BUSINESS CASE WORKSTREAM MEETING 27-11-2024
WILLIAM BORTHEN I found a couple of these sessions and the overarching ambition is to develop a high level document that simply and easily explains the business case for better information management. So, why would we invest money and time in improving information management. What we’ve done, we’ve established in previous sessions what the key areas are, this is a collective exercise so happy to debate these things. What I’ve brought up on the screen there is a list of areas of responsibility. Within asset management we’re responsible for all of these different things, statutory compliance, health & safety critical systems, handover, lifecycle. And all information management leads to avoidable issues with these things.
So, how can we use better information management to avoid these issues? And we’re trying to put together a high level document to address these things and demonstrate what the value is, and with real life examples ideally. So, within the BIM For Asset Management website there’s a list of questions that you can just go and fill out to provide a scenario where you’ve seen examples of issues occurring due to poor information management and how that can be overcome. And then the plan is to use that to demonstrate using real world examples why we would improve the way we do things. So, I’ve got an example of something, this might be what it looks like, a document or a page of a document that we might have one page per area that we demonstrate the need, the problem, the solution and the scenario.
Maybe with some kind of high level points that drill home why you might actually do this. So I guess the purpose of the call is to see if people can support in doing that and provide some examples from their experience of where better information management has solve problems that are occurring in these key areas.
GEORGE STEVENSON My frustration with this is that everybody in asset management has got loads and loads of stories of things that go wrong that they are frustrated about and are costing them a lot of money. And yet what we aren’t getting back from the people enough is what those things are because if people can identify what they are we can use that to both sort out and address them and then go from there. So, this business case really, as Will was saying, what we’re doing here is not saying how we’re going to do it. We’ve got other groups that are focusing on how we’re going to do it, it’s really a matter of dealing with the why are we actually doing it. I’m working on several projects at the moment where, quite frankly, the information that’s coming in to the asset team is shocking.
It’s so incomplete and I’m talking about on some very prestigious contracts, I’m not talking about maybe even residential projects where people have got the excuse that nobody’s got any money and it’s all done too quickly etc., I’m talking about top projects.
CLIFF KNEALE I think I was in some of these first meetings and then I broke out into some other meetings, so I’ve just come back in again and seen what you’ve just shown so I might be asking some stupid questions, but there is a point I’m trying to make. Have we defined what information management is for the group? Are we going to set out what that is? Because when implementing BIM across massive companies that span the globe, we had a slide deck when I was working at Autodesk, and we’d say these are some of the problems that you can avoid if you manage your information better. And one of the slides was a building that was actually built in the wrong place because they hadn’t used the common project in their Revit models, for example.
So they didn’t actually have what we used to call a Station A on the site to set the building out from. The drawings arrived on the site and they had to choose which setting out point to use and they chose and they chose the wrong one, so the building was in the wrong place. So, there’s an example of you could save the entire sum of the entire project just by having that information correctly managed. In my experience also there is a lot of discussion about information management, but this information comes from activities, so really it all boils down to the activities associate with managing a building, what information you need to carry out those activities and then how that information is managed so that it can flow seamlessly between parties.
I don’t know if that’s useful or not, to define what information management actually is and then we can pick those bits apart. So you start with activities, you have some information, it has to be the right level of information at the right time shared in a sharable format which then informs the next activity. And if you can explain the information management in those terms people can start to understand what it actually is because I think it’s just tossed around a lot, a bit like digital twin, information management, what actually is it? Or are we going to assume that everybody knows.
RICHARD WHITTAKER I agree with everything that Cliff is saying about the need for a definition and there’s some variation of that depending on the audience. But initially the cell has to be around compliance and the definition of information requirements is to ensure as a business and an individual that you are compliant and providing your duty of care to your customers. So, that has to be high up there and that piece of work that Will’s done which is a great road map into this, I think there needs to be some strength around compliance and risk management because that will get the people that are responsible for strategy, and accountable at a high level, interested. Or it should do.
