware, actually we used to do it within our contractual documents, we used to put a responsibility on the contractor to provide a live document as well as a PDF for exactly that reason. So, it’s an easy fix just to drop in.
PAUL OAKLEY Karim introduced this concept which goes back to a book from a hundred-odd years ago The Meaning of Meaning, he influence of language upon thought and the science of symbolism. So, we’ve got a symbol or a string and that evokes a concept which is a reference or refers to a thing that is a reference. So, the symbol basically stands for the reference, but that’s an unstable relationship. If you go to the next slide, what we’re talking about is we’ve got the digital records is talking really about symbols and texts, and then we’ve got the business case which is really talking about the things and then we’re basically dealing with the linking between the two. So we’re really trying to tie that stuff together and it’s quite interesting what you’ve been doing in terms of how that fits into what we’re actually after to start our piece of work.
And then basically we get into the detail of it, where we start getting down to the quality of the next bit. We’re mapping between what’s going on with the workstreams digital records and the business cases, now we can tie those together. We’d done a couple of exercises looking at purpose at the last meeting looked at what digital records do you receive/require, what do you use them for and what formats are they in. So actually that’s the sort of feedback we really need from the other two groups to help us move forward in terms of what we’re doing. So, any input you can give us on those, then we can then start looking at those.
And the sort of things we just talked about in terms of drawings, you need them as a static record of the project, but then they’re also an ongoing change requirement, so you need them in the format and the solutions that you’re going to use to carry out that change management process. It’s those two things which are crucial to how this is all going to move forwards.
GEORGE Just to build on what Paul has just said, the interoperability group is going into the technical detail about how these things can get glued together. And if you wanted to participate on that the next meeting is on the 30th of October. What we’re trying to do is make it so that the digital records team and the business case team don’t have to get involved in the technical detail.
BEN EVANS In terms of PFI which always seems to be the problem child in these forums, in fact it obviously significantly overlaps the discussions on digital records etc. Because the more I think about it and the more I see the quest is to digitise data and base data that goes back some 20 years or more on projects. So it’s moving away from a siloed approach that the FM detractors? 14mins 57secs deal with. And for us, we’re on the investor side so we’re looking to validate the data and make sure it’s up-to-date in accordance with contract requirements. But also in accordance with law i.e. CDM regs, health & safety files. And it takes far too long for us to validate data because it’s all in very different silos. Part of that is because these projects are 20 years old and a lot of them were produced pre-digital era, apart from we do come across WG drawings.
But there is no connect between any of the sets of data, asset registers, room data sheets, drawings etc. So we don’t expect that to be kind of a big fuss to link all of those things up because it’s not required in the contract. But there must be an affordable way of FMs being able to significantly improve digitisation of all of their assets so that validation, not just by us but within themselves, their own teams, it becomes a lot more effective.
GEORGE So, this was the session, Ben, that you asked us to run for you.
BEN EVANS Yes.
GEORGE The principle here is this is an example of the collaboration that we’ve got going on within the team. Ben, because he and Richard and some of his colleagues agreed to run the PFI group, we agreed to pull together a team of experts to go and give them some guidance on what was happening as far as the new regs are concerned. And we’ve had some pretty senior people involved in that. Was that a good experience, Ben?
BEN EVANS Yeah, certainly, and there is still some ongoing bits and pieces to this because it’s allowed us to phrase a number of questions to our regular city lawyer that we use and we’re waiting back for answers. In connection with the Building Safety Act and the particulars of a PFI contract as well, around responsible persons etc, not CDM, but responsible persons. A lot of it is obviously fire safety related in our case. But it was very useful, for sure.
RICHARD BACON I’ve had a couple of people come to me with questions since that, it’s certainly raised discussion, it was a useful session, George, cheers.
GEORGE I think the outcome of that was that Albany realised that this wasn’t just about high-rise buildings, which everybody thinks it is. It’s actually more about a culture of looking at buildings from a risk perspective and looking at it in a holistic way. And one of the messages that the experts gave us was that really you should be doing this across all of your buildings because it’s really complying with building regs you’ve got to do legally. The fact that you don’t necessarily have a regulator actually looking at it, you do have regulators, you’ve got the local authority or you’ve got building control. What does it mean by the whole building working together? Well, what it actually means in this particular case, some of you have seen this graphic before but I think it helps explain how everything has got to be working.
So, if a fire breaks out in a kitchen and you’re trying to protect smoke from spreading you need to make sure that all of the compartmentation works, not just the fire doors, not just the dampers. If the penetration seals aren’t good, then you may as well not bother with the fire doors. And the same with smoke control detection and signage systems. So all of those things have got to work together and therefore it may be that you've got golden threads that cover different parts of the process, but that door, for example, is protecting spaces and it needs to work in concert with other things that are also being inspected, maybe by different software applications. So it may well be that we've got lots of golden threads, what we've got to do is pull them together. And that's really I think the call that that Ben's got out to FM contractors, is that right, Ben?
BEN EVANS Yeah, I think it was touched on in the digital working group about creating the ecosystem….FM contractors need to do, they have their own methods of working and they’re all competitors at the end of the day. Some will utilise a different application corporately and some will do it in a different way. But we see within organisations non-standardisation within FM companies themselves. The centre of excellence teams within those FM cos need to create this ecosystem.
RICHARD BACON One of the bits somebody said to me the other day following this discussion is actually it’s not a golden thread, it’s a golden weave because there’s lots of threads that are all intertwined.
GEORGE That’s very true. Adam, you’ve got a couple of thoughts on this.
ADAM SANDERS I think that the whole golden thread thing is so overused, there’s so many people and companies out there claiming they have a golden thread solution. And you came up with an example the other day of a post on LinkedIn, they basically just said the golden thread s just a collection of documents. And I thought I’d just take a minute to take people back to what the legislation actually says. The golden thread, it came from the Hackitt report, I think it’s a horrible term, it was defined within the Building Safety Act which basically requires that the accountable person, and specifically the PAP as well, keep prescribed information in accordance with prescribed standards and keep that information up-to-date. It doesn’t define what that prescribed information is or what those prescribed standards is, they decided to hide that in one of the 30-odd bits of secondary legislation that follows the BSA.
