BIM IN ASSET MANAGEMENT MONTHLY FORUM 11-09-2024
GEORGE Thanks everybody for coming together. We’ve got quite a lot of content that we’re going to be covering, but it’s also a matter of building on what we’ve been doing over the last 2-3 years, and also more recently from the BIM In Asset Management side of things. One of the challenges I’ve had over the years with BIM4Housing is helping people understand that it’s not simply what people think of as BIM, as in 3D modelling, it’s actually about better information management. And also, quite importantly, it’s not just about housing. A lot of the things that we’re doing in BIM4Housing are actually applicable to all other types of buildings, so that’s one of the reasons we decided to start BIM In Asset Management to bring it to a much wider audience. I think that’s resonating with people, so that’s the way that I’d like us to continue with that.
I think anybody that’s been listening to the Grenfell reports that isn’t in the industry would think basically that we’re made up of people that are either crooks or incompetent people. And that’s very frustrating because I’ve been in the industry for 40 years and 95% of the people that I’ve come across are very dedicated and want to do a good job. One of the challenges that we’ve got is it’s a very low margin industry and there isn’t the level of investment in getting a lot of these things right. As a result of that, what we’re trying to do with BIM4Housing, when I took over 4 years ago one of the things we did was to recalibrate it to focus on information management rather than modelling. And I was able to get quite a lot of very committed people to join us, that came from a number of different areas. So, in development, design, construction, manufacturing, advisory and operations.
The purpose of what we’ve been doing, we’ve actually been looking at ways that we can use information management to make things simpler. So, to be able to take information and turn it into something that’s more standardised, and that’s something that we’re going to be doing quite a lot today with this. There is a whole range of activities we’ve got going on around that. Also, classification and creating reusable quality libraries. Fire safety is probably one of the biggest areas. I say fire safety, but safety generally, with a focus on fire and smoke, has been a lot of what we’ve been doing. Also, sustainability and we helped start Zero Construct. And the digital record, that’s a very important part of what we’re doing. Part of what we’ve been doing with that is to reach out to the community that we’ve established. We’ve had over 2,000 people involved over the last 4 years, to really pick up on information management.
And about 3 years ago the government reached out to Jonny Furlong when he was the BIM manager at L&Q to try and pull together an industry group that could advise on the golden thread. I was fortunate enough to be picked to run the asset information group, but that was only one of ten other working groups. What we were tasked with doing was to be able to identify what asset information was needed to make buildings safe, and we’ve been working on that ever since. We produced our first publication at the end of 2021 and we’ve then been refining that, so that’s a lot of what we’ve been doing. And the way in which we’ve been doing it is pulling together subject matter experts, manufacturers, designers, and everybody has been working…a lot of them are competitors, but they’re sitting around tables (largely at Teams workshops) where we’ve been getting people to share their experiences and document what’s needed.
And from doing that I think we’ve had a unique level of cross-collaboration between people that are very knowledgeable in these areas. And the interesting thing for me was that I’ve bee involved in asset management for many years, but in most cases what people are doing are thinking about what is the asset and what do we need to do to it. Whereas the perspective of the golden thread is looking at things from a different perspective i.e. what is that thing doing? What risk does it mitigate? And how do we then ensure that it’s going to perform when it’s needed? Also, what do people do to the assets to stop them from working? And that’s drawn out a few interesting things. For example, we’ve had over 180 roundtable workshops over this last 2-3 years, an enormous amount of industry knowledge has come into it. But I didn’t understand that sprinklers, for example, were normally dry, and they are only filled with water when they need to be filled with water.
But when they’re tested once a year, perhaps, they then need to be emptied again and some of the techniques of doing that can actually cause problems> They’ll put pressurised air in and the oxygen can oxidise and therefore cause problems with the joints in a metal sprinkler system. So the next time it gets filled it leaks which is obviously not great. And that was addressed by the sprinkler industry by using plastic, as I understand it, which that in itself is a good way of doing it, unless you use the wrong type of mastic. By using the wrong type of mastic it makes them brittle. A lot of the people on this call will know that, but will other people know it? It’s that type of deep dive that I think is important. Another interesting example, one of the asset managers from L&Q was explaining that some of the residents have got some novel ways of using condoms, putting them overt smoke alarms to be able to stop them from going off when they’re having a smoke inside the flat.
Or, we’ve got others where why did the AOV not work? Well, part of the reason was that somebody have been smoking in the corridor and they’d tried to open the window, which actually wasn’t a window, it was an AOV, but they sprained the actuator. So, these are the sorts of things that probably aren’t in the text books but they actually come from people’s practical experience, and that’s what we’ve tried to document. We’ve also then gone down to the detail of what information is needed about an asset to ensure that it actually performs as is required. It’s also true of putting in terms of what do we need to do to assets to make sure that they are installed, commissioned, inspected and maintained properly. The level of competency that’s needed, and also how should product changes be recorded. All of this is available for 12 key asset types, these are all on the BIM4Housing website, along with other recommendations and guidance that you can download and use.
I feel that we’ve created a very rich set of information that people can utilise and learn from. In particular, procurement people should be reading these things so that they can understand why the scope of perhaps what they’re asking contractors and manufacturers to do is perhaps remiss. I encourage you to look at that. And the other thing that we did with this was looked at giving people a context in which these things were being used, but I’ll come on to that when we talk about competency a bit later. I’d also now like to just break because I think we’re now going to hand over to the workstreams. We’ve got a number of main players here that have been working in the background over the last few months. We’ve got a group looking at interoperability. What we’re trying to do here is make it easy for people, rather than everybody looking at the regulations and then looking at what they need to do and then doing things in isolation. If we can get things done in a more joined up way it’s going to make it a lot easier for supply chains to be able to respond with good quality information.