CLIFF KNEALE This came from when I was working at Autodesk, we were selling millions of pounds worth of software and of course it had to be signed off at a very, very high level. So that feeds in to what Richard was saying about you’re talking to CEO level. So building information management is often used in the design and construction of buildings, but now we’re talking more about asset information which is needed to inform the golden thread of information. So really these housing associations, they’ve gone from at one level maybe estate agents with quite a few properties, to actually housing associations that run thousands of properties. And they’ve been doing it in a very ad hoc way, just like the design & construction industry were doing.
But now we need to resell the whole thing, it’s still information management but it’s for asset, it’s for the properties. So really I think that the purpose of this group is to actually be able to put something on the table that releases millions of pounds worth of funds so that the entire organisation can be transformed. Because this is not a small change, this is a massive change.
RICHARD FREER Sorry, I’m going to have to interrupt you, this is not the purpose of this group. The purpose of this group, it’s a misnomer to call it the business case group, the purpose is to define what information is needed to go into a business case. There is no way this group can do a business case, the financials would be absolutely impossible at this stage to even think about and without financials it’s not a business case. This is more about building an extended value proposition and defining what needs to go into the business case. And we’re doing that with using examples which we’ve been asked for by the other groups, they want examples before they can move forward themselves of where better information management has solved an issue or the lack of better information management has compounded an issue.
CLIFF KNEALE What springs to mind is PFI handbacks, that’s happening right now and that’s a hot potato for a lot of people.
RICHARD FREER What I suggest is we go round the room and ask everybody if they’ve got an example. Cliff, have you got an example? You gave one earlier, do you want to expand on that?
EXAMPLE by CLIFF KNEALE The one about the buildings being in the wrong place. It was quite a while back, maybe 15 years ago when we were implementing BIM, I can’t remember the exact details of which building it was but it all comes from everybody agreeing to use, in order to work collaboratively the teams all need to agree to use the same standards, methods and procedures for producing information. That includes things like…
GEORGE STEVENSON I think the example there is probably a bit obscure…I think probably from your recent experience what we’re doing at the moment, what you’re doing in terms of helping on handover, you’ve got some practical examples of that, haven’t you?
EXAMPLE by CLIFF KNEALE Let’s talk about handover information, then. So, you want to build the golden thread or you want to manage the information better and at the moment the handover information is typically coming from the contractor, obviously. And it’s packaged up and some of those packages are very well organised and sometimes they’re not. So you’ll get duplicate information in the same file, you’ll get folders inside folders inside folders and find that the 4th folder is completely empty. You’ll have file names that are too long so you can’t download them because half way through the download it will crash saying file name too long, what do you want to do, do you want to skip it, or not?
So you could say skip and then after a while you get bored and go I’ll skip through all of them and before you know it you don’t have half of the information so then that leads to missing information. You have information in different formats, sometimes you can’t open them. You have information inside the 4th folder then inside a zip file and when you unzip that you get another 4 folders. And when you extract all of the information it duplicates all of the folder names again. So, this is actually in the real world, just trying to get the information to create the golden thread. And then we’ve got things like the information sometimes isn’t on one domain, it sits on multiple domains. So you’ve got the contractor’s version of it, so they’re gathering the information as it goes along.
The pass some of this information once it’s complete from one of the packages, it might go into the employer’s representative or the employer’s agent, and then they’ll have their version of it. And then you’ll have some of it then gets passed onto the employer and they’ve got their own folder structure and their own copy of it. And then you’ve got somebody that’s perhaps compiling the CDM or the health & safety file or the O&M manuals and they’ve also got their version of it. So sometimes when we’ve been asked to create the golden thread we get logins which takes weeks just to get logins and access as well. That’s another problem is access to logins. It takes absolutely weeks to get anything done.
And people don’t know where their as-builts are and another problem with getting this information is that particularly now with the Building Safety Act there’s been a lot of churning companies and people are moving around so logins get lost and nobody can get into the information anymore. I could go on, but there’s an example, just trying to get the information. It’s literally a project just getting all of the information before you can start the project.
RICHARD FREER Will, is there anything that you can ask Cliff that will fit into your schemata?
WILLIAM BORTHEN Yeah, what I’m thinking is, that’s a great example of how information has been handed over poorly. Have you got examples of where you’ve see it done well?