And so they’ve listed 31 sets of records in a building that this golden thread is supposed to look after and then there is a whole load of subclauses. And it also talks about a whole load of other information which the accountable person needs to provide to residents. This only applies to high-risk high-rise buildings over 18 metres. But crucially it’s about managing this information and keeping it up-to-date, it doesn’t prescribe documents, it talks about information. And if we look at government guidance there’s really only five points that they’re trying to make, that you have this single source of truth, and again ti doesn’t mean it’s one system, it just means that you have one trusted place to get a particular type of information.It could be five systems, as long as they talk to each other, as long as the information is up-to-date and the data is consistent, absolutely right.
Obviously digital, and we’re talking in the group about what that digital thing means, and securely with the key thing about the security being it’s trusted. But you’ve got to keep it secure and there’s three other points. It needs to be available to the people that need to use it, so whether that’s a property manager, an asset manager, whether that’s a surveyor. So, we need to be able to share this information, we need to get it to people who are within or external to an organisation. And it can be as simple as emailing something, as soon as you email something and then that document or that information needs to change, how do you then go back and update that single source of truth. So for me it’s about the integration with other systems. It needs to be available when they need it, you could interpret that as being OK, that consultant or that surveyor that’s going to go out next Thursday to go and do something, you ’ve got to provide that information ahead of time. But ideally they’d be grabbing this information live.
So, the information has got to be accessible, it’s got to move between different systems and then finally presented in a way that can be used. Well, that’s pretty obvious, if it’s not in a format that’s accessible or addressable or modifiable then it’s pretty useless. If you give somebody huge CAD plans that they can’t zoom into or they can’t use because it’s in a format that they can’t access, the whole thing becomes useless. I think it’s just sometimes worth coming back to this stuff because I keep getting people say to me oh, we’ve got a golden thread solution and it’s effectively just SharePoint. And to me yes, you might be able to in a small organisation make that work, but just looking at documents and then dealing with version control rather than considering the data and the portability of that data and getting it to the people that need it in the field, in the office, in the right application, in the right system doesn’t work.
GEORGE That brings me onto what we’re trying to do at the moment within BIM In Asset Management. We’re trying to give practical support to people that actually need this information in the right way. And it’s not about software applications, in many cases you can have some great software applications, but unless they’re being used properly, unless the way the data has been set up within them is designed to be able to interface with other data sets, that can be just about the organisation of that, that needs to be done. So what we’re looking at within BIM In Asset Management is having people that are saying that they can do these things, I’m talking about both people that are maybe doing surveys, inspections, I don’t mean just software, so that we can actually test that and then make sure that we can then validate these different systems that are going to talk to each other.
We think that would be a useful thing for the community to have because then you’ve got something where there is a community of experts who can test things out, make sure that they do work and look at processes. I’m going to stop there because I’m going to introduce two software companies shortly who are hopefully going to be part of that ecosystem. I’d like to introduce Bastiaan from INGY. (shares slides on screen).
BASTIAAN DE GROOT I’m the CEO and co-founder of INGY, what we do is we deploy large amounts of IoT sensors in large buildings, much more cost efficiently by integrating them into the lighting, and I was asked to day to give you a little bit of an overview of what we see happening in the IoT space, in healthcare and how it potentially links up. I’ll fly into it with some insights that we can bring and then obviously also linking a little bit how we look at that. What we’re seeing is that the IoT space in the usage of IoT sensors in healthcare is massively growing, it’s got a 5 double in the coming 10 years, and we’ve seen all kinds of usage of all kinds of IoT sensors in healthcare. One of the biggest applications of IoT in healthcare is…what we see is asset tracking is actually one of the biggest applications of IoT in healthcare. It has huge amounts of advantages.
What we do with asset tracking is we put a tag on any object and then we localise that object in real time throughout the hospital. And that has a lot of different advantages, it can increase the utilisation of your healthcare devices and thereby reduct the amount of healthcare devices that you need by about 10%. We can increase the maintenance adherence, so if you need to do maintenance on your healthcare equipment you actually need to know where it is and if you don’t know where it is you either have to spend a lot of time searching for it or you’ll be out of maintenance. So, asset tracking is by far one of the biggest IoT applications in healthcare and I think the link to BIM floor plans and getting the data of floor plans is very evident. The other big thing we’re seeing is indoor navigation.
Basically what you’re doing there is you localise the mobile phone inside the building which means that you basically can have Google maps work inside the building. And this is a huge help with people navigating the hospitals and that actually results in a reduction of the amount of missed and late appointments, because people just show up better. Actually there is also a huge amount of saving because highly schooled doctors are not being bothered by actually pointing people to directions, creating almost a $1,000 saving per ben per year in a hospital introducing indoor navigation. And again, I think the link to the BIM models is very clear here. People counting, it’s quite recently, so you now see that people counting is really diving through the floor in terms of cost meaning that it can now be applied in large scale, also in hospitals.
People are seeing some very good early results improving resource allocation and detecting the treatment rooms are actually used as offices and therefore hugs amounts of wastage of money. Ensuring that your places don’t get too crowded in case of infection transmission, improving facility management, both the space utilisation, bit for example also cleaning, huge savings are being made with people counting. So these are some of the good things we’re seeing, what we’re seeing on the technical side is that if you look 5-10 years ago you saw a lot of vertically integrated solutions where someone had one cool sensor and then they supplied one gateway for their sensor and thy had one cool dashboard and they implanted this sort of vertically integrated one IoT solution.