Today we’ve got interoperability which is led by Paul Oakley and Karim Farley?. We’ve got another one on digital records which is led by Adina Poncis and Adam Sanders, and Adina is going to give us a quick overview of where we’ve got to on that. And the other one that we’ve been working on is looking at the business case, so looking at things that we need to do cost justify any investment that’s made. Richard Whitaker and Will…are going to cover that. And that’s building on work that Marc Bradfield from Bureau Veritas has done. We’re all volunteers, so this is really a matter of trying to do some sort of collaboration together to try and get the industry’s feedback as to what’s needed and then to be able to create some content that people can find valuable. After that, what we’re doing is looking at PFI hand-back. For example, PFI hand-back encompasses a lot of things that we’re covering with the golden thread, but in a very specific way. They are under the same new regulatory regime that we’ve got with building safety, but they’ve got the added aspect of really punitive commercial terms. Ben Evans from Albany is going to give us a run-through on that.
And then bridging the gap between construction and FM is something that I’ve spent years working on. I’ve worked with quite a lot of very smart people in the industry and some of the leading aspects were from BSRIA (Building Services Research & Information Association). And they effectively had the golden thread cracked probably 20 years ago when I saw what they were doing, and soft landings was part of what they did in that area, which then became government soft landings. Well, I’m pleased to say that Jo Harris, who was part of the team that was leading on that and condition based maintenance, which is another area that there is a lot of interest in. She’s offered to do a little slot today to explain what that means and how that can then feed and support the process. So, all of those parts are really part of what we’re doing with the golden thread. I’d like to hand over to Paul Oakley…to explain what we’re doing on the interoperability group, as far as purposes and things like that are concerned.
PAUL OAKLEY We had quite a lively meeting in terms of talking about interoperability and the various contexts in terms of what it can me and how it can be used. Obviously one of the key things, there’s been lots of existing work through the GIG and obviously buildingSMART and loads of other groups looking at interoperability from different points of view. The use of purposes was one of the initial bits of work that we identified that needs to be carried out. Purposes could be something as basic as insurance, the typical OMs and all of the rest of it. There are lots of purposes which we need information for which, if you watch the news we’ve seen the other terrible fire in London where lots of people had no insurance because they couldn’t afford the insurance because the insurance premiums on the buildings are so high because nobody can give the insurers information about the buildings so that they can identify the risk and things like this.
So, there’s lots of these set purposes that we need to start going through that we can then identify data sets requirements and other things to slowly build on to build a bigger picture. But it all really starts with the high level purposes, we set up a Miro board where people start to dump ideas on that, so at the next meetings we’ll be working through that again.
RICHARD Paul, Debbie has asked a question, does interoperability include interoperability of competence, standards and frameworks, and associated competency profile data?
PAUL OAKLEY I’d say that’s a bit outside of the scope of what we were asked to look at. Competency…it was really from a data point of view, not from…
GEORGE I would bow to Debbie’s experience on the competency side of things, she’s our subject matter expert on that. But it would be interesting, Debbie, to see how you think that that could be glued together from an interoperability point of view. In principle what we’re trying to do is move interoperability beyond….a lot of the focus on interoperability is about moving 3D models around. What we want to do from an asset management point of view is carry it down to a much lower level of detail using all of the standards, like Uniclass and IFC. But if we can do the same with other standard taxonomies that you can help us with, then I think that would be very useful.
RICHARD So, digital record, Adina.
ADINA PONCIS We’ve had two sessions just before the summer break where we’ve had some in-depth conversations as we work towards defining some clear goals and scopes to feed back into the business case. Our aim is to develop a simple and practical plan that outliners what formats digital records should take and what they need to do and what they need to achieve. This needs to be viable for both existing buildings and new developments. There are, of course, quite a few complexities such as we have to cover different sectors and the diversity of buildings or asset types, the challenge to manage individual buildings versus portfolio buildings. But also a bit of a bugbear, the age of buildings and the stage of their digital maturity, we’re talking about buildings with highly detailed data, 3D models which are updated throughout the operational phase and have developed digital twin. While we also have a large stock of buildings that only have a set of 3D as-built drawings. These are just to name a few of the high level challenges.
We’ve also looked at a couple of real life scenarios and interrogated some current processes such as data requirements, activities and rules to help shape our approach. As George mentioned, we’ve recognised that BIM as an acronym isn’t always viewed favourably during the operational phase. We’ve done a lot of work in the construction and there is a lot of awareness that BIM is more of better information management, but we probably need to do a little bit more, like promoting it for the operational teams. We’ve stressed the need of an early engagement of asset managers and facility managers and teams in defining asset data requirements and managing digital records throughout the operational phase. Generally, the need for clients to adopt long term strategies or soft landing strategy, and potentially to review their approach to FM contracts.
So we’re looking at developing this like a best practice plan that sits within a long term strategy, so the digital records are consistently updated and used throughout the lifecycle of an asset, are portable and reusable to enable interoperability. And they can be available to all stakeholders. For the next steps we proposed a development of a digital best practice strategy for project delivery with the help from some Tier 1 contractors and other stakeholders and we’ve also been looking at breaking down into having some smaller working groups to focus on specific issues such as handover best practices and the integration of digital records into the ongoing maintenance processes. And if you’re an asset manager or a facilities manager please join us on our session, it would be really good for us to understand your struggles on the ground.
RICHARD You’ve found, I know, that theres quite a lot of crossover with the other working groups.
ADINA PONCIS There are, indeed, probably the next session we’ll have to catch up with the other working groups to make sure that we’re working towards the same goal.