CLIFF KNEALE Yeah, it’s well, but from their perspective. The health & safety file might be very well structured, but it’s got information in it that’s needed, for example, for Regulation 38 as well. So what you need, you don’t want to copy that information for Regulation 38, you need to link to it. So I’d say that there are examples of information that’s been gathered for a specific purpose, for example health & safety file, but what you really need is information that is field level that can then be used for multiple different purposes and I haven’t seen an example of that.
WILLIAM BORTHEN So how can I write that, what is needed?
CLIFF KNEALE A database is needed, not a SharePoint folder. A lot of people might think that if you put something in SharePoint in the cloud it’s a database. There’s a difference between that and what an actual database is.
WILLIAM BORTHEN And that’s because there’s a box for a piece of information and it’s populated once and then it can be shared between multiple people and used.
CLIFF KNEALE The difference is the information is stored once and used many times and it can be linked together. So you can take a system called compartmentation and you can add all of the components that make up that system, or you might call them components, elements, products or whatever they are, you can link them all together. But by linking them it doesn’t mean to say that they’re all in the same folder, it just means that when you click on the system it brings up all of the information about that system. So, that’s a database.
RICHARD FREER Caroline, have you got an example you can give us?
EXAMPLE by CAROLINE HAYHOE Yeah, it’s probably later in the process, so from whether it be a bid stage or a mobilisation stage or bringing on a new client. We kind of have similar kind of things, but there is no consistency in the data that we have. Every organisation has their own set of rules in terms of what they want, what they don’t want and I guess it’s setting out the bare minimum of things that we must have in order to take on a new contract and make sure that we can deliver PPM plans, we can deliver life cycle management and we can progress with it. Because we end up for the first 12 months of a new contract re-getting all of the asset data to then actually deliver better lifecycle plans, better PPM plans. Because it’s just not what every organisation wants, everybody has a slightly different view of what they want.
GEORGE STEVENSON Caroline, what’s the implication of that?
CAROLINE HAYHOE The implication is a lot of waste of money. So, a client will spend X amount of money for somebody to do an asset collection survey and then they don’t maintain that asset data. So in five years’ time when they go out to market for a new supplier to take on the PPM or the facilities management, it’s five years out of date. But then the first year of a new contract somebody is going to go out and collect the data again and it’s a cycle of that every time. And it’s a case of not maintaining the data once we’ve got it, because things do get updated and perhaps the projects are slightly smaller.
But those things do, if you’ve got 200 buildings within a five year period you’re going to have done quite a bit of work on those 200 buildings, but when you come to the next level you’re going to have to start again. So, it’s a waste of money for the clients every five years recollecting the data because they haven’t maintained it in the previous five years. And that contractor, whoever they are, have lost a year of being able what they want to deliver.
GEORGE STEVENSON I’m just drilling down a little bit now, what’s the implication of that? So if, for example, they place a contract with a new contractor, but the information that they gave that contractor was wrong, what’s the impact? Presumably there needs to be some sort of financial adjustment and that probably is going to involve contractual negotiations which are going to be expensive because senior people are going to have to get involved in that. It also brings in a level of uncertainty, I would have thought. You might question whether the tender process could then be challenged because the basis on which the appointment was made was wrong. So, what are the implications?
CAROLINE HAYHOE There’s numerous, the main one is probably financial, but I guess the other side of things is that you could take on a large building and you think this building is in a certain condition because that’s what all the data tells you. You bid against that, you agree that this is what you’re going to deliver, but when you actually get onsite within the first couple of months of actually maintaining the building you actually find that it’s in a significantly worse state and something you’ve committed to is actually going to be much more expensive because the data is so far out of date you’ve got compliance issues.
You could walk onto an estate, you’ve got all sorts of stuff that are non-compliant, but because the data hasn’t been updated you can’t tell that because when you come to the bid stage you’re just looking at a flat spreadsheet. You can’t go and look at every single building before you take on a new contract, you’re basing everything on the information that you’re given.