And then the next com? 35mins 2secs came and they put their gateways in and dashboards and what we’re now seeing is, especially those that are ahead, they are really bringing an IoT architecture, saying actually we’re going to place multi-usage gateways across our buildings and we’re going to make sure that multiple applications run on one gateway. And we’re going to have one dashboard and one data layer and all of the different sensors need to send their data to this one dashboard. And we’re really starting to see people that are on the right side, they’re really starting to move forward and having huge advantages, whilst those on the left, they sort of get stuck with having cool toys, but then they don’t really get to this full digitalised office.
And again, I think you see the link there with the BIM models because I think if you bring your BIM models and you have your centralised BIM models, but then you can also link that to your centralised IoT infrastructure and actually getting all of this IoT data into that same cloud dashboard and link the two together, then you can really start getting into this digital hospital. So it’s really cool, we’ve got our centralised BIM model, we’ve got all of the centralised data storage, we ’ve got the two linked. Now actually if you start deploying lots of months of IoT sensors you still run into quite a number of challenges around installation, changing batteries and wireless coverage. So, what we’re seeing is that actually a lot of IoT use cases are actually even on the sensor hardware stating to fall together.
So, we’re seeing more and more multi-sensor applications where we have got one single sensor in the room which can serve, for example, lighting control, climate sensing, asset tracking, people counting, indoor navigation and more and more of these IoT applications stat merging into one sensor. Which of course brings huge advantages in terms of installation cost and maintenance cost. The thing that we see as the difficulty is when you start bringing multiple use cases together, or actually using one sensor for multiple use cases that the complexity of your stakeholder management usually increases. And so what we see as a key requirement you want to do this is that you make sure that your multi-sensor can actually be purchased by one stakeholder and then used by the others. But then you’re paying…you have to pull all of the budgets together.
It’s almost impossible to get this done, but if you can get to a business model where the budget for one can pay for the multi-sensor and then it becomes really easy to get that data hooked up to all of your other applications in silos and stakeholders that might want to use this information, then it starts working. And a really important one that is price, here you see an example of what we were doing with one of the multi-sensors, we actually saved so much money in lighting control that we can actually pay for the people counting and the asset tracking sensors to be integrated and then the lighting budget is still cheaper, while it’s also paying for all of the infrastructure for the others. And it links back to this ID infrastructure that we discussed earlier because you need to make sure that all of this data can actually flow to the dashboards and the IT processes of the other silos that might want to use that same information, which if you have one dashboard linked to one sensor it often becomes very hard.
GEORGE If people could put their name in the chat if they’d like more information on INGY. We’re going to have a Q&A in a moment, but I’d like to now introduce Paul Sheedy from Unifi.id.
PAUL SHEEDY Like Bastiaan, we’re very much in the same sort of field. Different positioning, but I completely get where Bastiaan is coming from. We’re again obsessed about the whole return on investment in how this works. So, we’re all about moving intelligence and building intelligence and how that’s going to change the way we go forward. I work there in the middle of Canary Wharf, it’s like a forest of Christmas trees. I can guarantee you most of those lights do not need to be on, but they are, and a lot of what we’re trying to do now is bring in the intelligence of these minor things, HVAC and lighting gets sorted very quickly. The big issue is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure is our whole philosophy here, and really we’re a measurement tool of what’s happening in the building in real time and then through the Ai we have predictive analysis of what is going to happen in the future.
And this data is really what’s needed for the heads of ESG etc. to get the right data in to focus on net zero. So, it’s building year on year how am I reducing my energy down, it’s not about the fact that you’ve moved to wind-power or nuclear or anything else, it’s how do I year on year hold the amount of energy my building needs out and we’re trying to really get people on the same hymn sheet here and a big KPI for them each year. There’s no architects in the last few decades that have set out to design a building with in the back of their minds Covid is going to come along and we’re going to see complete chaos. Now this is my worst performing building. That building is a 570-seat office which used to be full Monday-Friday. It now has on a Friday 2% of staff coming to work, most of…those is actually FM staff.
And this is where we’re trying to get companies to realise, you can’t carry on with the status quo when you’ve this sort of impact on what’s happening in a building. And a lot of this, the data just helps guide you to how you’re going to change going forward. We all know at least 30% of energy is wasted in buildings, a huge amount of real estate is empty. There’s so few buildings that we would call smart buildings, even 22 Bishopsgate, it has all of the bells and whistles but really it doesn’t even know that you’re in the building which is shocking. So where we get to is we do put in place various sensors, most of technology bills is actually built inside your access card, we build in there dual technology, triple technology cards which enable us to know when you walk in the building and you walk out of a lift, e detect you.
We analyse all of that data but then we trigger actions that happen straight away. So, the five areas that we focus on are security, we know who has gone onto each floor of the building, we know if someone has tailgated in behind be and they shouldn’t have, who the person was, at what time and it’s fed straight down to security teams. They have digitalisation of the security protocols, who has gone where and when. Then the soft features which are actually becoming extremely important to us in co-working and private members clubs. As you walk into a building we automatically have your face and name appears on the screen, the reception team engage with you and the retention rates increase. One of the copies? 44mins 03secs of course is net zero targeting, looking at how we met all the data, and I don’t stand here and pretend I am the sliver, bullet, I’m not, I’m one of the silver bullets and we need a whole arsenal of them.
What I’m absolutely focused on engaging and working with other companies is not having a siloed approach like a lot of corporates have, looking at when do I work with an automated BIM company or how do I work with people with a lighting management company etc. And then there’s the FM optimisation, here we see huge wastage. If you’ve only got 2% of staff coming in on a Friday and you’ve got 80% on a Thursday, you don’t need four cleaners and three kitchen staff etc. And this is where we’re trying to get people to work not on a schedule, on a triggered automated that if we hit certain times people in a kitchen or wherever it might be, now we go and clean. The last one is really my focus is the safety evacuation of buildings. We are…the only company that knows exactly who’s on each floor of a building at the point of the alarm goes off and how we then show you that building evacuating in real time.
