BIMinAM OPERATIONS WORKING GROUP MEETING 05-03-2025
GEORGE STEVENSON I had a meeting with the HSE on Monday with the people that we’ve been dealing with on the standardised health & safety file. One of the challenges that I think everybody struggles with is that all of the handover information that’s coming through is unique. So, depending on which contractor has actually done the work and which O&M complier has been commissioned to do the work you end up with a very different set of information. And the difficulty is, as any landlord how do you check to see if you’ve got all of the information that you required? And one of the biggest challenges for the FMs is that the information is typically compiled by work package, because that’s the easiest way for the construction firms to actually procure the information.
Whereas people that are actually running the buildings are typically working by system. Or they’re working by groups of assets that need to be performed in a certain way. So, one of the things that we’ve been doing for over a year now is trying to come up with a more standardised way of managing this information. You might call it a folder structure, but actually it’s more a table of contents, so that if people are collecting information in, for example, SharePoint, and then they want to transfer it into something that’s a bit more permanent, the folder structure doesn’t become the critical thing. The folder structure is perhaps how you’ve collected the information, rather than how you want to view it.
So, that’s where we’ve been doing quite a lot of work, which I can illustrate to you. Within BIM In Asset Management as well we’ve now found that several of the contractors are keen on this because they’re finding. The way they normally do it is they outsource it to a third party who spends their time phoning up supply chain members to chase them for documents. They can’t get them because it’s not always easy to get those documents, so they then report in back to somebody like Waites and Waites have either got to decide whether it’s worth pursuing the subcontractor, or not. And I think that they recognise now that it’s a lot better if they do the collection of the information and oversee it because they’ve got more authority. But, I think we’re going through an evolution there.
The other aspect is looking at things from a point of view of what’s critical because there’s an overwhelming amount of information, and it’s a matter of identifying what is likely to catch you out. And one of the shorthands that we’ve done to do that is looking at the fire safety information and in particular Regulation 38. To look at that from a point of view of what should be provided at handover and then using that as a basis to say that’s what should be maintained going forward. Certainly Bex and Dave, you’ve been on that journey with us. Bex, do you have any comment or contribution to what I’ve just said?
BEX GIBSON It’s been a bit of a journey and I’ve actually changed roles in this journey of from the client to a consultant. And I’ve been dealing with recently Reg 38 files and trying to get the information from those into a building safety case report and such like. And I think there is disparity in content, from obviously different contractors and clients. And generally though, the content is there if you look for it, but I think it would be good to have a standardised way of receiving it, jut to make that a little bit more easy and fluid going to operations as well. So, at the moment, as far as I’m aware, most people just accept a Reg 38 file and then pass it on. And people just go off and do what they want to do, it doesn’t feel like there’s a proper process in place.
GEORGE STEVENSON Dave, anything from you?
DAVE WILLIAMS Echoing what you said, basically extracting the relevant data from the documentation is the biggest manual overhead of the handover process. Because not just for Reg 38, but for virtually every component, be it kitchens, bathrooms etc., that because of the format of the information when it comes across there’s definitely a sort of manual search of documentation in order to find the relevant data and stick that into something else. In order for that to then populate whatever backend asset management system that you’ve got because, at the end of the day, that when it comes to particularly the golden thread, it is your asset management system that’s managing servicing and maintenance. And that is a crucial component of proving that you’re keeping that building safe.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, what was interesting about that, i was having a meeting last week with Chris Bicknell, he’s a real expert in strategic asset management, he used to work at AECOM. And he was telling me something that I’d not actually realised and that is one of the big challenges is that there’s a lot of things that get installed in buildings that have got warranties. But the information about what those warranties are is often not collected. And it’s also not transferred, often, from the contractor, so the warranty is generally with the organisation that bought the product, rather than the people who are actually going to run it. Which is obviously madness, that’s not what’s supposed to be done. But, you’ll find that the handover between those two things is contractually very seldom done properly.