GEORGE What Adina just said is really important and that is that what we’re trying to do is keep each of the working groups focused on doing a relatively small task, a focused task. Because we’re looking at them actually as task and finish exercises and hopefully we can maybe come up with some recommendations for what a digital record should contain and how best should it be created within the next couple of months. So, the idea of these isn’t that we’ve got things that are going on just for meetings sake, we’ve got very clear deliverables. And I know that Adina, in particular Adam Sanders, is very impatient to get that type of thing sorted. So we need to be looking at these, similarly for the interoperability aspect, they’re big topics, but they each interface with each other, so we’re trying to get that cross-filtration of work. We’re just very grateful that we’ve got people that are passionately interested. So, if you are interested in the digital record or the interoperability side of things please put your hand up and get involved because we need that type of feedback from people.
RICHARD All of these meetings are recorded…so please do use the chat, because nothing is lost that goes into the chat. If you think of something, or you don’t want to speak out loud, just put it in the chat. Likewise, if you want to join any of the groups and workstreams that we’re talking about, pop it in the chat and we’ll pick it up with you afterwards. So, business case.
RICHARD WHITTAKER The business case. Three workstreams have already been talked about and explained, what’s interesting is around 200 attendees last time, there’s about 117 this time, so there is a real interest in this, and I thank everybody for what they’re doing. But, the business case, a tremendous amount of work has happened on that business case and credit to Marc Bradfield, he’s done a significant amount on this. But we’re getting to the position now where we need to be understanding what the rationale is. We need to be in a position where we can aim for examples where we can demonstrate value. And in terms of that rationale, what is the priority order? Is it cost? One of the great things that influence the higher management in order to invest. Or, is it risk? And that’s risk around compliance or legislation, Building Safety Act is a perfect example. It’s also about the provision of information and if you look at chapter 8 of the Hackitt Report and it promotes a golden thread digitisation, fits in exactly with this workgroup.
And then, of course, there is efficiency, and when you look at efficiency that influences the operational delivery of the asset management function. And why is that important? Well, there is this thing at the other end called a customer and customer service is very, very important. And if you’ve been on a journey with the ombudsman in terms of poor service delivery, well, that would be your priority. So there is a wrestle to be had as we go through this and determine what is it that will actually influence the powers that be to invest the necessary investment that’s required from a cost and resource basis in order to get that payback that they’ve been looking for as an organisation. And of course, one of the things that will contribute an influence to that is standardisation and operational delivery. And I don’t mean standardisation across the industry, I think I might get shot at for that one, but I genuinely don’t. I think that we need a flexibility to adopt the standardisation that exists within organisations because they’ll have invested a significant amount of time and effort in building their structures and it’s how we have the flexibility to feed in to that.
So, really, a plea. If anybody has got any examples, any business cases that relate to supporting change in the business around digitalisation or interoperability, then please do let us know.
RICHARD FREER Brilliant, we’ve had 4 people join up for the digital record, so if anyone wants to join business case then pop it into the chat. I know that George is going to go into a bit more detail on something that Richard has already spoken about.
RICHARD WHITTAKER Just a last thing…as well as recruiting volunteers we think we need to segregate the business case so it covers existing buildings, new build, and soft landings because they’ll differ by organisation and discipline. And there’s a couple of websites, which we’ll share with everybody afterwards, in relation to BIM for asset management, so you can go along, look and contribute.
GEORGE Will Borthen, have you got anything to add to that.
WILLIAM BORTHEN No, I think that was a good summary of everything. The purpose of the business case working group is to demonstrate value. I think there’s been a challenge within the asset management community around the adoption of BIM and partly that’s down to a lack of tangible, meaningful and achievable solutions being available to people. And that’s what this workstream aims to address and we think that if we can demonstrate how asset management problems can be solved with case study type scenarios then people in asset management across the full spectrum of asset management will be able to see that and see how they can adopt those types of solutions and feed into their own business cases within their own organisations.
GEORGE One of the interesting things, I’ve been involved in both sides of this so I’ve come at things both from a point of view of the BIM side of things, the delivery, the design & construction side of things. But I’ve also been involved in asset management for over 30 years and as a result of that I’ve got perhaps a slightly unusual perspective in that I’ve got both sides of that particular equation. And one of the big frustrations I know that the design & construction people have is that asset managers struggle to articulate what they need.And I think if we can use this process, the business case, because it’s not a matter of technically how we need the information, it’s why do we need it, what information is needed and what are we going to do with it. So I think those are 3 things that we want to be looking at and what we’ve done is we’ve tried to come up with a way that asset managers can communicate what it is that they actually need and why they need it.
One of the things that we’ve put up is this simple template that you can see there. We’ve put it on the website, but we’re encouraging people to come up with things that they have as issues that would be solved by having better information. So the more of these that you can give us the better because we can use that to turn it into something that can then get fed back up the line. The second thing is building the importance of that, it’s not just a matter of identifying what the problem is, it’s what the impact of that problem is. What is both the commercial and the safety, the operational impact of not having that right information? What information would actually help? So, to try and be a bit more explicit. And who is in the best place to provide it? And then if you know fo something where that’s been done successfully that would be great to know. Not a matter of promoting individual solutions, but understanding what’s working so that we can all learn from that. And from a tangible point of view why is that useful to a client? Because that’s going to make it a lot easier to feed that business case.
So, what we’ve done is that we’ve created a few that are coming from our own experiences. For example, one of the things that I find amazing is that manufacturers guarantees and warranties aren’t clearly defined or transferred to the owner. In most contracts it’s actually between the subcontractor who bought the pump or the luminaires. They may have a 10 year warranty but it doesn’t get transferred over to the client or the asset team, which is, in my view, crazy. And what’s the impact of that, you can see that we’ve built that out a little bit. So if can look at these, that’s one, another one that we’ve got up there is information in O&Ms being disconnected from all of the other information, so that if you’ve got models or BIM models or schedules the information in the O&M and health & safety files aren’t joined together. Another one here is spaces in the handover information are missing. This is a quite a common thing and you’d think that that was straight forward to deliver from a BIM model and the BIM model process, but in practice it happens all of the time. And it’s just a matter of making sure that that is actually covered because it creates chaos for asset managers not knowing which spaces things are in.
