BUSINESS CASE WORKSTREAM MEETING 20-06-2024
RICHARD FREER This is the business case workstream, it’s going to be led by Marc Bradfield and Richard Whittaker. Normally for a workstream we would meet once a month, although it’s been known for it to be fortnightly, or 2-monthly. That’s going to be something that you need to decide for yourselves. It might be a good idea, Marc, for you and Richard to give a quick run over on yourself.
MARC BRADFIELD I am Director of Assurance Services with Bureau Veritas. I won’t go into all of the detail of what that means, but it revolves very much around the Building Safety Act. But obviously there is a lot of information involved in that and our interest in the golden thread etc, but this is a much wider discussion which is why I don’t want to go into the detail. A tiny bit of background, I’ve got 25 years experience in main contracting, so only recently taken a step into the world of consultancy.
RICHARD WHITTAKER I’ve been around construction 40-odd years, that’s why I look so cynical, bitter and twisted. Client and contractor experience, been involved in digitisation for well over a decade, 15 years, trying to get that working. Had some success recently. I’m a member of Construction Excellence and I recently received a lifetime award for contributing to trying to improve the industry. Because the real driver, and I suspect this is for all of us, is we know the industry is broken, but it’s a big complex thing and it’s hard to fix and it’s people like the people in this group who chip away at (and a small window lets in a lot of light). So, we do make a difference for the better.
MARC BRADFIELD I think you’ve all hopefully selected and elected to join this working group. I think it’s important to mention that obviously we are looking at the business case and why do we need better information, whether that be from a statutory, an operational, people, competence, knowledge, whatever that may be. But we need to remember that we’re operating at that higher level, very much the why. I think it was on Monday from the session we had, you’ll have seen that the other two working groups, workstreams, in terms of digital records, how do we create and audit etc. and the interoperability workstreams tome are very much about the how.
And there’s going to be a little bit of a difficult job to make sure that each of those workstreams don’t stray into each other's world. But we can’t prevent that, but just try and remember at all times that we’re very much dealing with the why at the highest level.
RICHARD FREER On that point, Adina Poncis is one of the heads of digital records and she’s on the call for that precise purpose that you just mentioned. Also, Cliff Kneale who is one of the leads in the fire critical asset group.
MARC BRADFIELD Perfect. As I say, there will be crossover, but we might need to just pull ourselves back from that. And I’m sure, Richard, if people get to a certain point and feel that actually their focus maybe is better in the detail and the why then there might be a little bit of a shifting around in terms of the groups. I haven’t led one of these before, but I appreciate that anything like this, we’ve got 14 people on the call, I do think it’s very important that everybody that’s part of this group has an opportunity to have a say. I do know that certainly for this first session and probably the second session we’ve going to be in a little bit of a storming phase as such, as we find our feet.
Myself and Richard tried to short-circuit that slightly by providing the document to have a read through before today. It was basically just to get a load of thoughts down which you guys can agree or disagree with. In hindsight, I appreciate it probably does start to delve a little bit into the how, to an extent, and that’s why we’ve got to unpick this. Notwithstanding what you said, Richard, earlier, I do think we probably have time for everybody to have a little bit of a say, providing they don’t take offence if I say we need to move on. It would be really good from my point of view for everybody to very briefly say their name, what their role is, the sectors that they focus on. And just to give us a little bit of an insight into what you believe the benefits are of having this information.
ALAN OLIVER I think it’s so important because the Building Safety Act is a complete game changer. All of sudden people have got to be ensuring that people working in their buildings are competent at what they do. And there’s so many incompetent people out there. For example, I delivered a CPD presentation at the NAHFO conference in Newcastle two weeks ago and I pointed out to them a load of defects on fire doors that have been installed in NHS buildings over the last 2-3 years (in other words, post-Grenfell). And the fact that all of the defects shown n the images were delivered by people who had installed them on the third-party certification schemes for the installation of fire doors. And people are horrified at that. People don’t get, they don’t realise that just because you’re in a third-party certification scheme that does not in itself mean compliance.
As you said, the whole industry is broken. The ASFP is looking to raise the bar because some of these third-party certification schemes aren’t fir for purpose. And it’s almost where do you start, but there is a massive need for education and training out there and if we’re not going to try and help deliver that, who can.
MARC BRADFIELD I think it’s an interesting point and possibly some of the people’s mindsets have started from the consideration from the Building Safety Act point of view, but we also need to consider how we widen this out and demonstrate the greater value.
ANTHONY HARTE I am a specialist BIM consultant and have been for many years and i work across a wide range of different clients. Some clients have absolutely no idea about BIM, they don’t necessarily manage their own estate, they pay a management company etc. And my task really is to set the standards for those companies and set the exchange information requirements and all of that sort of stuff. And over the last 12 months starting to bring the building safety aspect of that into it and I think there is a real need for business case because clients don’t see that benefit at all and they’re not connecting the dots.
They’re not educated enough, and it comes back to that education that we’ve mentioned before. So, I’m trying to align fitting in this business case workstream with some of the clients that I have on the books at the moment that are asking for an overall strategy about how they can bring it all together and I think it will be really useful to get real world feedback from my clients and fit it into this business case and vice versa. Clients are mostly high-rise residential in London and also some commercial, so mainly I’m looking at the residential sector at the moment.
MARC BRADFIELD It’s interesting and I try to say this without being controversial, but in my previous life I interacted an awful lot with our BIM team. And I was always very interested in how we kind of translate the world of BIM which sometimes can descend into lots of acronyms etc into something where clients can really understand the value. So, I think that’s probably something to think about in how we present this business case when we get to that point.
JAMIE HALL I’m a ??? 11mins 15secs officer at a housing association. You were talking about educating and the more I attend BIM meetings the more I find that there’s more stuff that I don’t know. We’re a small housing association, we tend to find there’s a lot of gaps around knowledge and information. So the more we can bring in the better for us as well.
MARC BRADFIELD Perfect, again maybe highlights that how do we translate all of the complex acronyms and everything that we’re using to actually demonstrating value to those that need this information.