Now, back to Bastiaan’s point, it’s all about a return or investment so it’s to the finance director, the FM director, sustainability, head of security, how delivering these solutions hits each of their budgets. Because the problem we have is oh, that’s not my budget, the siloed approach is a nightmare for all of us. So we try and sit there with all of those participants and show them how right across the business we deliver efficiency and cost savings. And again, for a major company, let’s just say a HSBC type of operation, they might have 250 different security systems in 300 buildings, this gives them one single view of what happens on every floor of a building around the world, what their occupancy levels, do they actually need to buy more offices or actually are they way overcompensated already.
The sort of detection methods are the core pieces, card detection, that’s important for fires because you can’t using cameras see anybody when there is smoke, so the card piece is one of the most fundamental pieces of what we do. It's not sexy, although what we’re doing on that is, it’s really a core piece of how we can detect people in buildings. A lot of the work we do now with multiple universities is how we’re developing now 2.4, 5, 6 and 7G non-powered microchips. And this is where we take the radio wave that’s there in wifi and we’ve worked massively hard over the last years on passive energy harvesting, pulling that tiny amount of energy that’s there into doing the minimum it can do inside a microchip to just get the microchip to talk back to our sensors. And this is the real big push we have going forward because this way we no longer need to put in hardware into a building, well, minimum hardware into a building to make it work.
In terms of how things look we put our antennas in behind ceilings or they can hang below ceilings, whatever you may want, we can see through everything except steel. We can’t see through steel so i’m afraid if you’ve got metal ceiling tiles we’re no good for you, but behind normal ceiling tiles we detect people there so you don’t see anything in the building, it can all be hidden up. Now my issue is this building and I was protesting about it before…how you build a 62-floor building for 13,000 people and only put in two stairways to evacuate is beyond belief. And while I was protesting about this their building had a helicopter crashed into the plant room in New York, their 52-storey building. The only way to get out of this building is to break the first commandment and use the lifts. The first commandment is thou shalt not use a lift in a fire, as we all know. That’s how you get out of 22 Bishopsgate.
The reason is very simple, stairways are not rentable space and that’s what it comes down to…and with some of the other things I’ve seen it’s pure luck that we haven’t had any more major disasters. As far as I’m concerned Dagenham was worse than Grenfell, how somebody is not in jail for padlocking those fire doors I do not know. But it had the same cladding, the fire alarm didn’t work and the fire doors locked. It’s just pure madness in 2024 that this is happening. A lot of what we’re doing now in collaboration with a company in Singapore is that they have the best fire sensor systems that we’ve seen and we’re not going to combine both technologies together in buildings. Now my issues here, this is the tallest fire brigade, fire unit we have which is the 22nd floor fire in Aldgate Tower. That has to be deployed, so why are we building 278 metre tall buildings with that gap in between them is beyond me. And I can hear from every expert, oh, it’s because, because, it’s nonsense.
Something goes wrong in these buildings now I’m afraid it’s not going to be good. So what we do is we know at the point of the alarm exactly how many floors are in the building, how many fire evacuation stairways there are, how many people even down to age groups. Also, how many people in that building have got a disability, a mobility issue, that is highlighted and what we’re giving the fire service is an x-ray of the building in real time. Where we want to go in the future is that if this stairway is over packed we don’t want to send people into that stairway, we want to try and send them to other stairways. We’re working in collaboration with some dynamic fire evacuation signage companies on how we actually move that forward in the future. This is what we did in MMU (Manchester Metropolitan University) where we did a full evacuation and record every single piece of data on that.
All the students, all of the lecturers had a lanyard with our technology in there and we put the sensors on each evacuation stairway. And this is the result, we had exactly how many people on the floor at the point that the alarm was called, which of those four people had a mobility issue and where the three fire wardens were in the building. And as this progresses, as they move from a floor into a stairway and then right the way down and out of the ground floor you see exactly how the evacuations happening, where things are going wrong, where the fire fighters are in the building, This is going to be ground breaking, this delivers to you as the fire commander what do you need to know about what’s happening above you in 16, 20, 62-storey buildings. You have the data insight, you make the right decision and you don’t do what happened in New York and have 412 dead firemen because that should never have happened.
This is how we’re going forward, this is the sort of data we’ll deliver in real time during an evacuation. Now, in this particular one we caught 100% of people with 87.6% of every single possible detection matter that we had and it was 22 times more data than was needed in that evacuation. Here’s another building we have in Milton Keynes, it’s a highly secure documentation, it’s all paper, for the fire suppression they can’t use water, they use inergen gas. We need to know exactly who is in the building and that’s through these fire systems here on the way in, and on the way out as you evacuate through one of the 13 doorways we’re detecting each and every person out of the building and we’re left with maybe one or two people who haven’t been detected. You have the phone number and the name right there and you can assess are they out already or still in the building, and they you pump the building with inergen gas and put out the fire.
Now, the work that we’re doing with this company in Singapore is taking their digital twins, their fire sensor technologies and then going back to the insurance sector and saying to the insurance sector if I’ve got two buildings and with all the data I could wish to see in real time and I know everything is working and I know what the occupancy levels are and I know how well it’s being run and one building where I am completely blind for the next 12 months, why would the insurance premium be the same? And this is again the ROI modelling. If I could reduce the insurance premiums down by 8-12% then this goes a long way to paying for the hardware that goes into the building. And I think the big issue here is the property sector has been hit with low commensurate? 52mins 07secs rates, huge increases in energy costs and they’re all a bit of a state. We can go in there and show them you can get smart, get a dumb building and make it smart and it makes you money. This is going to be the pivot of how we go forward and that’s what we need all people in technology to work together to go right, this extra sensors on lighting and FIREVAC and HVAC and everything else, this is how we deliver a smart building, increase the asset value and lower the cost of the building going forward.