Now, I’ve know that for a long time and it’s something that we are trying to encourage, but one of the things that I wasn’t aware of is that there’s a lot of products where the manufacturer requires a certain inspection of that product once it’s been installed, after 3 months. And if you don’t that warranty, even if it’s a 5 or 10 year warranty, is void. I don’t know how many people know that. Is that geared into whatever the handover process is? Is that built into something that should be checked? Were you aware of that?
BEX GIBSON That’s really interesting, though, as well because I’ve got a question off of the back of that. What if it was installed 3 months before handover? And that’s one of the things as well, is that even a suitable way of operating a warranty?
GEORGE STEVENSON I entirely agree and in fact actually there’s lots of examples where, for example, lighting is put in a year or 2 years before the building is finished. And it’s actually used for that period as well. So therefore, the warranty for that product, the life of that product, should start from when it starts being used. And I’ve heard the term beneficial use, so it’s at that point that things start to kick in. So, I guess what I’m saying is we can’t answer those questions, but I think they’re questions that the operations group should be able to ask. What do you think on that, Sen?
SOUMAN SEN I do see it more from an operational element and that’s a common occurrence, we have a servicing and maintenance schedule to give you an idea of a quarterly something should be maintained. We’ll raise the questions about when was it installed and if something has been installed 9 months before practical completion and handover, so there’s only 3 months left. Now there’s a question of the developer, we ask those guys and whether you extend the warranty, their usual comeback is this is not in the EIRs, it wasn’t a requirement off of the bat so we’re not going to do it. But then there’s an element of when we’re handing over to our repairs contractors.
I work for a local authority, they’re very reactionary to issues, so when they’re taking on newer stock, honestly they’re not geared towards thinking like that. They don’t think about maintaining the asset from an earlier stage, bringing onboard guarantees, working with external partners, they work with their internal contractors. And I’ve seen, unfortunately, within a year, within the defects period if something hasn’t been maintained the developer will say that it’s not been serviced, so we’re not going to touch it. Elements have been ripped out and replaced, and it’s just poor management, poor management. And it’s not a one off, I’ve seen that often.
DAVE WILLIAMS I don’t know whether it’s worth me sharing this, just to give you an idea of some of the stuff that we have to go through. (shares screen). This is one of our recent developments and obviously we mention around Regulation 38. But you can see that we list the manufacturer, the warranty details if there are any, any information about servicing packages, whether we’ve got the certificates, the service contracts expiry dates etc. And this is just one of the spreadsheets that we have to complete, just on any of the components. And there is yet another spreadsheet which covers off things like the actual make and model of any installed equipment. So, you can see we’ve got quite a lot of information on this particular sheet, but once again, this is only part of the information that we actually have.
GEORGE STEVENSON Could you go to the top of that…that’s obviously quite similar to the work that we’ve been doing on Medeas House, so that’s good. If we just look here at the different asset types, from what I’m seeing there a lot of that information could be delivered as part of the COBie.
DAVE WILLIAMS Yeah, the difficulty we found is trying to get any of the principal contractors and designers to provide us with a fully loaded COBie spreadsheet. But I thought I’d share that, just to show you one example of one of the many files that we deal with when it comes to a new development coming across.
GEORGE STEVENSON Is that part of what you’ re doing, Bex, within RLB? Auditing handover information?
BEX GIBSON No, I’m more post-occupancy, the building safety case reporting, that side of things.
GEORGE STEVENSON And does anybody do that within RWBD now?
BEX GIBSON We do loads of multidisciplinary things, I’m sure that there are departments.
GEORGE STEVENSON What do you do, Connor?
CONNOR STEVENSON I’m currently a building surveyor or stock condition surveyor with Wheatley? Homes in Scotland. Previously, and hopefully in the future, I was a BIM manager for a part of the Sure Serve Group, but that got shut down and when I moved to Wheatley they said they wanted to adopt BIM stuff and it’s 7 months down the line and I’m still waiting. I don’t know if I’m in the right meeting.
GEORGE STEVENSON We have a number of different working groups and we can certainly point you at the right ones for what you’re doing. This actually is the operations group, so the principle of this group is to look at receiving BIM information and doing something with it.