JOE STOTT I’m from AHR architects, we’re architects and building surveyors. I’m the practice BIM manager, an architect by training, I’ve come to the dark side and now I’m the practice BIM manager. I feel like a bit of an outlier in this work group, but I’m interested in it because we’ve been delivering project requirements in terms of asset information and BIM for a good number of years now. And it’s a huge amount of effort for the industry and I always think there’s a disconnect between what we’re actually being asked to produce and we’re jumping through a lot of hops and a lot of energy in doing it and I have a suspicion that it’s never being used at the other side. And BIM, to me, was always about efficiency, so I always question why are we doing this if it’s not actually being used?
So, I’m quite interested in developing the use case and bridging the gap between the construction team and the asset and the operation and then closing that loop again as well. Because I’m also interested in how do we decommission, that’s probably a bit more advanced and in the future. So, for me, it’s about filling in the gaps in my knowledge and being able to understand and talk to clients in a way that is not technical. As a BIM manager I go in and I talk parameters and COBie and it’s of no interest, what’s really of interest is this business case.
MARC BRADFIELD For me again from past life, I’m certainly far from the expert as I think that many of you here are, but when you talk about COBie I have certainly seen examples where tens if not hundreds of thousands of pieces of COBie data are required from a contractual point of view. But we know, and people have nearly killed themselves in trying to get the processes in place to gather that, and yet we also know that probably a tiny percentage of that was being used or going to be used. Again, it’s how do we translate that into value, not just being a bolt-on contractual requirement to tick a box, but nobody really knows why or what they were asking for.
PAUL SHEEDY I’m the CEO of unifi.id, we are a specialist in occupancy technologies, so we build a lot of our own technologies to know exactly who is on each floor of the high-rise buildings. We don’t really work on residential, it’s more commercial. And we use that data really at the point of an emergency to know the numbers of people on each floor, even the age groups. i work on the 39th floor of this building here and there’s only been one evacuation, just after 9/11, so it does make me laugh how we seem to hide from the truth. We use that occupancy technology and through AI predictive analysis of what’s going to happen the next day.
So, we take into consideration tube strikes, train strikes, weather conditions, day of the week, midterm breaks, bank holidays. We can predict exactly the occupancy and what we call the plateau effect of each floor of a building in advance. Then we feed that into a BIM system to know how late you put the air conditioning on, how low we turn the fans, how early we turn it off. And then smart lighting, so, when the last person leaves a floor, the lights go off straight away. When the security guard arrives at 2 or 4 o’clock in the morning, so be on for another half an hour, we know the security guard has left that floor, we override the lighting system.
The key thing for us is in real time as the evacuation happens we detect each and every one of those individuals in the high-rise building, right through the stairways and right out of that building. And through AI, the fire brigade on the way to the building will know the height, number of floors, number or stairways available, the number of people, age groups etc. How long the building will take to evacuate in real time and they can see it there like an x-ray looking at a building. I can assure you, I was here 4 months ago, had a power cut, all of the fire evacuation signs were broken, all of the fire doors were locked. Not impressed.
MARC BRADFIELD Interesting, and I guess in terms of leveraging what you’re describing there then it’s really important in terms of that information being available to move on to that. So, you’re almost looking at it from the next point on, what you can do once you’ve collected that information and the power of that. And something else that you just reminded me that I should have said, Richard Freer has told me off for this. It’s possibly easy for some of us to focus on residential, but part of the business case that we’re looking at here is to look at it again at that high level and very globally, to take a step up and look at it across building types and sectors. So, that’s an important point to remember.
PAUL SHEEDY The key thing that we’re trying to do is to get the insurance sector to lower premiums. So, if you’ve got a smart building with all the data, and one where you’ve got nothing, then you should be paying a lot less. And to build the ? 17mins 40secs model up so actually it sort of motivates the dumb building to become a smart building because it’s financially better off in doing it. As well as we did a bilateral with a company in Singapore, we have all the sensors on every bit of fire equipment in the building so it’s monitored 24 hours a day. If it breaks, we tell the building manager and the insurance company at the same time.
MARC BRADFIELD That’s an important part of this is thinking about how this data with information will be used going forward.
WILLIAM BORTHEN I’m an asset manager by trade, I work for a company called Asseticom who are essentially a technology company. We work with asset data companies and compile their asset data. Through my whole career I’ve worked in the operational phase managing portfolios of buildings across large public sector estates and private sector. I suppose I’m interested in the conversation from an asset managers point of view and how can we help asset managers realise the value from BIM, which a couple of people have said already.
An asset manager has got certain things they’re responsible for and roles that they have to perform and if BIM can support them to do that more efficiently or effectively in a better way then that’s what I want to try and pull out of this conversation. In a way that uses plain language, rather than the kind of BIM speak. I work now with a lot of asset managers across different organisations and I see a real lack of maturity and understanding about BIM. Everyone knows about BIM as a thing, they know it exists, but they don’t understand how to exploit it or specify it or use it or how it can support them to do their job. So, that’s what I’m interested in.
MARC BRADFIELD Do you ever have a frustration, as an asset manager persuading the people that hold the purse strings that allow you to do what you do, as such, in terms of them understanding the value of taking things to the next level, if that question makes sense.
WILLIAM BORTHEN Yeah, it does, totally. And I think that you can’t express the value, it’s difficult to provide anyone with a tangible business case, which is why I’m interested in this workstream, for BIM. There is a government mandate to implement BIM, but that’s quite open to interpretation, so it’s only for central government departments and there is no specification around what extent BIM should be implemented to. Is it just on new construction of new buildings? Or is it on projects? And if it’s just on projects, what scale is it? Is it the replacement of a pump in a boiler room as a reactive replacement? Or is it as a full boiler house renewal? And that kind of lack of clarity and lack of a tangible business case means that it’s really difficult to convince people to invest.
And a lot of the time it’s not necessarily the investment in technology, it’s the investment in people as well and investment in existing members of the team to upskill them to be able to understand BIM. I think someone earlier said that people just specify a kind of standard, just ask for everything, we’ll have every bit of data that you’ve got. And then the construction team go and spend ages, and probably lots of money, compiling all of that data which then never really gets used because the person specifying it didn’t really know what they were talking about.