And then the last one we’ve got on there is maybe a client tenders a contract based on 10,000 items or assets and then the FM’s initial review identifies that there’s 20,000, so how do we overcome that? These are just 4 examples. I was talking with Richard bacon yesterday from Albany and he came up with about another 4 or 5. So, I think it’s quite a rich thing that we can use and very practical and I feel we could get some good feedback from people that we can tackle a lot of these things that are causing people problems.
RICHARD FREER We’ll just put the link for the scenario search page onto the chat so if any or all of you can contribute to that it would be fantastic.
GEORGE Because we've not had a lot of interaction from people on the floor yet, there must be some questions or comments or observations.
MARK KEEBLE I’m new to this, I’m going to jump in. This is a great discussion and I’m
hitting it from the fundamental point of why we’re here, we’re here to make our high-risk buildings, which is a term I hate, safer. I’m going to throw it on its head, so we come from aviation, rail and nuclear and we’ve been supporting lots of different councils in the country with doing safety cases. Now, you’re hitting it, from my understanding, is what evidence do we need for the argument of why a building is safe. Whilst I contend there is lots of evidence needed for compliance to the law, how other high-risk industries do it and have been doing it for decades very successfully, and it comes from the legal kind of area, is to actually think about your safety case and your safety arguments and what you’re trying to prove and that is dependent on the risk of your building. And that’s why the Building Safety Regulator wants you to understand your risk associated with each HRB which then defines your safety arguments which then defines what evidence you need.
So I think your’e hitting it 3 or 4 hurdles down. What the industry is not doing at the moment, and this is working with at least 50-odd clients who own or manage HRBs ranging from councils to housing associations to large private landlords, is they’re going after all of this evidence, but actually the evidence that they’re gathering in some cases isn’t supporting their argument to safety, which is why we’re here. And in fact they’re wasting money gathering that evidence. In aviation we used to do it about 20 years ago, we used to call it the thud factor, here is a load of evidence, that means that we’re safe. And aviation and nuclear in particular have realised that is not an argument of safety. So, what’s my summary? Evidence is really important, it’s fundamental, but what evidence you need is informed by your risk. However, I do understand that the law and legal requirements may need certain elements, I get that.
But the additional stuff which lots of consultants are telling councils to go and get, actually isn’t needed for your argument of safety if you actually understand your risk which in my experience of working in your industry for the past 2 years, is being done very poorly. But George knows where we’re coming from, so thanks for listening to my monologue there.
GEORGE I support what Mark’s saying there, but what we need to look at is to look at this from the perspective that Paul was talking about earlier and that is purposes. So, what Mark’s looking at is from a point of view of safety cases which is obviously a critical area. But we also need to look at things from a point of view of operations, also contractual responsibilities. It’s not just the legal and the compliance side of things, it’s actually making sure that when, for example, an air handling unit is operating it’s actually supporting the right level of quality of air in the different aspects. So, I think what Mark said there is absolutely right, but we need to make sure that the fundamental things, we need to work from the ground up as well as the top down.
SAMBA PAPILSON Talking about all of this digital information is very interesting but when we talk about it in terms of building safety cases we’re only referring to HRB high-risk buildings. But how do we prepare ourselves to more complex buildings that which are not residentials? Because we know eventually it will be going down that direction. Coming from complex environments, complex buildings, complex operations and high-risk buildings, but we’re not residential environments. So how do we prepare ourselves learning, getting this experience and start setting the path to what’s coming because we now that along the way this will be transferred to other complex buildings as well.
GEORGE I think the answer to that is that 95% of what you’ve got to do for residential is going to be equally applicable to hospitals and other types of complex buildings. And I think Mark would agree with that. It’s not a matter of what type of building it is, it’s looking at it from what the risk is. And actually the legislation, they’ve focused on that to some degree to give them a bit of a funnel because they’re already overwhelmed with building types. It’s interesting, I was talking with a lawyer last week and he was saying that one of the big challenges that clients have got is that just doing maintenance work, building work in an existing building, if it’s a high-risk building which can be a hospital or something like that , it’s notifiable. It used to be the case, or it was planned that that was going to be an 8 week turnaround. An 8 week turnaround on a relatively small work is a big problem. It’s an even bigger problem now because the Regulator has got such a backlog it’s probably going to be 6 months.
So you’re absolutely right, I think we need to get it right for all types of buildings. And that’s also true of the competence of the supply chain as well because if you’re switching people around…
ANDREW PERRY I think one of the biggest issues that we face as asset managers in improving the value of asset management is having the right people at the table at the very start of the project. And we talk about the FM provision, be it from the customer side, if I’ve got the ability, if I’ve got the intelligent customer function, intelligent client function. Or if they’ve got a partnered FM provider, sort of a maintenance contractor. And it’s having the people that have got the ability to impart the knowledge and the constraints that the end users business outputs will put on how the building is to be maintained and how it will be used. And of course that has an impact on how the building will perform. Will it perform its fullest potential in terms of interruption to core business activities? Will the maintenance be capable of supporting the assets to their predicted timeline for their lifecycle? And when it comes to lifecycle, does the design allow for an easy, or a less disruptive, swap out of capital planting equipment.
That all takes resource, but unfortunately because of our disconnect between capital costs, whole life costs and maintenance, and the ever present disconnect (as I put in the chat). My view is that sometimes the quality of the design and the long term outputs and benefits are sacrificed on the altar of the cheapest capital cost. So, as an industry we really need to make sure that we can get the right people to the table at the right time with the right voice.