CONNOR STEVENSON I was out surveying or doing what they call an SBA, so I was out surveying properties, blocks of flats today to see what level, if any, of the DWS forms would be required. And what we might need to do in terms of getting information and nobody on the site even know what BIM was. I was listening to someone talk about information, does anybody adopt digital twin? Because Autodesk have a good platform called Tandem. And instead of going through a SharePoint, which is the bane of any site-based professional, because it’s a nightmare to work on tablet and mobile. Is having someday one of the task teams that access the data or information media.
And they get a login for Autodesk’s Tandem platform and then they can just put it straight on to the object, if they have any information in any format. Whether it be a PDF, a JPEG, a link that I scan. And then instead of having a folder format you have this 3D model digital twin being built at the same time. So, that’s just something I thought I’d put out there as an alternative. It’s quite good as well because if you’ve got the warranties and stuff coming in and the warranties are actually attached to the object. And everybody knows what a house looks like, or a block of flats or any kind of building, so they can navigate through the model and you can filter down to that and it pops up before your warranties and stuff.
If you don’t start your warranty within 3 months of it being installed, I’m not sure how the manufacturer of the product is going to know when they’re installed. Because I’ve got a shower that was actually installed last year and I phoned up last week to start the warranty. I thought you’re talking about handover of information, the digital twins, particularly that platform, made it really easy for us in my last role…we were using it, it was me building the models and indicating the data and we had one of the clients who was actually Wheatley, who I’m working for at the moment. One of their team, we gave them a login, so they were adding in data and I was adding in data. And there are now bits you can do, you can send everybody’s favourite email updates using the platform.
So if somebody went right, there’s your warranty information, you can set it up to send a notification to whoever it is that’s dealing with it. Other than that, you’ve just got to have that one, I like to call it the clerk of BIM, a digital clerk of works, if you like. A person that goes around saying you said you’d have this information by this point…most of the time, I’m sure the contractors will just go at handover at least point you in the right direction so you can go and get it.
GEORGE STEVENSON That’s a really good contribution. I wear two hats, I’m BIM3Housing which is my voluntary stuff and my company Active Plan. We’re a Revit developer, so we’re an Autodesk developer, so I was involved with the Tandem development back about 3 years ago when it was just coming through. But I’m encouraged to hear that somebody has actually got it working, I’ve not heard of anybody that has, to be honest. I don’t mean that in a disparaging way because obviously it’s in our interests to see it working well.
CONNOR STEVENSON There’s a lot I would change, but it was…it’s quite a simple tool that makes it really easy for some of the people that you deal with. At least the people that I’ve met in housing associations who would look at the models, it’s easy for them to understand how to use it. it did exactly what you needed it to do. We were developing something in the background that we can bring a few things using Unreal Engine, but when I was speaking to the people at Autodesk they said that that’s the kind of level that they were aspiring to get to and it was growing. The stuff that you can do in Unreal Engine is, I mean you need to have computer geniuses in order to work out how to link things together in Unreal Engine, it’s quite a tricky programme to learn how to use. And you can link Revit models to Unreal Engine and you get this ultra-realism.
And you can build Grand Theft Auto apps of real places which made it quite good. The Tandem stuff, I think it’s a really good programme for housing associations. It’s quite basic in what it can do, but it’s easy enough if you’ve got the right people who can show us how to work it (I’m in a housing association now). It’s because I’ve been using Autodesk since I was at Uni, it’s quite easy to understand. Everybody knows what a PDF is and if you right click this, and then go to this bit you just need to press this button and then frag and drop, and they go oh, that’s great. How do I set up an email notification? Oh, don’t worry about that, we’ll set that up for you. It’s just 8having that clerk of BIM type person to do it.
GEORGE STEVENSON That’s very helpful, it would be really interesting to talk to people who are actually now continuing to use it. Are you one of those people that continue to use it?
CONNOR STEVENSON Well, as I say, that part of the Sure Serve Group got shut down, so they took us on with the idea that we would end up doing what we were doing before. But being a housing association we needed get us in some capacity, so we’re doing surveying at the moment. We’re 7 months in and, apart from these meetings, haven’t touched a BIM thing. So, not at the moment, but if they said tomorrow right, we want you to start, then I’d go back to Autodesk without using the Tandem stuff.