CLIFF KNEALE I’m an information management consultant and I started about 40 years ago using computers to draw buildings and then went on to start working in 3D. And then BIM came along, and I often found myself as the CAD manager or the BIM manager and happening always to sell this inside businesses that I was working at. So, in a way I found that the best way to sell it was to have a business case for it because in order to implement something this big, like something as large as the Building Safety Act requires, it’s going to affect the whole company. So, you need to budget, and it needs a workstream and everybody needs to work as a team to actually get it done. I agree with not using acronyms wherever we can. I used to call BIM the thing, I used to call COBie the thing inside the thing, which made people laugh a bit.
So, I think we need to look at it as a transformation, which is a huge change. And if it’s looked upon as a transformation and a business case to support that transformation, then it’s more likely to get traction within the company. And presumably we’re aiming this business case at social housing companies. I’m not really sure, I think we need to agree who the business case is for.
MARC BRADFIELD I think you make a good point because, as I said earlier, the kind of initial brief is to try and take this to such a high level that we’re dealing across different clients and different sectors. It’s really for us as a group to agree whether that is the right direction, or not. But certainly, it feels right to keep it high level, certainly in the first instance. Maybe we can open that up for discussion in a minute. Adina, I think it would be good for you just to bring in from the point of view of the other workstream if there is maybe anything you want to share.
ADINA PONCIS Yeah, we haven’t started yet, but it’s equally important that we talked a lot about the fire safety and the building safety regulations but think we didn’t really touch at all on the climate emergencies. I think a big portion of our industry is working on decarbonisation, so obviously you would require good quality data to analyse your building performance. As someone was saying earlier, it’s important for you to know how many people you are, how utilised is your building? How can you switch off the lights when they’re not in use? So while I think we’re working on talking about what we want to achieve, it’s quite important to take this aspect into account.
And I think that at the end of the day is safer and smarter assets. This is how I’m seeing it because there’s a lot of talks and there’s a lot of other groups that talk about the client emergencies and they’re all interlinked. So, what we’re trying to achieve is a flow of information that serves both purposes. We achieve safe buildings, but also smart buildings who are performing well to achieve the net zero.
ANTHONY HARTE I think that’s a good strapline: safer, smarter, greener. I think we should use that as part of the business case and what we’re aiming to achieve.
MARC BRADFIELD It’s interesting because…if you thought of it in the context of the Building Safety Act, it’s almost a compliance or a statutory requirement and in a way that’s the easy win, this is a statutory requirement. But you’re right, it’s also demonstrating when you start talking in terms of topics of carbon, sustainability, whatever it might be,, actually developing the business case to look at the value that you can unlock. You can choose not to do this, but actually if you do, here is the value that you unlock. I think with everybody’s busy and complex lives, sometimes it’s just easy to take the low hanging fruit. So, I’ll tick all of my statutory boxes, I won’t worry about the other stuff. And our business case needs to drive that a little bit further and try and show that value, as such.
Having heard from everybody, is there anybody that would like to kick off and direct the conversation? Because we’ve ultimately got to get a point of having a plan for something that is an actual output, a deliverable as such. Richard, you’re ready to go and as co-leader you should have a good say.
RICHARD WHITTAKER A question, really, what will open the door? As simple as that. There are so many parts to this machine and so many parts to the benefits that we can achieve. What will open the door? I have a view on that which will not surprise some people. Really, for organisations, what is important to them and what sits underneath it? And the things that are important are operational risk, they are also what are the operational benefits, there’s also reputation and the other one for me is about compliance. So that means as a business we’re covering the money, the reputation, the efficiency and, as leaders of those businesses, we’re not going to jail because of the compliance.
That's a very short description but underneath that is the actual vehicle that makes it work and this is an enabling thing that we’re doing. And underneath that is asset management and repairs and occupation of a building. Whether that’s a hospital, a prison, a retail park or housing: those things apply to all of them. So, you get like a structure then underneath and the things we’ve been talking about the provision of information, about the climate, about carbon, all sit within one of those categories. Or perhaps, additional categories if you guys believe this.
ANTHONY HARTE I think it’s also great to be seen as market leaders as well, so following all of that up in terms of the safety and making sure that you are covering your own backside. I think it’s always good to be seen as market leading and that, as part of the business case, to know that you’re doing something that’s extraordinary, will always be something that can grab those people that are spending the money to do this.
RICHARD FREER When we did the pre-meeting we thought it might be a good idea to identify the top 3 risks and the top 3 benefits as a start point. What you were saying earlier that it needs to be high level because it’s got to go cross-sector, as you said then that would be kind of a first phase. But that would help identify what further phases need to be, it could be that it gets split down into sectors. But until you’ve done the initial piece of work, you can’t really determine that.
MARC BRADFIELD OK, we’ll come back then to the benefits and the risks.
PAUL SHEEDY For me, I’m from AI and I started my first Ai company in 2003. But coming into the sector, I see a sector that doesn’t know if it actually wants to change because I think all of the answers are actually here already, it just needs banging heads together. And getting back to Richard’s question, it’s all about the return on investment, if we can go and start pushing the technology into the buildings. And actually, we all have a need to work together, so I’m a specialist in one thing, other specialists with other ideas, but if we start amalgamating our technologies together and working on the same sheet, the solutions are here already.
And we just need transparency and actually I want transparency back to the tenants as well as the owners, as well as the insurance companies. We’ve got to have transparency and then, you know what? Nothing can stop us. But we need to actually get off of our backsides and do it. All I see is procrastination, not only in this sector, but all of the sectors that I work in. Get off of our backsides and knock heads together and build something new and fresh. And don’t just carry on what’s there historically already, but actually look at a brand-new fresh sheet and go forward.
MARC BRADFIELD I totally agree with that, Paul. In my time in the industry I feel that in a lot of cases nothing has really changed for many, many years. But then for various reasons for the last few years I’ve felt that there’s a momentum that can be picked up on in terms of going back, almost a blank sheet of paper, and starting again and rethinking these things. But the biggest question is, in terms of our business case, how do you pitch that to the right people? Ultimately, you’ve got to unlock right from the top of the chain and get their interest. I think we as a group can agree what we know should be important to those people, but how we persuade those that hold the purse strings that actually it should be important to you because of the value that can be generated.