GEORGE STEVENSON And where does the responsibility, therefore, lie? Is that something that you’ve taken it on, so therefore you’ve then got to swallow whatever the additional cost is, or would you seek to get the client to compensate you for that? And if you do, what if they don’t have the budget?
CAROLINE HAYHOE Well yeah, that’s exactly where the problems lie. Because they’re probably coming to it, I’m not saying that anybody is being deceptive at this point, they probably fully believe that everything they’ve got id in that condition. So there’s not necessarily a deception in there that’s causing a potential problem, it’s a case of they are they’re generally going into that. So that’s where the tricky situations happen because they probably won’t have the budget so then they’ll start prioritising the absolute basics. And it could be resolved by just maintaining the data on a yearly basis to make sure that, but then again that’s obviously conversations within an organisation to make sure that FM talk to construction and the estates teams and a lot of these organisations or groups within organisations are not always talking to each other.
So somebody will go an refurb an entire building and not tell the FM team and they’ll rock up and there’s brand new kit that they didn’t know had been put in there and they could have actually have spent the money better had they actually asked, but that’s probably a different…
RICHARD FREER Will, have you got anything you could ask Caroline that will help you fill out some boxes?
WILLIAM BORTHEN Yeah, I think that’s a good one around the inaccuracy of information for the procurement of FM contracts. That’s an issue that FM companies face when they take on a new contract and it’s an issue that clients face, but really that lies with the incumbent FM company and the client to manage that FM company. So, that’s a definite problem that’s rife, I recognise that, that’s a good one. Then at the start, Caroline, you talked about asset data being inconsistent across different companies, so I think that’s a different issue, that’s probably around the kind fo data model and the naming of asset types. Some people use Uniclass, some people use NRM3, some people use their own bespoke hierarchy.
CAROLINE HAYHOE And I think it’s the ones that use their own bespoke ones that sometimes offer the most challenges because it just works in this little small environment and then when you move on it makes it very difficult to map to a more generic one.
WILLIAM BORTHEN Yeah, and I think everyone is trying to achieve the same thing, you need to be compliant and you need to know what the asset type is so you know what maintenance is required, the frequency and all of that kind of stuff. You can still do all of those things with inconsistent asset hierarchies, but it’s when someone else comes in and they have to do some mapping to it, I suppose.
EXAMPLE by CAROLINE HAYHOE Yeah, absolutely, one example I’ve had in the last couple of weeks is trying to reconcile some F-gas data from two different suppliers. One supplier gave me everything I needed, the make, the model etc, to be able to build an F-gas register and put it into the system to be able to do that. The other supplier gave me the make and the serial number and an F-gas type and some of them had an F-gas volume. So in order to work out what those different things, and it’s those kind of things, I’m absolutely powerless to do much with a serial number of an air-conditioning unit compared to a make and a model because if they’re just giving the make and the model I can fill out most of the rest because there is information online to be able to put that back together.
I know it’s very granular, but that’s the kind of detail that we work to. So, it’s those kind of things and they were told to do exactly the same thing, but two different suppliers have approached it very differently. One’s done a very comprehensive piece of work and one has just given us the serial number of the outdoor unit.
RICHARD FREER Afam, have you got a good example of where incomplete asset information affected what you were doing?
EXAMPLE by AFAM UNAKA Yeah, from my experience I think it’s more of an issue of change management. When the new system is introduced most people don’t have enough information of how it’s being used, so they don’t put the information in correctly. So when you go to pick up to find information you find out that most of what you’re looking for are not there.
GEORGE STEVENSON What’s the impact of that, Afam?
AFAM UNAKA It delays my work, it delays my operation or project or whatever I want to do next because I need an account of the previous information of what has been done before, any change that has been made, to make my own decision on how to approach the remediation or any action I want to take.
GEORGE STEVENSON So if you’re managing projects and you’v got a chain of people that are delivering that then something that is incomplete then, that would delay the project and therefore that’s going to incur a knock-on effect in terms of cost.