And the fire sensor technology literally, these are the statistics on that, it’s cutting down the cost of running that massive amount. The responses are better, the occurrences of fires happening are way lower as well because everything is working 100% of the time. Now, what we’ve done on predictive analysis, we’re taking five years of data and we work with UCL on this. We’ve taken the weather conditions over the last five years, every tube strike, train strike, mid-term break, bank holiday, we put every piece of data in there to look at how we do predictive analysis on what happens in each building the next day. And what we’ve seen is that a lot of buildings get a dna, we get to see a look and feel of what happens Monday-Friday with these buildings. When you’re adding the predictive analysis you then feed into the BMS system we expect tomorrow being Friday that we’ll have an occupancy of 4% based on this and the fact that we never see anybody in the building from about 5.15, how late to turn the air conditioning on, how low to turn the fans, how early can we turn it off and not effect the people in those buildings.
So we took a lot of data in here over five years, we saw some very interesting things, like there’s psychological things as well, if it’s raining on a Tuesday about the same amount of people we expect to come to work come to work because they haven’t been in Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. So calling your boss up and saying oh, we’re not coming in today again because it’s raining makes you look like a complete snowflake. And these are anomalies we’ve seen in there and some very strange ones, I haven’t got the time to go through it, really quite amazing piece of data, where you work, the type of building you work in, the dna and culture of that particular organisation as well. So, when we run through the AI techniques we found that certain ones which we expected to work well didn’t. So random forest forecast was absolutely rubbish, we ended up going into recurring neural networks and that was the one that gave us the finest detail on data, even with very small data sets.
Even with the type of the data we’re extremely accurate, the more data goes in the shorter the time horizons of looking at weather etc. the better the model works out in the future. And the whole value proposition here is having the real time insight for you to know exactly what you should be doing all of the time with the normality of engagement, with systems and cost reduction we can deliver you and finally the safety and control over a building. All of these combined deliver you an increase in your asset value and that’s what we’re really focused on. These are clients we’ve had for many years, the likes of Deliotte, seven years with Deloitte, TSB Bank, Acre, a lot in co-working high security buildings and then some in the hospitality sector as well.
GEORGE I think the point is here that both INGY and Unifi have got different information sets that complement for different conditions. Obviously those were both sales presentations and that isn’t really what BIM In Asset Management is about, that’s not a criticism, Paul, because that’s what I asked you to do. But the key thing here is for us to be aware of the opportunities that we’ve got and both Unifi and INGY are willing to work collaboratively with each other and also with us, to pull all of these things together, so i think that’s where we need to be. Richard Freer, in terms of what we’re trying to do with the golden thread and pulling together the information management side of things, how do you see as managing this process with different organisations?
RICHARD FREER One of the things that we learned throughout the time with BIM4Housing over the last 3-4 years is that it’s great having these outputs, but if you can’t disseminate them, if they don’t get out into the industry we’re just talking to ourselves. So what we’ve been very keen to do in BIM In Asset Management is to get out into industry very, very early. You’ve seen that already with the PFI, the collaboration outside of the organisation out into the industry. We’re going to hear shortly about another collaboration again that we’ve been driving, again out into the industry. And I think that’s it, it’s getting out of just us, it’s not just about just us, it’s actually getting out there into the broader industry and this is what we’re very keen to do.
GEORGE I think the other thing is that there is an overwhelming amount of guidance…and we’re actually contributing to that as well in many ways, we’re actually providing, for example, standardised fire door inspections and things like that. Which I think is going to help people, but people haven’t got the time to read them, people haven’t got the time to respond. So therefore we need to have practical examples of how these things can be pulled together.
RICHARD FREER Well, the thing is everybody is now in agreement, it’s not just about having the data, there’s loads of data, the point is managing it and being able to retrieve it. And as you say, the guidance is coming out of our ears from all kinds of organisations, from government, there’s just too much of it and it’s not a feasible situation for one person to be totally up to speed with the lot.
GEORGE Can we just ask the group, so you’ve seen some interesting things there, are there any questions that people have got about either Bastiaan or Paul?
BEN EVAMS I’ve looked at a few of these Internet of Things and one of the questions arises around you’ve got a hardwired BMS system in place and there seems always to be a bit of conflict between what BMS was originally designed to do, and still does, and these more Internet of Things wireless technology. I struggle with all of these different systems.
BASTIAAN DE GROOT One of the things we run into a lot is that people are like BMS is the central place of everything, and we’re like well, yeah, but really what is a BMS? A BMS is like an HVAC, like a heating and ventilation, air conditioning, that’s the data that it handles. Something like asset tracking, why would you run that through a BMS, there is no logical sense to that. And I find that the BMS is often put on a pedestal as the central thing, well it’s not really, it’s just very central in HVAC. You have the access control systems, all kinds of other data points, and the BMS is just one of the data points that you can read and you can write to. But there is definitely a layer on top of that that brings much more together.
PAUL SHEEDY If you knew tomorrow exactly what the weather conditions were like based on what floor you are on and how much sun is coming into the building, based on the fact that you know your occupancy rate is going to be xyz, then your HVAC is going to work very, very differently. And what we’re doing is giving you that vision of tomorrow, this is what your building is going to be looking like. And we can take in if there is going to be an event through various CRM systems, we can take in we’re going to have 200 extra people on this floor. We can feed you that information, it’s really just taking the knowledge and the dna that we see in a building and going, right, this is what’s going to happen tomorrow. If you know the temperature is going to be 42 degrees and bright sun and you’re going to have 80% capacity in the office, would you run the building the same way if it’s going to be overcast and 12 degrees and you’ve got 4% of people in the building? You’re not, and this is where we see wastage happening. One of the bigger things, beyond BMS, is culture, it’s trying to get…
I’ve got one company and I feel like banging their head against the wall, they’ve had this data coming through for 138 weeks and they was on average £4,000 a day on energy….if that was my, maybe because I’ve been pretty much self-employed and running businesses the year dot, I sit there and go no matter how big you are as a business, how is that OK? How is it literally not even…that isn’t a rounding error, £4,000 a dayis not a rounding error on one building. And this is where we see wastage on a grand scale and this whole BS we hear about net zero and green washing. I’ve seen so much of it. Please people, you don’t go and plant five trees and say you’ve hit your ESG goals.