RICHARD WHITTAKER Where I used to work, they had a digital twin and it cost them millions. And they couldn’t keep up with the skill set required to actually operate the digital twin within the organisation because they’d got other priorities like 5,000 live orders to get through and black mould and all of that sort of thing. So, they were forever getting competing priorities and people moving round. And quite often in lots of places, asset is a high turnover environment, so you have to have this constant training thing. The solution for me is data containers that you can just search because people know how to search a computer, it’s a very simple thing to do. So, if you’ve got something that you can just log onto and search it’s going to he helpful.
And the thing that’s going to drive it forward in terms of use, there’s a couple of things. One, contract clauses in terms of putting in digital information as part of the contract. And the other one is such as HSE, who could very easily insist that a health & safety file is built in the same way as a CDM file, so that it’s audited on a pretty regular basis. And without that, attracting people into it is going to be difficult because of damp and mould, because of all sorts of different reasons within construction. It sounds a bit negative, but I think it’s pretty realistic.
CONNOR STEVENSON Yeah, the time that I was working on it, the digital twins that we were building in the background using Unreal Engine, we’d always link to your internal database. So, if somebody wanted to search a computer then it would be searched, if somebody wanted to walk through the building virtually then they could also do that. So, you did have the two options. We found, it was maybe because we were excited about using this new, shiny digital technology, we went oh, why don’t we try it this way and just update it. Because if you look at a building and you know what it is that you’re looking for visually, it feels either like OK, where’s the cooker? the cooker is in the kitchen. Oh, alright, just got to the kitchen, the search that works as well.
What we found was when you get to 5,000 properties and having a folder structure that good, if you type in warranty or you type in echo fire smoke alarm, then you get 5,000 smoke alarms come up. So, your folder structure needs to be pretty spot on. As I’m saying that I’m thinking in my head well, it doesn’t really matter which way you go, you start to search for something…
RICHARD WHITTAKER It’s the easy search that’s essential and your UPRN, which every housing association has, is something that fixes the 5,000 returns from a search.
CONNOR STEVENSON You need to know the URRN though, I’m assuming that other housing associations have better UPRN numbers than what we’ve got.
RICHARD WHITTAKER I’ve never met one that hasn’t, yet.
CONNOR STEVENSON It really does have UPRNs, but they make absolutely no sense.
RICHARD WHITTAKER Well, that’s a separate conversation than what it is, because it could be an address with a postcode or whatever. But the other thing where I worked previously was they wanted it to feed into their existing asset management database, rather than being multiple standalone systems. And that raised some concerns around risk, integrity of the information and all of that side of it. Dynamic linking is easy, getting the right information through the dynamic link is a different question altogether.
GEORGE STEVENSON One of the biggest challenges is how do you collect the information in a form that can then be easily checked and audited. I’ll just give you an example of how we’ve been doing it. We’ve been doing this now for several years, I can also show you how we fit this into the work that we’re doing with the HSE. Which actually, that might be of interest to Bex and Dave, and Sen has not seen it. (shares screen). Just looking at the digital twin bit, this is an integration of various different applications. We’ve got the Autodesk construction cloud there. If, for example, we’re looking for a fire damper, what we’ve got here is the fire damper modelled, but actually we’ve got the database or the data behind it, is in Sequel so it’s easy to find.
So, if you’re looking for a fire damper, you can see all of the different types of fire dampers because we’ve got it tied back to manufacturer’s product data as well. Not in the model, that’s important, it’s connected to the model via APIs. And then all of the information, we can then see where that is, you can have a very simple view of it. So, you can look at it in 3D, but a lot of FMs prefer it in 2D, and you can also have it connected to a 360 photo. So, here we’ve got a schedule of the fire dampers and then it takes you to that individual as-built fire damper, actually in the building. That means that you’re not then reliant on every single element to be modelled because, quite frankly, a lot of M&E elements aren’t modelled in any detail because nobody is paying for that.