PHIL THOMPSON It’s really interesting listening to the comments being made and I concur with many of them. But one thing I just wanted to highlight to people, this is clearly a complex environment, but often we talk about the kind of problems that we all face with clients and systems, digitisation models etc, interchange of information. But recently, I’ve been kind of stepping back from that and looking at the landscape of the culture of the industry. And this group and other groups that we all contribute to and probably get something from it, if you look at the landscape of organisations, associations, think tanks in the construction industry, of which there are many which seem to present an adversarial kind of almost disconnected approach, has anyone ever questioned the validity of that? Has anyone every challenged their own trade body and said why do you work in silos? Showing this example where you're breaking down these barriers to improve interoperability of information.
GEORGE I think you’re absolutely on the nail there, Phil. I think the institutions actually an encourage that type of silo-based thinking, so I’d support you.
PHIL THOMPSON Somebody I’ve been working with put a post of LinkedIn yesterday and i’ve commented on it. he took a graphic of some work that I’ve been doing showing not all, but my view of the landscape of trade bodies, associations, member organisations etc that sit across construction, from what I’ve come across in my experience. Just take a look at that, maybe there is more, maybe it’s worse that I thought. But if you go back 26 years when they had the Leighton Report it talks about the industry being disconnected and adversarial. I can’t see how it’s that different, the way the organisations approach this problem.
RICHARD Has anybody got anything to say on what Phil said on the siloisation of the construction industry in terms of trade bodies, organisations, the disconnect.
JOANNA HARRIS Phil, this is a subject that we’ve been fighting for 20 years and some. When I used to work at BSRIA it was always the challenge that everybody was working separately, but now I sort of represent CIBSE as a volunteer. CIBSE, IWFM, BISA, we’re all trying to pull together around maintenance and operations. But you’re right, it’s a very difficult process because everybody has got their own agendas, but they do have a joint committee which I’m going to struggle to name because it was such a stupid acronym. But it’s about whether on not we can get to that organisation to make that happen. But it is there, we could do it, if we could engage them.
RICHARD WHITTAKER I absolutely agree with what Phil’s saying and when you go back through time, you can go way back beyond the 80s down to 1964 and Sir Harold Emerson and a diagnosis of ill health and a call for remedial action. Which were saying exactly the same things and led onto the Bandall committee of 1966, which is not what I want to talk about. Part of this is about the culture change, part of this is about the race to the bottom because it’s a capital cost environment. And often prior to me doing this consultancy role that I’m doing now, I worked on the client side for many years and far too often in the industry I used to get developers, contractors, supply chain members come back and say if you want to improve it you need to pay. You’re the client, you’ve got bags of money. Well, my budget last year was £128 million which supports that argument. The balancing factor is there are 8,000 people on the waiting list looking for suitable accommodation or living in unsuitable accommodation. So, I can invest in something that provides better value in the future, or I can provide homes. And the answer had to be provide homes because that was what the business was there for. And part of the conversation about getting people to understand that, some clients have big budgets but they are finite budgets and not big enough.
But the other one was with the efficiencies that we get within construction across all disciplines through digitisation, through standardisation and things like that, I’ve yet to see anybody come back to a client and say we’ve generated efficiencies that we can then reduce our costs and share that benefit with you. It’s about increasing margins, not…and everybody has got to get a slice of the cake, I get that, but if you’re on 20% and efficiency brings you 30%, why would’t you have 25% and give 5% back to your client to support them in meeting their objectives? That usually results in lots of blank faces.
DAVE WILLIAMS When we were talking earlier on about evidence and risk etc, I was going to give an example with one of our HRBs where we were doing something simple which was cyclical decorations. Now, probably half of the people in the room think oh yeah, that’s always on a planned maintenance schedule where every so many years you go and paint the inside or the outside of a building. But very few people realise that it matters that you use Class 0 paint. Now, that is something that a lot of people in the operations side and the maintenance side don’t even think about and so they’ll just contract someone to go and repaint an building and it’s only afterwards that they realise that the risk has increased because they haven’t used the right materials and didn’t specify the right materials.
So, although a lot of the discussion that we’re having at the moment is about new developments and about construction, there is that whole thing around maintenance and operations where there is evidence required at sometimes really minute levels that you wouldn’t normally expect because everyone just thinks of major components regarding fire safety and structural safety.
PAUL SHEEDY It’s a culture change here, you don’t get this in the US…we’ve heard all of these arguments about cost and all of the rest, absolute nonsense. The US standards are far higher and you know what the US is doing very well, it’s exactly what Commissioner Grove said the other day. I work across the US, it’s the culture here, it’s the culture of I don’t give a damn, I’ve done my bit, alright mate, I’m off. That’s the issue and until people start taking it seriously and start realising that what happened in Dagenham, I don’t know why people have not been arrested yet. Dagenham was Grenfell again, cladding gone off, the alarms again not working, we’ve had that in Valencia earlier in the summer. This time, padlocked doors, Jesus Christ, we’re in 2024, who is padlocking fire evacuation doors? I don’t know why these people are not in prison already. It is only luck why people didn’t die in Dagenham. When I was 11 we had 48 neighbours that died in Dublin in the stardust fire because the doors were padlocked. I don’t get this any longer.