CLIFF KNEALE I found that what has worked for me, when I worked at Autodesk we were selling millions of dollars' worth of software into big blue-chip companies. And we would ask them what their values were, what their mission statement was and what their principles were. And then we sort of aligned the software to those and wouldn’t really talk about the software too much, but we’d talk about how technology can help to support the design process, rather than using the word BIM or asset information model, or system management or safety case reports. Talk a bit more of a higher, higher level conversation just to get the ball rolling initially, that’s important. As the in, as Richard was saying, how do you get your foot in the door, I think initially you need to understand the company, what are their wants and needs, what they’re trying to do and how we can support it.
MARC BRADFIELD As Richard rightly said, one of the things that we’d set up at the pre-meeting was what do you believe are the benefits of having this information, or the risks of not having it. Does anybody want to take a punt at the highest level, almost in one word, the risks of not having this information. How would we be presenting that in the business case?
JAMIE HALL At least in social housing recently a lot of it has been due to tenant safety and health. I don’t know if it’s the sector as a whole, but as I speak to other organisations we do a lot more work on our assets and getting the information needed around damp and mould.
MARC BRADFIELD So, in a way in my term that it’s driven by almost a legal, statutory compliance point of view, but is there ever a feeling from your point of view that you’re gathering information or data, but actually if you just push it a little bit harder there’s other value that can be unlocked. And how important would you feel that is to you? Whether we start talking about things like carbon, sustainability or other aspects.
JAMIE HALL One thing we have found when we’re looking at it is we have got quite a few old properties that are very energy inefficient. So how can we use that data to improve the energy efficiency of the property. Aside from the health of the tenants, it’s also reducing utility bills.
CLIFF KNEALE I’d say that having the right information you can make informed decisions and you can also save money, it’s more efficient. So, when you’re trying to write the safety case report you’ve got all of the information that you need, so it’s easier to share. From my experience so far it takes literally months to get information to try and develop the golden thread. It’s often on different domains and different and different offices and sometimes C drives, so it’s very difficult. So, if all of that information was already together and you wanted to invite the Building Safety Regulator to review the safety case report, they would just log-in and find the information.They charge by the hour, so if the information isn’t there readily available it’s going to cost a fortune.
MARC BRADFIELD Yeah, from a Building Safety Act point of view and the Regulator, that’s an important point. And we find some of our clients are quite surprised when they actually learn that, yes, you’ve got a flat fee with your applications, but then everything is over to an hourly rate. And it takes as long as it takes and if the reviews of that then gets pushed out to what’s known as a multidisciplinary team, and I think you’re basically talking £140 per hour and they need to keep going through.
This conversation, in a way, has come out of the Building Safety Act, but it’s to try and keep it to that broad point of view as well. But I will say that the concept of the golden thread, which is a Building Safety Act thing, and which is actually specifically a higher-risk building thing, the concept of the golden thread should be across everything that we’re doing. Whether we’re talking high-risk buildings, residential etc, it’s just a bloody good concept. As is a lot of the concepts for high-risk buildings in terms of change control etc.
RICHARD WHITTAKER I’m going to use the word efficiency, you led nicely into that, Marc, because efficiency comes from the provision of information. And, if you look at Rochdale and the damp and mould issue and the subsequent Awaab’s law, it’s clear that when you follow that through the organisation didn’t have the data and the information that allowed them to make informed decisions. They were reacting to things, for all sorts of different reasons they were reacting, but they didn’t have the information. And the other point that leads into the risk at height is following Grenfell Dame Judith Hackitt set up this working group and that sort of thing. They asked the landlords and local authorities, how many tower blocks have you got? They didn’t know, they had to go and find out. And it turns out there are now 18,000 registered tower blocks within the UK. That has to be frightening of anybody that sits in the big chair at the top of the pyramid, not knowing that basic information about such complex buildings.
In relation to the measure of risk, it is blunt proxy, I’m paraphrasing Dame Judith Hackitt on that. You have to start with something, so that’s what we started with and 18 metre is something to do with the height of a ladder on a fire engine. However, the principle, if you believe that it applies, should be applied, that’s a clear message. So, if you look at, for example, a 4-storey building only needs an FD30. An 18-storey building on the 4ht floor needs an FD60. So, you can burn to death in half an hour in a 4-storey, but it’s going to take an hour in a 16-storey. You can’t compute that and settle that within your own moral compass and argue.
When the report comes out on September the 4th I wouldn’t be very surprised if there isn’t, at the very least, a recommendation that it applies to all complex buildings. And complex is anything that’s multiple occupancy or multidisciplinary or that sort of thing. Or, there is a principle that says it should be applied, one or the other. And this is the vehicle that’s going to support all of them organisations because with 18,000 tower blocks, how many low-rise buildings are there? Either commercial, retail or domestic. Tenfold, easily, or more.
MARC BRADFIELD It’s interesting because it’s a real frustration for me that people only tend to want to do things when regulation, legislation, tells them to do it. But they moan like hell when they do get the regulation and legislation and that’s why one of the things that I know we naturally go back to the Building Safety Act. But OK, let’s throw into, if we talked about carbon and a building in any sector, what’s the risks of not having that information? So, how would we put those sort of factors, not ticking a regulatory box yet, how do we demonstrate and get people to think about the value of having that information?
PAUL SHEEDY Like I said before, it’s all combining intelligence. Just get the BIM system, we’re doing predictive analysis of what’s going to happen the next day, if we’re putting it on the BIM system you’ve got a more efficient building, you’re saving your energy costs. You’ve got a safer building with your insurance premiums, we’re expecting to get the insurance sector to drop the premium by 8-12% for having a smart building. There's one particular building in the city that we’re dealing with that’s a million pounds a year on insurance, well, if you were cutting £80,000-i£120,000 a year on insurance, before we even get into energy cost savings, it starts making sense. By the time you think about leasing out sensors over multiple years, we can get there, but as I say about people in the property sector, Trump almost looks like a good guy compared to some of the people that I’ve met.