PAUL OAKLEY About five or six years ago we did various research with IoT based stuff and one of the manufacturers was talking about lighting, putting multi-sensor hardware into all of their lights because actually it was cheaper to put then in during the manufacturing process. How many manufacturers are doing that sort of thing and the hardware infrastructure is available that people can start to take advantage of?
BASTIAAN DE GROOT That’s a good question. To be honest what we see is that putting it in every lighting fixture, although it sounds really good on Powerpoint and on a high level we’re seeing that actually using one sensor and then maybe connecting that wire to maybe four or five luminaires in the room where you can have the benefit of using any luminaire makes more sense and actually turns out financial. I know exactly the lighting manufacturer that you talked to who have been spreading that gospel for quite a while, but actually if you see by the time you’re putting a CO2 sensor, a people counting sensor, maybe a fire alarm into that, it just becomes too expensive to put it in every luminaire. And actually what we see is that it makes more sense to take a central sensor and link it up to the luminaires.
PAUL OAKLEY What they were proposing was actually they were going to put it in all their luminaires anyway, they just hadn’t enabled them.
BASTIAAN DE GROOT I think I know the market very well and no, I’ve not seen that model really taken off, I’ve seen Powerpoints, but I’ve not seen anyone really pulling that off. It is what we do as well, but we just see that it just makes much more sense to have one sensor per room and not per luminaire.
JOE STOTT It just strikes me that there’s that many people in this meeting and we’re all kind of talking around the same topics. I think there is quite a lot of crossover between asset management requirements, traditional facilities management roles, and the stuff that Paul was talking about which is kind of operational requires the building to actually be in use. And I think there is a lot of crossover between those two worlds, but I think that there are two different worlds and my comment was just really that I think we might need to be mindful of that when we’re looking at the workstreams to make sure that we’re focusing on the correct definition, if you like, of ?? FM ?? 1hr 6mins 35secs and I think that covers a wide variety of needs and requirements. We just need to be mindful that we define that well.
JACK WHITE A lot of interesting things said there, a lot of really good points and I think in terms of the way I’m thinking about what should have been discussed is making sure that our focus on data, we have structures etc. that enable us to utilise different technologies. And so we’re conscious of that when we’re designing systems that work for us now is looking at some of the things that have been talked about and thinking about how that might apply. So making sure that whatever we’re doing now has those opportunities enabled in the future so we’re not doing something now to meet just our current requirements and then having to do something again in a number of years’ time when certain technologies are more prevalent, maybe at better price points, maybe better understood etc. and then we do the same again. So, in terms of my thinking on that, it’s really interesting stuff and it’s just applying, taking some of the thinking there and applying it to what I’m doing.
BASTIAAN DE GROOT Yeah, we see that very much as well and I think that’s why we are such advocates of cutting horizontal instead of vertical because if you have these vertically integrated solutions then you’re so integrating to the toolchain that it becomes hard to replace or to put in the new technology when it becomes available. Where if you have horizontal layers then it becomes much easier to replace parts as technology progresses. I think Joe Stott made an interesting comment in the chat on the subscription model. Yeah, we actually see this a lot in the industry where people are putting quite hefty subscription models, I tend to call them investor friendly business models. Because if you want to raise any money nowadays like any investor will ask you about a subscription model. But we’re seeing a real change quite rapidly in the last two years where people are like just because you a nice air quality sensor doesn’t mean you can charge 10 euros per year subscription on that sensor.
It’s like maybe you could sell me the sensor and then I will hook it up to whatever cloud servers I want, or maybe I’ll just have an alternate servers. And then you’re seeing a lot of stacking of subscriptions, so you have a subscription for the sensor and then that goes to their cloud and then it goes to the next cloud to actually visualise it which also has a subscription and you end up with this forest of subscriptions. And we’re really seeing the industry and the clients smartening up there and not accepting this anymore.
RICHARD FREER That’s interesting actually, not for the business case workstream, this workstream I think when we get down to the nitty-gritty and talking about money and cost which is the plan, I think that’s going to be an interesting topic. OK, I mentioned earlier on about our aim of getting out into the industry early, the PFI collaboration that’s already happened and resulted in the workstream. We have another working group which is fire and safety critical, this is headed up by Paul White and Cliff Kneale. Now, we’ve got a collaboration going that Cliff, who’s been working quite closely with Active Plan pulling this together for us, is collaborating with Pinnacle, RiskBase and this has been under the auspices of BIM In Asset Management. Cliff, do you want to give us a run-through of where you are and what you’ve been doing?I understand that you’ve been out on location.
CLIFF KNEALE I can give you an update of what we’ve been doing in collaboration with RiskBase and Active Plan. And also I’ve been out onto site to survey one of the buildings that we’re looking at and I could show a presentation on that, how we gathered the information to start to build the golden thread. It’s mostly to do with the fire critical assets. (shares screen). I’m just going to run through a presentation of how the site survey went on. Adam Sanders and I went down to Bedford Towers in Brighton to carry out a 360 site survey of the assets there, mostly the fire critical assets, it was late last week and we took some relatively inexpensive and easy to use equipment with us, it was this Ricoh Theta SC2 camera here for 360 photographs, a stand and also a blue tooth tape measure, and that’s all that was needed really. But this is a survey just to show how quickly you can do a whole corridor.
This corridor here is about 18 metres long and about every 6 metres you need to stop with the camera and then just press the button and you wait for 5 seconds and then it will produce a 360 photograph. So all in all, the building has got 5 floors, the lower 5 floors are the hotel and floor 6 to 17 are actually residential. And it only took a couple of hours to go through all of the floors and all of the 2 fire staircases and the dry riser, just a couple of hours to do our survey.
RICHARD FREER What is that photographing there right now?