And this is now connecting it back to all of the documentation. So, it’s a combination of various different things, that’s the approach that we’re taking on quite a few projects at the moment. The important thing is that people need to be able to create the information in a standardised, structured way. The other aspect of this is being able to collect what actually gets installed. So the handover information, for example, needs to start much earlier in the process where the operations team become part of the validation process at earlier stages. So here, for example, there is no reason why the FM team shouldn’t be involved when products are actually being considered.
BEX GIBSON And that goes hand in hand with soft landings. In reality, we were discussing this last time, everyone loves soft landing and we’d love to do that, but in our busy, hectic organisations you’ve got your development team and then you’ve got the operations team. And then I guess that’s why we’re here, is to work out that sweet spot of coordination, but in reality it’s quite tricky one to get right.
GEORGE STEVENSON The principle here, Connor, is that the actual product that’s being installed can be tested against the information requirements. And then the product that probably actually gets installed, which often gets changed, that gets picked up so that it can then be compared. So, this is a technical submittal process, which I[‘m sure you’re familiar with. And in this case, we’ve got people like Bouygues and Waites that are involved in this, so the technical submittal tells you what the product is that should be installed and then also what product is actually going to be used.
And that gets put into a product library which can then be used to record what was (this is a standardised technical submittal), so that you can then say what product is being proposed, so that it can then pick up when something gets changed. And that then gets signed off. But you can also do comparisons, so as part of that sign-off process you can compare products. So, in this case, comparing a number of boilers, or comparing doors against a specification. So, you’ve then got a track record of what was being proposed and what’s actually being delivered. And then that then, you’ve got a golden thread link through to what gets procured and installed. So, that’s broadly part of what we’re doing.
And this is going through the exercise of auditing, this is one of Origin’s projects where 4 big blocks, we identified some of the key information. Like here, for example, this is fire stopping, and you can see that that fire stopping drawing isn’t really fit for purpose because all of the lozenges are overlapping each other. So, that’s something that should have been checked by the employer’s agent, should have been checked by the construction company because that actually is useless. And then the methodology, this is an earlier version of the one that Dave was showing earlier. So, the principle here is that you can then set out what information is required, and where it’s green it means that it’s provided. But then when it’s red, it’s missing.
And you can then use that to audit the information so that we can actually identify were data sheets supposed to have been provided, was there a certificate of conformance, so that can then be tied back to the AIR. And then this is the work that we’ve been doing with the HSE to be able to take information that may be in folders in SharePoint, bring them to a database, but the database is standardised. So let me just skip off to that. This is a standardised folder structure of looking at what’s in a health & safety file. Because health & safety files tend to be fairly standardised, not so much the O&Ms. And what we’re doing here with this group, we’ve got a group of people within BIM In Asset Management that are working on this to actually say what should be in a document, what should be data, how should it be classified, how should to be searched for?
And then we can then go through, we’ve got essentially a check list for the various different, for constructional consultants there’s some key documents there. For mechanical services consultants, some key documents and then we’ve got the various different work packages. But what we’re doing here, we’re trying to encourage people to think about systems rather than just its mechanical services or electrical services. To try and get people to think about these from a point of view of networks and circuits and things like that. So, the principle of capturing the information is then standardised…so what you’re then able to do is to look at things from a database perspective where you can add metadata to items. So you can pull out, for example as Bex was saying earlier, all of the information that needs to go into a fire and emergency file. Now, that can come from lots of different folders.
To try and put them into folders, using folders as a way that you would use information is not sensible because you’re never going to get enough folders for all of the different ways that people want to look at information. And also, once they’re in a database you can then connect them, So, you can connect, for example, data in a door schedule with the spaces that those doors relate to. And then you can then present those in a simple way because in many cases you want a simple graphic that shows that that particular door is protecting that stairwell. And then connecting the documents into the model so that you can then say those documents relate to these systems. So, then something from a commissioning folder then gets referenced back to the particular element.