They’re only interested in this (money), that’s it, and we’ve got to refocus this whole argument to how they actually react. And they react down to dollar bills. And it’s going to take a lot of efficiency. It means we’ve got to work out on our golden thread at what point does the architect start thinking about when he designs the building, right down the when the building is going to get demolished, how does he think about that? Right through to everybody else on the M&E side, sensors technologies, the way the BIM models work. We’re got to think really clearly about how we simplify everything here so that it works together. I describe how technology needs to be, it needs to be that the building knows in advance what it’s got to do, not reacts back to things or air conditioning comes on at 6am and goes off at 8pm, that’s the beginning and the end of it and it doesn’t matter what’s happening. Start using the data as they are read now and who and when do I feed into the BIM model.
What comes out of the sensor technology to tell me we’ve got that right or we got that wrong and that we need to adjust things differently. We’re in an era now where we have all the answers, we have to bang some heads together, get in a room and get us to really think logically. And that’s right from the start of this project to the end. What’s the architect thinking about from when he’s designed it to when it’s going to have to be, eventually, knocked down.
MARC BRADFIELD The other thing listening to you and going through my head is always when does the conversation start, as well. From my experience the conversation, on a lot of things on the built environment, happens way too late. People are focused on getting projects through planning, but there’s other conversations that can and should start at that point to bring an efficiency on how we build this asset information. And then ultimately, Paul, it will lead to something like you’re describing. But it also makes me think, in terms of presenting in this business case, do we start needing to think about case studies where actually you can put some real metrics to the numbers involved.
Because you’re right, you can say what you like, but until you start putting something in terms of pounds and pence in there what you say will get so far, but it won’t break beyond these sort of groups of people. Whereas it really needs to get to the people holding those purse strings.
CLIFF KNEALE From what I’m hearing so far there is 3 different categories of business cases that we can start looking at. One is information management, having the right information. The other one is compliance, if you’re not compliant with the new regulations that are coming out. The other one is how the building is used and how green it is, it’s what Paul and Adina have picked up on. So maybe if we split the business cases up into categories, there might be more buckets that we could find, but information management will be the same across all sectors. But maybe greener buildings might not be because if you’re doing a bridge or waterways it’s not the same business case. So, information is always information, but you’ll have a different business case for how the asset is operated, depending on what the asset is.
RICHARD WHITTAKER That’s a good point that Cliff made. One of the things we need to do is determine the structure of the audience that we’re targeting because if you’re looking at practitioners, the people that do, it’s different to the people who are the decision makers and the strategists. So, whereas provisional information is important to a practitioner, reputation is important to a decision maker. So, it’s whether we have a structure that has an umbrella effect, so perhaps if you’ve got compliance, you’ve got corporate compliance, corporate manslaughter, then you’ve got operational compliance that sits underneath it. And I don’t think we can do that in one go, that’s a bit of a journey, but the people that will approve, authorise, and spend the money are the people who are responsible for strategy and liable to corporate prosecution.
WILLIAM BORTHEN I just thought that there might be some value in categorising the business case into cost, risk and performance. Because anyone in asset management understands those as being the core elements of asset management and are defined in ISO 55000. And I think that’s quite a good way of bucketing the things that people have already talked about.
MARC BRADFIELD Has anybody got any thoughts on that? Because we do need to start drilling down a little bit more. I really like, Cliff, the splitting between the info management, the compliance and how it’s used and using the info management across all sectors. Because maybe that is a way of dealing with, we’re trying to deal with cross-sectors, but somewhere we’re going to need to split that. And William, I think I agree, cost, risk, performance. Cost is always going to be the number one, but then you’re drilling down the risk and the performance.
JOE STOTT Apologies to throw another layer into this as well. I’m sat here thinking that we also need to address the different types of asset owners in terms of the target audience. So, someone who owns a housing association, for example, will have very different requirements to someone who owns one or two assets. We deal with quite a lot of housing associations and there’s some very low hanging fruit with those kind of customers. How many units have I got? A question as simple as that is a challenge, versus if you’ve got one building or one asset, you might be more interested in the granularity of energy usage and occupation and all of the rest of it. So, I think there is a kind of cross-weaving into those 3 areas that Cliff mentioned that is looking at the scale of the target audience.
MARC BRADFIELD I’ torn here slightly in terms of how we progress this because they’re really, really good points in terms of people’s needs are going to be very different. Are we going to end up watering the business case down too much, but then does that go back to the point of splitting it down into information management and high level compliance, I don’t know.
ALAN OLIVER I think like everybody else, I’m scratching my head here. It’s almost like the thing is too big at the moment and we’re trying to work out things like who the audience is. I know that the other Richard and George Stevenson, they\re looking to get away from just devoting this to housing, and quite rightly so. I’m wondering whether we should look at councils because councils have clearly got issues with housing, but they’ve also got issues with other buildings: multi-use buildings, swimming pools, sports centres, large office blocks, some of which will be possibly about 18 storeys in height. And I’m thinking at least you can define the market then.
I don’t know how many councils there are in the country, there’s got to be several hundred, but there’s lots of people there struggling with these problems who would be interested in getting involved and maybe looking at case studies.
MARC BRADFIELD Richard F, within our brief does that sit? Because I really like that idea.
RICHARD FREER Yes, absolutely. I’m a little bit concerned missing out health and education.
ALAN OLIVER Councils are involved with education, they’ve got schools as well.
RICHARD FREER Yeah, but how much of that comes under the councils?
ALAN OLIVER Quite a lot, I think. Richard, you’ve obviously got some views, what other organisations look after schools if it’s not councils?
RICHARD FREER I don’t know, I’m not an expert on it, but I thought that it’s been split and messed around so many times. Hasn’t it become more centralised now?
JOE STOTT It’s academy trusts.
RICHARD FREER So, who runs those? The academy trusts, they’re independent, or semi. So that wouldn’t bet the council. Likewise, the hospitals, they’re under health authorities, aren’t they?