CLIFF KNEALE The corridor, but we’ll come on to that on the next slide, I’m really showing the equipment that was used and the survey we were doing. So, we captured about 125 images and in a couple of hours and this is showing here from the entrance the premises information box and some of the door entry system. This one here is just inside the reception area and you can see the fire alarm panel, you can see some resident’s information and a fire alarm break panel here. What we decided to do then was to each staircase individually and then the dry riser individually and then the residential areas so that it kind of tells the story. As you go down the staircase you can see where it starts and where you actually exit the building/
RICHARD FREER Have you done this before, Cliff?
CLIFF KNEALE No, I hadn’t done this before. I was collaborating with Hannah at Sodexo and she was very helpful, she has done quite a lot of this and George gave me her number. So I was in contact with her during the day and she was giving me some advice on how to use it.
RICHARD FREER So it’s not a highly skilled job.
CLIFF KNEALE No, I hadn’t done it before, I thought it was all going to be a bit techie, but it was as easy as taking a photograph with your iPhone really. This is the staircase, as you can see it actually went across a roof and then exited out onto the pavement and there was a motorcycle near to the exit, but it wasn’t really obstructing it. This is one of the dry risers, so you can see the dry riser here and here is the electrical cupboard. This was actually only a couple of square metres, but the camera coped quite well with it and managed to capture everything. This is a photograph of the doors open and then I took some photographs with my iPhone as well just to show the barriers between the floors, it’s fallen in here and some of the penetration sealing needs to be redone.
I also took some photographs of the PPM records that were inside the door, so it was quite easy again to capture everything. And then just went through and as it so happened the camera has got about a 6 metre range where you can pick things up and that’s about how often there was a flat door. So stood outside each flat door so you know where each photograph has been taken and then you can see the information. So there’s a detection head here and you can see that this resident here might have trouble getting around because there’s a scooter here. This is the lift lobby which again shows the fire escape route away from the lifts and down the stairs, and there’s a detection head here as well. And again, another one of the corridors, I just put this one in because it showed that quite a bit of the wallpaper in the building was coming away. So, you could use it not just for fire critical assets, but also to gather other information about the condition of the building.
For he next step after you’ve done the actual survey of the building is to start taking it back to the office and start doing the asset tagging. In this instance, it’s not always the case, we actually had some floor plans that were in the premises information box. So we took some scans of these locally and used this digital tape measure to measure the corridor which gave us an overall width and dimension of the communal area. I was able to use that to scan it in and scan it up and again using some free software SketchUp I managed to draw it up so it’s now gone from paper-based dumb data into a vectorised format which can be used to help o build a spatial model in a database. Again, I haven’t used SketchUp before but I just did this in about half a day, so it’s quite easy to do with relatively inexpensive hardware and free to use software.
RICHARD FREER How big was that building?
CLIFF KNEALE 17 storeys.
RICHARD FREER And you did those photos in how long for the whole building?
CLIFF KNEALE It was a couple of hours and then about 3 or 4 hours to draw up the CAD plan, never having used SketchUp before, just looking on Youtube tutorials.
ADAM SANDERS Let me add some context to that, I was with a colleague and we were doing some basic surveys. We were at the building for a couple of hours and then we were done, so we went to the pub. And I think Cliff got all of the floor planning done whilst we were in the pub and that was 2 gin & tonics and one pint, by the way.
RICHARD FREER Cliff, the more traditional way of doing that, how long would it have taken?
CLIFF KNEALE Measuring it up, I think I would have been there the entire day, maybe even have to go back the next day. And then the CAD plan would have taken a bit longer because you’d have to start from scratch whereas with having the photocopy of the fire floor plan it was easy just to scale it up and trace over the top of it. So I think that probably would have been a weeks work and I’ve done it in a couple of days.
RICHARD FREER And you’ve done it, no offence, not as a skilled person.
CLIFF KNEALE Well no, I can use CAD but I’ve never used SketchUp before.
RICHARD FREER But in terms of the camera…
GEORGE I think the point is as well that the 360 photos mean that somebody can go and do that and then you can have people that are experts in sprinkler systems and things like that be able to review it afterwards, which is really what Cliff is just showing there at the moment. Do you just want to talk that through?
CLIFF KNEALE Yeah, this isn’t the same building because we only did this survey late last week and I’ve been working on some other projects, but the next step is to take those photographs which I’ve just shown you and add these tags on, which we’ve done on another building. So once you’ve got the 360 photograph you bring it into the database, you can add these tags and these tags contain all sorts of information about the asset. It can just be about the condition of it or it can be about the…maintenance of it, it can be whatever you want it to be. If I just run the video, it’s only about a minute. You can see this is the fire door, there is some information here about the fire door, you’ve tags for some attributes about whether it’s operational, the condition of it as well, whether it needs to be repaired and also whether or not there’s any risk problems with it. So, it’s very easy to add these tags on as well.
GEORGE Sodexo have been doing this and they’re finding that they’re able to work at probably 7 or 8 times the speed that they would normally do to do surveys, and they are more reliable. So, the methodology really works.
CLIFF KNEALE If anyone wants to see the photographs after they’ve been tagged they’re welcome and we can set something up for next week just to show how it was tagged and wha you can do with it in terms of desktop studies and things like that.
RICHARD FREER That’s great, Cliff.
CAROLYN FLYNN Before I joined the current company that I’m in, during covid those cameras are what we used. I was on a school project and at that time we were trying to work out the oneway systems with the schools. So we did use those cameras and I think we got them off Amazon or Ebay, just simple like that, they come with a little battery and the heads are the only things you need to protect. They work very, very well and you can just buy a stand and stick it on there. But what it helped was that we had the drawings of the school, so it does help, and we found that we could put it on some software, we had to rename it a bit, but you need to follow a certain direction. So if you were going from east to west you’d enter the building and you’d go the same way so that your camera, you always have to stand the same way.