It’s a lack of responsibility and we have to change everybody’s attitude and realise that everybody in this chain of command is responsible for people dying, maybe tomorrow, maybe in 20 years-time, if you don’t do your job correctly. I don’t know where this is going to end up until people are taking this responsibly and lining up. The golden thread is absolutely essential, but we’ve got to get the insurers to say…my issue is, why was that building even insured? There’s two people responsible here: the fire brigade…why did they allow people to live in a building that they knew had fundamentally huge fire issues in that building in Dagenham? And why was it insured? We’ve got to get the insurance companies to start being the carrot and the stick. Carrot, you run your building properly, you put fire sensors on everything, you know it’s running correctly, great, your premiums are down. If you’ve done it wrong, you go below maybe a compliance level of 80 or 85%, that’s it, you evacuate the building until the building manager or the property owner fixes it correctly. We’ve got to stop this passive letting things happen now.
GEORGE I agree.
RICHARD FREER I’ve got to move on now. George has a piece on competence and training.
GEORGE I’m coming at this from a point of view of ways that we can…at the moment we’re overwhelmed with the amount of guidance…BIM4Housing has contributed to the content as well, so I recognise that. (shares screen). For example, this is the fire door, this is one example of one of those 12 asset types. So, whats a fire door made of, what are the component parts, that’s giving an indication. So, what I’ve found was talking to different people, some of them were experts but they’re experts in the leaf rather than the overall door set. This is the sort of information that we’ve got in BIM4Housing which you can just download. The reason I’m saying that is that we’ve got a real deep dive set of information about fire doors, but then about a year later we then realised that the individual assets actually aren’t enough. For example, what we’ve got here is compartmentation. So, the fire door, no matter how good that fire door is, it’s part of a fire compartment, it’s part of a fire wall and therefore unless the penetration seals work properly the fire door may be perfect, but smoke is still going to get out and kill people. And yo’ve then got to rely on smoke controls.
So, any one of these things going wrong detect? 1hr 1min 33secs all the signage. So, all of those need to be looked at from a point of view of operational effectiveness. And i think that type of holistic way of looking at things is really important. So, we drilled down to the next level of detail with fire doors because in residential we’re coming across housing associations that are literally replacing all of their doors, thousands of doors, in some cases simply because they don’t have the right certificates. Now, the fire door people that I’ve been talking with that were part of the team said that’s completely unnecessary to do that. It needs to be done on a risk-based assessment and if, for example, a door may not have the right certification, but it’s actually not representing a major risk. And if it looks like it’s going to perform OK then don’t swap it out because it may well be that the door that you swap it out with is actually less good than the one that has replaced it, which is the point I was making earlier.
So, what we did, we spoke to some Alan Oliver who’d been brought in by the NHS. The NHS have got the biggest portfolio of fire doors I think in Europe and they wanted to come up with a standardised way of doing it, so they produced a standardised way of doing inspections. And Alan got together with us and we’ve had all of our fire door experts put effort into this, so this is the guidance that we’ve got. So basically it works on the basis of breaking inspections down into four different types and then some detailed information about what to find. The reason I’m saying this is I think this is one of the things that can contribute towards competency of people actually carrying out the work. It’s not whether they have got a particular certification, but it’s standardising the way that information the way people are carrying out work. And importantly standardising the way that procurement people think about things as well. That’s a Type 1 survey, and then the Type 1, Type 2 and Type 3 are there to simplify and standardise the way that things are done. And also to be able to say that the Type 1 survey, which is for a new door, that’s going to take about 30-40 minutes per door, so you can expect to maybe do 10 in a day. If it’s an existing door, to gather together the information that you need to create that as a baseline, as a one off, that’s going to take about half an hour.
And then for the regular inspection, if both of those first two things have been done you should be able to do 40 or 50 a day, but not if you don’t have the right information. And the point is unless people are allowing that in their procurement process then we’re not going to be able to do it. And we’re now working on the same sort of thing for dampers and fire stopping. One of the things i wanted to go through here is something that we think is a way forward with engaging more people, subject matter experts, to join with people who are learning. So, how do you share knowledge? Well, you can share it through examples and this is an example using reality capture, so 360 photographs. This is using a product called OpenSpace, but there’s quite a few other reality capture tools. And what we’re doing here is connecting it to the asset data and by doing that it means that you’re then able to create asset lists in a safe environment and it can be used to train people that don’t have the subject matter expert expertise.
So, the principle here is that we can use the 360 photos for subject matter experts, in this case this is Sodexo, they’re using the remote tagging to actually then use the 360 photo as a way of almost gamifying the process. And then we’ve got here a list of the asset types that are in a plant room and if we can then use this to train less experienced people to recognise what type of valve that is. And then how that can then connect into other types of systems then we think this is a way forward of then being able to tie things together and make it more efficient. So, the plea that I’ve got from this, we need more knowledgeable people to help us with this with their experience. if you’ve got the knowledge to be able to look in a plant room and identify the different types of elements in there, we’d like you to put your name in the chat, or if you know people, they may be semi-retired, that would be willing to act as mentors for people that want to learn. And conversely, if anybody has got people that wants to learn then we can bring those in.
And the final bit in this process is that we’ve actually got now a relationship with the Supply Chain Sustainability School which is basically funded by all of the big organisations in the construction industry. And they are willing to take what we produce and turn it into learning materials so that you can get a qualification on it. And all of the process of this is that if you’re in the supply chain and you’re an SME you’ll get the training for nothing and you can get the qualification off of the back of it. So, my request is to see if our growing community is willing to share their expertise in that sort of way and use the technology to be able to pull that together.
RICHARD Right, soft landings, Jo Harris.
JOANNA HARRIS (shares slides on screen). While that’s up there and you can read it yourself I’ll tell you well over 20 years ago is that an architect went back to a building where he worked in the environment he’d designed and built and realised it wasn’t quite meeting the needs of the occupiers and that’s where the concept of soft landings came from. So it’s a concept that says if you get the users and the operators involved at the early stages of design & build you will get a better outcome. And that’s what it is, it’s a process, an overlapped set of activities that pull that knowledgeable person into the process of design & build and focusing on outcomes. So, everything is written, everything is free source…because it BSRIA’s idea to publish it, but it wasn’t their idea to generate. So, the information is generated by its members from the original concept of this chap, who’s name eludes me, so, it’s all open source. You can go to the BSRIA website and you can download all of the soft landings documents for free. The purpose, it’s about the assets, it’s about making it in maintainable, operatable, meeting the needs of the occupiers, being flexible, adaptable, all of those things that are really important to occupiers.