WILLIAM BORTHEN There is a lot of PFI as well.
RICHARD FREER Yeah, we don’t really want to be ignoring that either. It’s a huge, huge subject and it could be that we’ve got to split it down at the next stage into those areas. But I think it could be helpful if we could find a way through that at this high level.
WILLIAM BORTHEN I think the core principles of asset management apply across every type of facility. I’ve worked with various different types of facilities and all of the asset managers are wrestling with the same challenges. Trying to work out what maintenance they need to do and how to validate the compliance of their assets if they don’t have a clear view on what the assets are, where they are, what are their lifecycle requirements, how much budget do I need in 10 years time to replace whatever needs replacing. All of those kinds of asset management challenges apply to social housing or hospitals or schools, whatever.
And I think it is perfectly valid to be able to if this is BIM For Asset Management and we’re building a business case for BIM within the sphere of asset management, then you're talking about the challenges that asset managers have with relation to, typically, asset and spacial data. How can the position be improved by having BIM? Not knowing how many buildings that you’ve got isn’t necessarily a challenge that’s solved by BIM, even though that’s the kind of thing that some organisations don’t know. What does BIM actually solve over and above having an Excel spreadsheet on someone’s desktop?
That’s kind of what I was thinking would be the value of this business case, to say everyone is using a CAFM system or Excel spreadsheets at the moment, but how can you integrate BIM into that and improve your position? Being cognisant of the fact that a lot of people with large estates will have buildings that are 50 years old that don’t have any BIM data, buildings that are 2 weeks old that they’d have a full BIM model for, and everything in between, perhaps. So, I’m interested to understand how asset managers can integrate high level data from BIM into the low levels of data that they’ve got across the rest of their portfolio.
RICHARD FREER Yeah, absolutely, that’s why I say we really do want to be looking right across the industry at a high enough level that everything applies. Which I think William has just said is not too high a level.
JOE STOTT In terms of our experience, there’s a number of government sectors that are driving this agenda through EIR documents, exchange information requirements, and pushing the whole interoperability thing. They tend to be the DfE, the MOD and the MOJ and they have all of those things, they have refurbs, they have rebuilds. And they also have that huge gap between that initial requirements and then the reality of delivering those assets and does that data go anywhere. so those are sectors that I think we might have an in, in terms of they’ve got a clear government driven aspiration to go down this and they’ve got a clear lack of joined-up thinking when it gets to the end. And the other sector that jumped to mind is universities. There’s a lot of universities that we’ve been driving for along time to that type of digital estates. They’re kind of already sold on the business case, so it may be worth revisiting some of the stuff that universities have already done. And that tends to be an open door in terms of the sector.
MARC BRADFIELD It will be interesting, because I’m just looking at Paul’s comment in the chat focused upon actionable data, not data for data’s sake. And it’s almost like, I wonder in terms of someone’s got a set of EIRs in place, actually do they really understand the information? What percentage of those people that have got something in place actually understand the information that they’re asking for? Most of which, some of which they might be receiving. And it is actually, to use Paul’s term, actionable data.
JOE STOTT I'd love to have a way of fingerprinting data so that you can tell if anyone’s interacted with it because I’ve got my very strong suspicions that none of it is actually touched.
PAUL SHEEDY I’ll give you a quick example, it was one of my clients who I have a note that it’s 119 weeks since I put all the technology that we have into his building, everything. In 118 weeks they’ve not actioned any of that data, and I don’t get it. We’re talking about wasting £4,000 a day on energy, they have 2% occupancy every Friday in the building, they’ve only 3 times gone above 3% occupancy on a Friday. Every single floor has got all the lights on, all of the air conditioning on, everything working, all the FM stuff in and I sit there going is it me, or is it them Because I just don’t get how you’re wasting £4,000 a day in energy that the data is showing you what you’re doing wrong and it isn’t being actioned. And this is where I think the best thing that we should actually focus on is transparency and that being transparency between the asset owners, the insurance company.
But also the tenants, the head of the tenants association should have access to how well is my building being run. And one of the reasons why I’ve pushed so hard on doing this bilateral game with a company in Singapore is that over there they have a system that when the building goes below 80% compliance the insurance policy is void and it’s evacuated. Obviously, nobody wants to do that. And I think what we should be doing is having the focus of what we do on common sense. Everything we do, is it common sense? Is this understandable by everybody in the whole scenario that we have here? Because I think we’ve got people who are too specialist in their language of BIM, or language of architecture or fire, whatever it might be, where they speak that one language and nobody understands what the hell that they’re saying because it’s all acronyms.
We should really focus on how we deliver a transparent policy here that says by having a digital twin, by having this or that, you can see, obviously you don’t want every tenant in the building, but the head of the tenants association can see that actually we have these issues going wrong now, or this is an issue. What is the best practice in the next building that’s coming along. If we keep it simple here and think about all of the…there is lots of different specialities in this entire big picture, but let’s try and simplify the language right down so that everybody gets it. We just deliver that core piece of insight that everybody actually needs: is it running correctly? Is it being built correctly? Is it not? Where are the issues and let’s resolve them.
MARC BRADFIELD What interests me there, Paul, with your example is that where did the disconnect occur between somebody clearly commissioning you to do what you did on that building and then the person that actually is ultimately using the building not picking up on that. How does that situation come about?
PAUL SHEEDY Honestly, there’s times that I think I need stronger brick walls so I can bang my head against them. The biggest issue for over 9 months was the head of inclusion and diversity took 9 months to decide whether they’re going to put he/she/them/they on the access cards where the technology was built into the system anyway. My view is that if that person was being charged for the £4,000 a day they were wasting by not making a decision on that I think they would have made the decision a bit quicker. Then it came down to changes in the security company who are running the building, it was just a myriad.
My view is that me losing £4,000 a day, I’d have made a bloody decision and got it done, but big organisations literally pass the buck and no one takes responsibility. They’re all living in their own little silos and this is where I sat is what we’ve got to do is not go down the silo approach and we join up together, what is the best clear communication for this whole bigger picture that we’re trying to pull off here.