AFAM UNAKA Yeah, in terms of administrative time and cost plus time, I have to start finding information and looking for who did it last, where they started. I’m gonna get it together to put it back to where it’s supposed to be so I can provide to whoever or the contractors I’m supposed to give it to. So it will cost me a couple of days of administrative time before I could get off moving the project forward, I might not have to leave for two days.
GEORGE STEVENSON My recollection is that you’re on residential projects, is that right?
AFAM UNAKA Yes, I’m looking at it from a ? 30mins 43secs viewpoint because I’m a project manager with fairly mediation actions.
WILLIAM BORTHEN I was just trying to establish where this sits exactly. So, lifecycle type projects or new build?
AFAM UNAKA It’a actions that come from fire risk assessments, whatever type it is. The find out that information you’re looking for are not actually in the database with the building association or council has provided. to store such information. The action is there, but the other information is based on pieces you need to make sense of the action, they are not there. An example is where I’m working now there is a system they use called Apex. In Apex all the risk assessment goes in there and Apex has the ability to store images, plans, other information.
But when you go there and get the action plan then the further assessment the action is there, but the actual risk assessment is in a different hard drive, the remote drive somewhere else that I have to go and start digging into. I’m saying that because I know where they are because I’ve been asking questions, but it’s supposed to be in one place, in that Apex which is a database system, not just in a folder in a hard drive.
GEORGE STEVENSON I think that’s a good example.
RICHARD FREER I just wanted to ask Adam, he was one of the group leaders who wants this information, so I just want to check with him that this is what he wants.
GEORGE STEVENSON I think what Afam has just gone through there would be of great interest to Adam because his software is being used to do those inspections and they chime together, so we’ll pick that up.
RICHARD FREER Paul, can you give us a practical literal example of somewhere where a lack of information caused problems on a project?
EXAMPLE by PAUL SHEEDY From what I’ve seen it’s the lack of joined up thinking, the lack of people who have actually been able to communicate together on projects, I see that as the biggest issue here. I’ve just come off one job, 8 Bishopsgate, and that went at least 6 months way past where it should have gone. And when we got there when we finished the job they told us after we’d finished the job, oh, we’ve put all of this ducting in place for you after you’d already installed everything. And that’s the sort of level of what I see, it’s the communication between the different disciplines here. That group that went bust, ISG, they were the ones involved on this one and we also had Mighty involved and another company.
And all we had to do was turn up and do what we had to do, we got it done in about 2 days, it was the fact that those companies between them, none of them had actually been able to communicate anything to us. They did all of the work without telling us and after they finished the job they told us, by the way we put all of this ducting in place for you, quite amazing. So I think the bigger issue here is actually joined up thinking and getting people on the same hymn sheet is a massive issue.
WILLIAM BORTHEN What kind of information did you need? And why weren’t they able to communicate that?
PAUL SHEEDY We put in our plans about a year before hand, we expected it to be installed 6 months later, we installed it a year later. And what they didn’t tell us then was that they’d changed all of the design and put in ceiling panels where our face recognition cameras should have been. So where our face recognition cameras should have been it was completely impossible to put in anything there. It’s just a complete lack of communication between the whole shebang. There never seems to be a case, I got off a call this morning with a FTSE company, I ? 36mins 20secs taken there for 148 weeks, and in 148 weeks they haven’t fully turned the system on yet. This is where if we just sat down on day 1 with the FD, with the head of sustainability, with the head of diversity inclusion and whatever else we could have had all this done.
We had a 9 month delay because the head of diversity and inclusion couldn’t make a decision about printing on the ID cards he/she/them/they. There’s this sort of nonsense going on in the UK right now that I see as being the biggest blocker to progress. I think all of these projects, what needs to happen is that everybody involved needs to be in that room at that time and plan out what’s going to happen and when it’s going to happen. And have these central repositories that when someone on the site is going to change design and put these ceiling tiles and ceiling units in place that I can no longer that I can no longer ? 37mins 15 secs through, that I know about that, not that I turn up 6 months later on the job because they’ve taken so long to make changes and then find out I can no longer put my cameras in. There’s not joined up thinking happening here from what I can see.
WILLIAM BORTHEN So, this is a construction project lack of communication lead. What’s the result of that, Paul? Is it the project delays that the cost of the project increases?