And then the other concept it introduced to the industry, I think it was the catalyst, was the idea of the post-occupancy evaluation. Hopefully you’ve all heard of post-occupancy evaluation, it got into BREEAM credits and other schemes, but it’s all about revisiting a project after you’ve finished. So there’s no point building a building and running away which is what the industry has done for years and years and years. So, what they’re saying is if you’re doing soft landings properly you’ll always have a post-occupancy evaluation. So you’ll come back, you’ll be that architect at the end, you’ll work or sit in that building or you’ll talk to the people, talk to the operators and find out where you went right and where you went wrong. But you’ve got to sign up to that as a group. So, I saw somebody post about the IPD, that’s the concept where you join together as a team when you build a building and you all take the same amount of risk together. And it’s a great scheme,
I’ve seen it in action, and that just changes the concept of the construction team. And that’s kind of what soft landings is trying to do from a different point of view. So, it’s kind of more about collaborating, working as one team, understanding that you all want a good outcome at the end and it’s not all about profit and budget and timelines. And yes, I can provide a link to the business stuff.
RICHARD We’ve had a lot of talk in out meetings about getting people involved earlier, manufacturers involved earlier, FM people involved earlier. But this is really like the whole shebang, right down to the end user.
JOANNA HARRIS Yes. If you haven’t read about it start with the BSRIA guides because the government soft landings is a it of a take on it and waffles a bit, in my opinion.
HOWARD HALL Just an FYI, I’m involved in the implementation of government soft landings for a government department. so whilst that may be subject to a few restrictions I’m more than happy to share lessons learnt with the team on the basis of the practicality of how the government is also looking to implement when they also use a very heavy supply chain. So, actually that complicates to an extent the stakeholder engagement. So, that’s just something to add. Obviously I can’t, in open forum, discuss it in detail, but I’m more than happy to share going forward.
JOANNA HARRIS One of the main concepts of soft landings is learn your lessons, stop repeating the lessons of the past. But, we don’t share (I’ll go back to the Grenfell), we don’t share enough of what went wrong.
HOWARD HALL I think that the other thing that we have to remember is also its contractual conditions due to the fact that every new project sometimes had different T&Cs and whether people actually look at the T&Cs for the obligation to report and the accuracy of reporting and the means by which its collated.And half of the problems on a lot of project deliveries, not just within government but generally in commerce, is the fact that T&Cs aren’t scrutinised sufficiently to get accountability.
JOANNA HARRIS Yeah, and that was the beauty of the IPI initiative. George, you were involved in that. It was all about everybody singing up to the same thing in the whole supply chain and they became a project team together. But I understand in government that can't work.
HOWARD HALL But also when you’ve got contract conditions and cost then people revert back to the scope of service or the task orders that have been issued. And the problem there is over say a 3-4 year contract period if you’re looking at frameworks, the problem you have is that even housing associations doing frameworks for the Building Safety Act now and the golden thread is that there’s so much changes during those 4 years there is a reticence to actually change or do any variation to contracts, it’s a compensation event. So again, it’s something that needs to be thought of really carefully from a point of view of procurement and engaging procurement in project delivery is sometimes quite entertaining.
JOANNA HARRIS One last thing I’d forgotten…I’m involved in the British Standards for facilities management and they have just approved a project to write a soft landings operational guide from the BSI point of view. So hopefully we can get everything in one place in the right format for the future.
JAREK WITYK Joanna, is there any connection between this standard that you just mentioned and ISO 19650?
JOANNA HARRIS 19650, the BIM standards. Yes, the whole group will be the same sort of people, will both be looking at it from all directions.
JAREK WITYK I’m asking because I heard that the standards are being developed and at the moment there is a bit of a disjoint, in my opinion. So, I was just interested.
NICK NISBET The revisions of ISO 19650 parts 1, 2 and 3 have already started and they’ve decided to move all contents of the part 3 which is about assets in use into part 2. So, there is one standard for information management for projects and assets in use and therefore also handover. And the part 3 will become a guidance to fill in some of the things that you can’t put in a standard. So, there is a restructuring happening. But right from the earliest stage the idea that soft landings needed to be complemented with good information, because if there was no record of what the brief was or the intentions were for the building then it’s very hard to judge it at the end. And so it’s always been the aspiration that soft landings and information management would complement each other.
GEORGE I think that Ben Evans or Richard are going to cover something on the PFI front.
BEN EVANS Myself and Richard work in the PFI environment and one particular common issue that comes up time and time again is, and we talked about data silos already, but that does impact us quite significantly when we’re trying to carry out condition surveys, or commission condition surveys by third parties. The PFI environment has condition surveys like no other, it seems like they are every year on a building, and the trouble we bump into a lot is getting FM to provide the data effectively and quickly for the surveyors. It’s a problem where we have certain information needed for the survey is disconnected from another silo of information that’s needed for the survey. So, that’s kind of the big issue, that’s not just for us, it’s for other PFI contracts and MSA providers.
RICHARD BACON I've been at a few different MSA providers and it’s exactly the same issue everywhere.
BEN EVANS So, when we talk about data silos and purposes, that’s a big one for us in terms of…I’m not saying that necessarily we need the information to be linked because a lot of these PFI contracts are 15-20 years old and we don’t expect retrospectively for this information to then suddenly appear in a digitised format, that’s not going to happen. But certainly there must be some way of going forward where we can digitise a certain level of key asset information and remove some silos.