CLIFF KNEALE I totally and utterly agree with everything that Paul has just said. And it’s been a major frustration of mine working with multidisciplinary teams in the design stage, ultimately information is a result of a task that’s been carrier out by somebody, usually a design activity produces information. So, if different teams working in silos are producing the wrong information at the wrong time it’s very wasteful. If you’re not producing the right information at the right time the next team cannot make the right decision. So I think that if we approach this business case as a digital transformation, because if you think of the social housing organisation, they can have many departments and they're all going to need to agree to this joined-up plan in order to actually get the golden thread so you can get a safety case report out of.
So I totally agree, not data for the sake of data. It actually means that you’re going to need to get the teams together into a room and say how do you do your job in six steps, tell me. And what are the barriers, how can we take them away. That’s actually transforming a company implementing it, but the business case for doing that, we’ve already touched on to do with information management, compliance and the use of buildings. And it all comes down to what Paul was saying about how did it get so far away when they building was being used from what it was supposed to be. It all starts off with the brief from the client and that gets worked upon and then it gets delivered.
And the brief can be quite big, but you need to pull out the three top key items from the brief that need to be actionable. For example, if you’re building a stadium and it’s going to host the Olympics for gymnastics, when they throw that ribbon up in the air, if the air conditioning moves that ribbon across the ceiling, it’s not going to land where the gymnast wants it to land. That’s an absolute key outcome for that project, if you haven’t achieved that then you’re not going to get paid. If you think in those terms, what was this building.
I’ve actually worked on a project where there was supposed to be completely automated port, but we had a block of housing for 3000 staff and nobody had read the initial brief that it was going to be the biggest automated port in the world. Everybody just went off and started to design something. So why have we got 3000 people here in a canteen for them and parking place to be automated? I just totally agree with what Paul said, it’s an enormous task and the best way to tackle it is with a business case to get everybody onboard.
MARC BRADFIELD The next problem is, and I think it’s something that Richard W said earlier. Let’s just say that we move forward a couple of months and we’ve got this business case sitting in front of us printed out and ready to go. Who are we actually handing that to? That’s tricky.
CLIFF KNEALE We have to scope it and fence it off somehow, we don’t want to boil the ocean.
WILLIAM BORTHEN Going back to Paul’s example of people not adopting the technology when there’s a clear benefit for it. A really simple example of that, I was head of asset management at Sodexo and we had people trying to push us to use Power BI (this was a while ago) and everyone bought in to the concept and said it would be good, you can visualise data, aggregate data, really good. Everyone’s got it on their laptops, so everyone can use it and there were a couple of people that we’re really good at using it and did amazing things. But most people kind of opened it up, got scared and then closed it down again.
The business case was there for using it and everyone kind of agreed with it, but it was just too scary for people to actually use. And I think the only way to overcome that is to really step people through it slowly and encourage them to take the first step for themselves and build a dashboard for themselves and then do something else. It’s so easy just for people to kind of get scared by technology, especially BIM is definitely in that area where people just are scared of it, so they just go back to Excel. Even if we build a big business case that’s really compelling, there has to be a way of demonstrating the value in a kind of really incremental, achievable way for people on the ground.
MARC BRADFIELD The Power BI, that scenario, often when people see data presented there is an initial wow, but the reality, unless it’s the right metric that’s being demonstrated which is often going to be money in some way, is a problem. I was thinking in terms of the most straightforward example that I could think of in terms of people that have got smart meters in their house, how does that actually change them? I don’t know because I haven’t got one.
RICHARD WHITTAKER One of the things coming out of this for me is as a sell for the business case, when we produce the business case people have still got to adopt it. And the question for me is how do you fund it? If you look at the elections, there’s all sorts of commitments and the question every time is, well, how do you fund it? I think Paul Sheedy made a perfect example, 2% occupancy, how do you fund it? Manage a building, this will give you the information to manage a building. So, if you’ve only got 2& occupancy and you can turn off 80% of whatever is costing money, that’s your initial capital cost. And then that leads into the benefits going forwards of better information, more efficiency, more dynamic teams and all of that side of it. So, I think that’s an example we should keep hold of.
MARC BRADFIELD In terms of funding it, again, it comes down to how you demonstrate what the value is and how rapidly that value is achieved. But as Paul’s pointed out you do have scenarios where it sounds like Paul is kicking and screaming and saying you can unlock this value, but they’re not.
RICHARD WHITTAKER I think that’s the first part of the process because that demonstrating the value is a different journey to then actually where does the money come from. Because when I’ve worked as a client, so many times I’ve been told by contractors all you have to do is spend an extra lump of money. And my response has always been I haven’t got that extra lump of money because everything is allocated to the business priorities. So, where does it come from? And examples like Paul shared and similar sort of things that make them think I recognise value, and oh, there’s an opportunity to actually find the money that actually allows me to go forward with this, because it is a big barrier for a lot of people.
CLIFF KNEALE But am I right in thinking that the business case is used to get the funds? If you build a good enough business case it can’t be ignored. I know that you can’t get money out of thin air, but…
RICHARD WHITTAKER If if helps persuade people to reprioritise that makes sense. And I know from the asset management world there are a lot of people that employ both directly and subcontractors and complain that subcontractors are expensive. Perhaps part of the reason that they’ve got subcontractors is the inefficiency within the business. So again, similar to the 2%, if it increases efficiency and reduces the reliance on subcontractors and generates a saving within the existing pot of money that’s being spent.
MARC BRADFIELD So, we’re into the last 15 minutes or so, my brain is almost spinning now as to how we take this forward. I think all of the discussions have been hugely valuable and I said it was going to be a storming phase and it’s certainly that. But it almost feels like it’s mushroomed, there’s some ideas to pick up on there, it’s just how we get to that next stage. I need to go away and have a think about this, but it’s how the group engages as well.