When you’re taking the picture and you’ve got to move obviously out of the way, but you can arrow it. So when we worked on the oneway system in schools it actually worked and you can then get once you’ve arranged them all together you can then show a video. So I could come and say oh, Richard, this is what we’ve done for your school and this is how your kids are going to go in and this is how they’re going to go out and just follow it. And if you draw it on the plan, we had the plan and I’d say this is photo #1, photo #2 over here. So just to add to Cliff that it does work and I’d never used it, but I was a little pro by the time I was done with that.
RICHARD Wow, well that just shows you basically how simple that is, it saves so much time, because it’s basically an unskilled person doing work that would otherwise have to be done by a skilled person. If anybody has got any interest in having a meeting to have a look through the tagging process and how that’s done put your name in the chat. We’ll email out to everyone anyway because it seems to me that that could be well worth doing. Probably too specialist or too focused to be the next forum meeting, but we could certainly do a side meeting on it.
GEORGE For the next forum meeting one of the things we do want to do is digital handover. So, we’re going to do a feature on that which we can…so if people are interested in O&M and how we can improve the digital handover side of things then please put your name in the chat and we’ll make sure that you are prepared for that.
RICHARD FREER Also if you want to join any of the workstreams or working groups put your name in the chat. Thank you for coming along and the next one is in about 5 to 6 weeks’ time.
GEORGE If anybody knows of people that have received this cancellation notice because we’re trying to figure out what’s happened because some people have received a cancellation notice for this meeting. It would be very helpful if you could let us know, even if you obviously you didn’t receive it=, but if you’ve heard of people that did receive it, please let us know because we think there is a problem possibly with LinkedIn.
RICHARD FREER Yeah, because as you know normally we have 150-200 people in these meetings, so there is something gone wrong.
CHAT
John Powell (External)11:10 am
This Podcast might be of interest to the Group when considering digital technology and the Golden Thread.
The Golden Thread Episode: With Aman Sharma & Peter Wise (youtube.com)
Chris Jeffers (External)11:12 am
Handover information, especially digital O&Ms - very interesting area indeed, would like to be involved in this, doing so much in the day job on this
Gordon Pringle (External)11:23 am
Golden Rope stronger than thread
Paul Hayles (Unverified)11:24 am
The thread is the fact they are joined/linked
Chun Qing Li (External)11:30 am
DfMA software can solve this solution
Mohamed Alaa El-Den Azmy (External)11:32 am
The link between BIM must be Asset Managemnt have to be made through IOT platform and an integration with the BIM model by a digital twin platform that gives yiu a history and a real time data.
William Borthen (External)11:37 am
Ideally digital twins Mohamed, but most Asset Managers are operating their buildings at a much lower level of maturity. For me, we need to support people with better information management across the entire spectrum of maturity.
Joe Stott (External)11:43 am
Key for me with this sort of thing are that the sensors can operate locally (Not cloud dependant) and firmware is opensource so sensors can be used should the manufacturer go bump or decide the device is end of life.
Chris Jeffers (External)11:48 am
Totally agree with need to adapt to FM optimisation - but it needs clients to push flexible contract models as well. Historically these tend to be fixed, which has suited both parties as it provides cost certainty.
But do agree with the need for change here!
Gordon Pringle (External)11:59 am
Agree that this process works for mass qty sensors but our monitors cover visual LED, Localised data old school as .csv and cloud which can be API to any other platform. Our unit needs more power i.e. 5V so suited to PoE and presently SIM card being used on retrofit at usually low costs as 3 or 4 units max on a Htg Circuit or 3 on a ChW circuit. I'd love to see if our tech could fit to provide data of Htg & Clg system water quality control.
I'm heading into a presentation now so please do reach out if we can assist hear in our field on Building Services data and FM data.
Paul Hayles (Unverified)12:01 pm
BSA Golden Thread, BIM for whole life in-occupation management and automation and smart buildings and management processes. There needs to be some logical and proportionate steps towards achieving these
Simon Collery (External)12:02 pm
Very interesting, thank you. I wonder if any of these offerings are aimed at the public sector, and public sector housing and service provision? They seem to aim at the high end of the market.
Paul Hayles (Unverified)12:03 pm
not correct - social housing providers are absolutely looking at these - however doing everything all at once is a problem
Simon Collery (External)12:03 pm
Yes, they are looking at them, but they still seem to be priced for the private sector.
Joe Stott (External)12:06 pm
I suspect we need to be mindful of asset maintenance v operational functions - strikes me there is cross over however for me they are two very different pools of requirements.. Do we need to define what we mean when we use the term FM? Keeping this in mind may help us focus on specific workstream requirements / solutions
Farghaly, Karim (External)12:09 pm
Thanks very much, smart buildings are not the end goal and it is not the why or the requirement needed. It is only a fancy way to reach our requirements
Joe Stott (External)12:10 pm
my concern with this is that manufacturers will then look towards the concept of subscribing to services to use the hardware you have already purchased... as per the car manufacturers are currently moving towards
Paul Hayles (Unverified)12:14 pm
You need to be smart about pricing and provide all life savings rather than short term/up front costs. A bit like Tesla will outline the savings
Orde, Phil (External)12:21 pm
Sketchup is intuitive that's the beauty of it
Joe Stott (External)12:22 pm
This raises a good question about accuracy of data... Data capture methods such as the one we have just seen always have limitations and compromises in terms of accuracy BUT does that matter?more often the answer (i think) would be no. and how do we ensure that the accuracy of the resultant data is attached to the dataset and shared with end users (if needed). My rule of thumb is that the accuracy needs to be "good enough" but this needs clearly communicating..
Sorin Ionescu (Unverified)12:23 pm
I also believe they should be addressed apart but technologically connected to avoid errors.
Adam Sanders (External)12:23 pm
Agree with Joe. As long as we know it's indicative and not quite to scale it's great
Simon Collery (External)12:24 pm
In contrast to the first two offerings (which I thought were excellent) this looks like it could be used for public sector housing and public services.
Joe Stott (External)12:25 pm
personally i love these kind of data capture services as they are accessible..
Chris Jeffers (External)12:26 pm
yes, would be very interesting to see how the photos are tagged - thanks Cliff