GEORGE What I would like to achieve here, on my screen at the moment your sitting next to Andrew perry who is one of my go-tos on PFI. And I’d like to be able to draw together you and Andrew and anybody else that’s on the call, either as an SPV manager like you, or as a delivery team or whatever. Because I think PFI and PBP have got specific challenges that it would be good if we could get some sort of alignment. Would that make sense, Ben?
BEN EVANS Yeah, I think whilst a building is a building, so a lot of this is relevant to PFI clearly, hospitals, schools, there are nuances within the PFI world, heavily regulated in terms of contractually. I spoke about condition surveys and there’s lifecycle replacement validation, that all needs to be underpinned by good quality data, that we haven’t got, quite often.
ANDREW PERRY Supplementing that, when you look at the sheer volume of PFI projects to be handed back in the forthcoming 18-24 months, it is rather a large lot. And when the authority receive them back, obviously they’re going to have to carry on to be maintained and operated and somebody somewhere is going to need a shed load of data.
GEORGE And one of the concerns that I’ve got, and that’s why I suggested using digital asset capture as a way of doing it. And that’s not proprietary, anybody that’s got 360 cameras, they are only about £350, that can be done in such a way that that can be used to train the next generation. Because we’re already seeing, in particular M&E, there just aren’t the number of people who can actually go into a plant room and identify in a reliable way both electrical and mechanical information. So, I think we’ve got a revolution that’s needed.
ANDREW PERRY Yeah, that’s going to be a real challenge because with the hand-back, the condition of the assets for lifecycle fund residue and balance and in terms of the contract, in terms of hand-back condition, particularly when you look at some of the BSF contracts that have got a remaining lifespan clause in them. It all hangs on the quality of the data and of course the buck stops with the person who is actually eyeballs on the ground. Yeah, happy to support where I can, George.
RICHARD BACON You picked an interesting term, Andrew, when you said shed load of data because I have been on projects in the past (not with this current provider), but where quite literally the original documentation at handover, the original O&Ms and health & safety files, a hard copy only and they are quite literally in a shed. We’ve left that shed on site because that’s where all of your O&Ms are, catch you later, guys.
ANDREW PERRY That was the nature of the beast of the day. And there are some very substantial projects coming back in the immediate future which are going to have a lot of data, it might be on a disk if you’re lucky. And somebody might have the disks, if you're very, very lucky.
GEORGE If anybody in the group has got engagement or some sort of involvement in PFI could you put your name in the chat and then ben can pick that up. And also, even if you know people that would be interested in that, or indeed my mentoring scheme. If you now someone that’s willing to be a mentor that would be great because I think that lack of experienced people coming through is a massive issue.
RICHARD If anybody has any issues or something comes up that effects their business, the way they work, or just a query, there’s 100-200 people on here every month, 200 experts. Let us know and we can put it on the agenda and you’ve got 200 people here to give you their opinion or their advice. Or conversely, maybe you know something that you’ve just discovered to share it.
GEORGE At the next one, we’re going to be looking at how O&M information and handover information can be more effectively digitised. So, we’ve got several of the big Tier 1s that are actively looking at that at the moment, so that’s coming up in October. Actually Adina’s digital record team, they’re a spinoff part of that, so if you’ve got some interest in that area of digital handover, O&Ms, health & safety files and things like that, put your name in the chat and we can involve you.
CHAT
Debbie
Does interoperability include interoperability of competence standards & frameworks and associated competency profile data?
Christopher Jenner (Unverified)11:31 am
Chris Bicknell 11:35 am
Hi Adina - happy to contribute to the Asset/ FM / Digital piece. Can offer experience from 15 years of case experience as Asset Director at AECOM and member of the BSI 15686 Lifecycle standards authoring team. Chris
Andrew Perry (External)11:36 am
In terms of "Value" - how much of a barrier is the ever present disconnect between Capital Cost Budget (CAPEX) and the Operational Maintenance Budget (REVEX) ?
Julian Buhagiar (External)11:45 am
George Stevenson do you want to mention Black Box?
Andrew Perry (External)11:47 am
Novation of OEM Warranties can be done but in most cases the client FM provider has not been appointed and the client team do not always have the foresight to do this. In addition the need to maintain the "quality of the design" is paramount if the project is to deliver the long term benefits / business outputs for the end user
Mark Keeble (External)11:49 am
Samba Papilson we are supporting Guys and St Thomas' hospital do their safety case. George Stevenson is spot on, understand the risk first by a robust risk analysis, this will then inform your safety arguments and what evidence you need to collect. Or, remediation work required. Any non-compliances will then need operational mitigations.
Brogan, Mark (BakerHicks) (Unverified)11:52 am
Andrew, completely agree. I'm often IM for a contractor and I cant get in touch with the project FM at all, let alone for early decision making, keen to discuss how we can manage this.
Harris, Joanna (External)11:53 am
The answer is Soft Landings
Chris Jeffers (External)11:53 am
About to type exactly that(!)
Paul Sheedy (External)11:56 am
The biggest issue is culture. The entire culture has to change, responsibility and an understanding of the consequences of the poor attitudes is the core issue here.
Andrew Perry (External)11:56 am
Yes Soft Landings is the process but it needs the right people at the off - in my PFI bidding days as an FM @ SPV level - the D & C contractor often questioned why I was there !
Tom Oulton (External)11:57 am
How are the Construction Industry Council contributing to the construction industry coming together? Isn't their job meant to be to break down barriers?
Dimitrios Theodorou (External)11:58 am
Hello to all , Does the FM/AM sector have a standardised taxonomy, dictionary, that is agrred upon public/ private institutions?
Phil Thompson (External)11:59 am