RICHARD WHITTAKER Everything that we’ve spoke about is immensely important and immensely valuable, it’s how you turn that into a roadmap. And perhaps a road mapping exercise is the answer. I’ve got to be honest, I’m not a big fan of roadmapping and mind-mapping and things like that, I’m an old practical guy but this is about strategy and operational delivery. You can’t just sit there and go 1, 2, 3, 4, you’ve got to go what’s the correlation and what’s the link and the break between those things. It gives you the vehicle that is targeting the execs, but also targeting grassroots. So, you get both ends coming together and that can only help what we’re trying to achieve because one will have a different priority to the other.
MARC BRADFIELD HAs anybody got any thoughts as to how they see us moving forward or anything they particularly want to pick up on?
CLIFF KNEALE I think perhaps if we each came up with an area where we thought there could be a business case and just start looking at a few. It’s very pragmatic, where do you see waste in your industry? Or where do you see things that can be improved? And the business case for it.
MARC BRADFIELD So, you're thinking to drill down into some specific examples.
CLIFF KNEALE Yeah, for each of those categories, three at the moment, but possibly there may be more. So, one for information management, or a couple, and the same for the greener buildings, and then for compliance.
RICHARD WHITTAKER For me, it’s about creating a matrix to capture what Cliff has just suggested. And then I think we volunteer somebody, perhaps somebody called Marc, to prioritise that list.
RICHARD FREER That sounds good to me. It’s a start point and that’s what we need. This hasn’t been a brainstorm, it’s been more like a brain tornado going on, a hurricane. Which is great because it means there is a lot of stuff happening very quickly, but you’ve still got to have a start point, so I think what Cliff said is a very good idea. I think to still bear in mind what we said in the other meeting, the top 3 risks and the top 3 advantages also gives a bit of early context. Other than that, yes, certainly.
MARC BRADFIELD Just to pick up on that and make sure we have ticked that box that we set ourselves before. Over the course of the next few days if everybody could have a think on everything that they’ve heard and just top 3 risks and top 3 benefits. Nothing more than a few words…just reading the transcript of this is probably going to give us enough to work with. Following that we’ll put together some thoughts for how we deal with the next meeting. Richard, were you saying monthly?
RICHARD FREER It’s entirely up to you guys to choose.
MARC BRADFIELD Monthly works well for me, unless we feel we need to be a little bit more rapid in terms of momentum. I feel that in this group there is a lot of passion and energy, mostly moving in the same direction. My fear is how do we actually pull that all together to get it down to an output at the end of it. I know we can do it.
RICHARD FREER Since we’re coming up to the summer, mid-July and right to the beginning of September, trying to get people into a meeting is not the easiest thing in the world. So, maybe just see how everybody in the meeting feels about it. Maybe the first week in July so we don’t lose the momentum that we’ve built up in this meeting.
MARC BRADFIELD We’ll do it as a shorter session.
RICHARD FREER People put their thoughts down in the next couple of days, get them over to us, we’ll get a meeting in the diary first week in July. And then we’ve got something to come back to in September.
MARC BRADFIELD That’s a good call.
ANTHONY HARTE I think shorter, more frequent, would probably work best. And I think given that we’re going to feedback something in September it would give more opportunity if people were busy with other meetings, you might not drop into all of them, but you can drop into the ones that are relevant and just keep that momentum.
RICHARD FREER Jiss will send out invites for the first week in July and we hope that everyone can come and then in the meantime if you can put some notes down on the 3 top risks and the 3 top benefits. And likewise with Cliff.
CLIFF KNEALE I was just thinking, you were saying the 3 top risks and benefits, is that for each type of building? So, for a school, a PFI, HRB.
MARC BRADFIELD When we first discussed that it was at the highest level and kind of where this started from. Richard kept correcting me on our previous meeting, don’t just talk about residential, we want to broaden this. That thought’s changing and evolving, I don’t see a problem if people want to do it from a focus, just state what that focus is.
RICHARD FREER Yeah, fine, the highest level possible that can encompass everything is also good. I think it was William that was saying remember that it’s BIM for Asset Management, so there are things that are risks for asset managers across the board, it’s not just one particular sector. But if somebody wants to drill down more and be more specific, that’s absolutely fine.
RICHARD WHITTAKER Everybody can benefit from efficiency because certainly discipline. Anybody can be prosecuted under health & safety for every discipline and everybody can benefit from transparency across every discipline. So, while we’re talking some detailed areas we do recognise what runs across asset management. And I’m wondering if a Survey Money on what people are considered to be risks would be an idea.
MARC BRADFIELD Yeah, works for me.
RICHARD FREER I’ll make a deal with you, Richard. You write what you want on the Survey Monkey and Jiss will put that up for you and disseminate.
MARC BRADFIELD I really appreciate everybody's time on this, I think I've got a lot to learn. I've got a lot to take in here, but I hope that everybody has found some value from this first session. And I look forward to the ongoing sessions as we try and pull this thing all together and come out with an output. But thank you very much everybody.
CHAT
[11:32 am] William Borthen (External)
Asset Management is about the balance of Cost, Risk & Performance.
I'm keen to identify what the role of asset management is, and how BIM can support those activities in a better way than it is done without BIM.
[11:49 am] Paul Sheedy (External)
Focus only on actionable data, not data for data sake
[12:04 pm] Joe Stott (External)
NO TLAs please... (three letter acronyms)
[12:13 pm] Paul Sheedy (External)
we have to educate and simplify why everyone needs to change.
We have to illustrate we thought through the key issues and communicate simply and clearly best practise. Bite sized chunks in each interested parties area of interest.
[12:16 pm] William Borthen (External)
Cost - financial benefits, Risk - compliance/legal, Performance - efficiencies/operational improvements
[12:17 pm] Joe Stott (External)
Finance / Money changes behaviour.. We could all have been driving electric cars years ago however its not until they are "affordable" and incentivised by tax break etc.. Gazing in to crystal ball i see a Carbon / Efficiency tax for the built environment on the horizon. at which point data will have tangible value..
[12:17 pm] Paul Sheedy (External)
Agree Joe, China fired ahead with EV's now europe are imposing 38% tarrifs as they dropped the ball....
UK can lead on Smart Buildings, and the gold standards on where we focus on better smarter, safer buildings
Can we agree a deadline for a good first draft. Otherwise this may just fizzle out