PAUL SHEEDY We have all this modern technology teams and all of the rest sand yet, from what I’m seeing, we’re going backwards a bit. I’m seeing every single project that we’re involved with, we go in quite late. On one project we’re nearly already 2 years late coming in on an NHS build, this last one on 8 Bishopsgate was 6 months late. I don’t get how when we have all of these different ways of communicating that these delays are coming in more prevalent than I’ve ever seen before. And I don’t know whether it’s a culture thing where that’s the real problem here, the technology is all here, is there a culture issue rather than anything else?
GEORGE STEVENSON I think the point about this group, what I’ve tried to do with this, rightly or wrongly Paul, is break it up into smaller groups who can do things and fix things.So that’s why we’ve got an interoperability group, that’s why we’ve got the digital record group so we can define what that is, and also fire critical assets.So we’re actually trying to pick them off in smaller bits. So, I think this group needs to be focused on providing the implication of why we need to things and I think that’s what Will is doing really well here.The knock-on effect of what you’re doing is you have to increase your prices because you’ve got your pricing in buggeration.
PAUL SHEEDY Do you think anybody ever allows that to happen?
GEORGE STEVENSON What I’m saying is you’ve got a buggeration cost in there. If we can iron out some of these things then presumably cost is going to be…there should be fewer defects etc.
PAUL SHEEDY I completely agree.
GEORGE STEVENSON Ruben, have you got any examples? Because you’re working in data centres now, aren’t you? But you’re not working in asset management. Can you think of any experiences that you’ve had where the lack of information has impacted, either on a handover or on something else?
EXAMPLE by RUBEN ROMERO VIVANCOS Yeah, basically lack of information everywhere. We work with design models, so someone design…many big companies are designing these buildings and this is a contract done by the client. A big company wants to build a data centre, they pay designers to design something somewhere and then when they finish this design the client is going to look for a construction company that needs to build what is designed. What happens is the construction company takes these design models and there is no information, the model is wrong most of the time, it’s not coordinated for construction so we need to redo everything from scratch. And we have to focus and model something that looks realistic because the people understand that onsite and they can build that.
We have to focus on that and we don’t even have time to identify what is every single asset. So, let’s say there are assets but not everything that you build is a maintainable asset. There are assets, for example, like mechanical equipment, something very specific for data centres, something that has a lot of value. And this is described with some kind of text and these texts are coming from the client. The client is asking what are your model at this… at least this list of assets with this of codes in your model. So we identify that in the future with a software for asset management so we can extract that information from the model. But the rest of things like architectural, structural, mechanical system, electricals, most of the things don’t have data and my work is construction sequencing for the BIM.
To make this work more smooth what I had to is introduce information in every single object. And this information is about location, for example, where is every single object located in the building. it’s a simple question, but you don’t know. When you get all of the models you don’t know where are the things if you don’t see them visually. So I want to know without looking at the screen or the drawing where is every object. It’s not clear because, for examples, the models are, let’s say when you create a project you define what is the project levels. So let’s say in this kind of building one or two floor levels, but in the Revit models maybe you find 20 levels. None of them have the same name, you need to figure out what is this.
And sometimes these objects are in between multiple rooms, not one room, so it’s difficult to find where is the location of them. So this is a stupid thing, but we never have the correct information, we need to invent something like programming so there’s a way to add this data. It will be interesting to add the information like Uniclass to 2015 codes in these objects, but it’s hard work, someone has to do that, maybe you can be wrong and you don’t have certainty of what you’re doing. This kind of work is super-fast, I suppose you don’t have time to…properly this information. I don’t know what happened at the end of when you deliver this construction models.
In theory you have an as-built model that looks very realistic visually, geometrically, but information described by each object is not describing anything probably. So you understand what it is by looking visually, by drawings or 3D videos? 46mins 3secs or something like that. No information, I would say, information is very poor.
GEORGE STEVENSON That’s really interesting, Ruben, because I think a lot of people, certainly I thought that the data centre world had got it all sorted out.