Because really you don’t want to go from maybe you’re looking at something, a particular system, you don’t want to have to go off to a folder that says commissioning and then look through 200 commissioning certificates, it wants to be glued together. So, that’s the sort of methodology and by following that sort of method we’ve then got a way of then connecting everything up. That’s one solution to it, I guess the question that we need to ask is what’s actually needed from an operations point of view? And, to an extent, let’s try and create the information requirements at the outset so that is easy to collect, that’s what we want to try and get to. Sen, was that helpful?
SOUMAN SEN Very much so, I think your final point about having some sort of uniformity on how the information comes over. I think that’s the key issue I have and the information I share with other colleagues, you’re working with different developers, different sizes. We’ve worked with Bouygues, I won’t say they understand it, they maybe have some more interest in the wider business area. Smaller developers, struggling to just get the work, happy to have the council as a client. They’re just kind of grabbing anything and everything and giving it to you. Maybe trying to be helpful, but giving you just random things that are not helpful at all. So, some uniformity - that would be key really.
And you guys have spoken about SharePoint and probably had some negative thoughts on it, I thought it was quite good, actually, but probably not for exactly what we’re doing here. But everything has its pros and cons and it’s a system the council use across all of our services and I found it quite useful.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, certainly we use SharePoint as well, I think most people do, it’s a critical part of anybody’s IT infrastructure. It’s just if, for example, you’re using it to hold health & safety files and O&M information, one of the big challenges is permissions. Because you might put something in thinking that other people can see it, but you can’t because of all of the restrictions that are quite correctly there for that particular purpose.
DAVE WILLIAMS One of the other downsides of SharePoint is the file path character limit which everyone has, no doubt, come across. Because if you have a folder structure and then a subfolder structure underneath that and then a subfolder structure underneath that. And then you’ve got a document which is…and this happens particularly with things like plans where they have a specific format for the file naming of a plan which is already 20 characters long. And by the time you’ve stuck that plan in the subfolder of a subfolder of a subfolder of a folder, you’ve breached the 256 character limit. And then you can’t access it and you can’t even often store document in SharePoint if it’s going to breach that limit. So, it’s a major shortcoming of using SharePoint.
GEORGE STEVENSON And you don’t know that it’s happened. So, you can import things in and not actually realise that it’s happened. Sen, I don’t think anybody is denigrating SharePoint, it’s just what it’s designed to do, as it were.
SOUMAN SEN Yeah, that’s a good point actually, I’ve seen that as well. Folders within folders and suddenly realising, what’s happened here.
GEROGE STEVENSON One of the interesting things, like all big organisations, Tower Hamlets have got, we’re implementing Active Plan across the board across all of the properties. So therefore you’ve got some of the technology that I’ve just been showing you there, available to use. But everybody has been concentrating at the moment on getting all of the floor plans done and 360 photos. Do you know Margina?
SOUMAN SEN Yes, I do, I’ve just recently moved over to the same kind of directorate as Margina, and I’ve heard of Active Plan from her in the last couple of weeks.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, it would be interesting to see what your needs are to see how that fits in, but I don’t want to hijack this for that purpose. Bex, Dave, what do you think? Do you think we’ve reached the limit of what we can do today?
DAVE WILLIAMS I would have thought so. One of the things that we were looking to do in this meeting, with a wider audience, was what Sen was saying, is just share experiences of development handover with a view that some people might be doing something smarter than other people that other people hadn’t thought of. And we’ve sort of done that within our limited group of people, in our limited experience. If there had of been a wider audience I think we probably would have got some different viewpoints. I think probably the same old pain points, right across the board. I don’t think that anyone has come up with the magic bullet for this yet, but it would be interesting to see what other people have done that perhaps you think oh, actually, that’s an idea.
GEORGE STEVENSON Sen, have you got any standard methods or templates or anything like that that you’re using?
SOUMAN SEN No, we don’t, we have ERs and we set out something, but the principal contractors don’t usually stick to that. We’ve been fortunate that we’ve worked with some of the bigger ones like Bouygues, so the information does come over in a decent format that we’re comfortable with. But we’ve not been able to get them to work to one way of doing things.