RUBEN ROMERO VIVANCOS The jobs are super-fast and let’s say if you ask a construction company to fill all of the gaps that the designer did and complete probably it will never happen because all of this information may be in an external document that describes what we are purchasing, how much is the price, all of this information is separate, it’s not inside the model, so there is a real issue.
GEORGE STEVENSON You’re working for a Tier 1 M&E contractor, aren’t you?
RUBEN ROMERO VIVANCOS A main contractor, data centre.
GEORGE STEVENSON Is that Winthrops.
RUBEN ROMERO VIVANCOS Yeah, I work in a manufacturer, they design and manufacture MEP models, DFMA and for data centre mainly. And this type of work is totally different, for example, they need more information, but this information is for their own benefit, but it’s not for the client. Let’s say the client is not requesting any of the information they produce but they need more extra information they go through them to manage themselves, the work that they are doing or track progress or check the quality of everything they are building in the factory. There are different interests of information, this information is not for anyone else.
For example, they model a very detailed thing like fasteners, bolts, nuts, also the weld. When you need to weld 2 pieces of metal…they model in 3D, in Revit, a weld and then they put a tag in every weld. And they have a document manager, they have document controllers that generate for each of these welds they have a document that describes when was it installed or the person, the date, unique tag and so they can find in which model that weld exists and what project and what location, if it’s delivered, whatever.
CLIFF KNEALE I was just looking at the spreadsheet and under the column A area is it worthwhile having an item in there for the collaborative production of information? Because at the root of everything everybody has been saying is the fact that nobody is following any process. So, if we could put a process in it as an area, you could call it management, but I think the collaborative production of information needs to be something that we’re looking at because that is what produces better information management. And that will actually make sure that all of the teams are aligned at the beginning because if you follow processes that are out there, it’s almost like the elephant in the room, there is a mobilisation period.
Everybody understands, the BIM execution plan is written upfront and everybody understands what’s going to happen. And you will end up with better information, but it’s not on there as an area. Collaborative production of information is what we’re trying to achieve, so I’m not sure if it’s something we should be discussing. And then in column B you would say it would say it will reduce issues with, and you list out the issues it will reduce, look at the scenario and then add some comments. I know it’s kind of the solution, but one of the problems that we have is that nobody is using it collaboratively.
WILLIAM BORTHEN At the start, Cliff, you said about looking at activities and then what information is needed to deliver that activity effectively. And I think that’s what we try do here, these are the kind of activities that relate to asset management and the collaborative production of information is maybe what’s the role of the asset manager within that to maybe specify what’s required.
CLIFF KNEALE Something that I haven’t seen for a long time since BIM has come along is we used to have something called the design responsibility matrix that set out which party was responsible for which aspects of the design. And then against each aspect or design you would have activities and those activities would produce the information in the right format so that you could continue. And it allowed for an iterative design process by sharing information through a common data environment and if we all just adopted that we wouldn’t have so many problems. So, these areas that you’ve got here, you’re saying that they are activities?
WILLIAM BORTHEN Yeah, I think they’re areas of responsibility and I guess they’re downstream from the kind of design & construction because they are within an operational building. Because they are downstream they kind of feel the pain of poor collaboration of information.
RICHARD WHITTAKER I just want to reinforce Cliff’s point, what he’s saying is important enough for it to be a standalone, I’m going to call it an activity as I can’t think of a better word. And the reason I say that is because within every contract you have employer’s information requirements and it’s about developing those EIRs to generate that collaborative environment that Cliff is talking about. so, rather than getting lost in practical activities, this as a procurement activity, it really is important across any job.
RICHARD FREER George, do you think that should be a workstream?
GEORGE STEVENSON No, I don’t think it should be a workstream because we’ve got too many workstreams. But what I would say, just to reinforce what both of you have said there, the key thing isn’t producing the EIR, it’s as Cliff is saying, who is responsible for delivering it. So, just as you were saying, Cliff, you’ve got a design responsibility matrix, should we have an information responsibility matrix? Where we actually say these are the people that are responsible.
RICHARD WHITTAKER I think that would make sense. You wouldn’t be able to populate it all initially because supply chain is often not engaged that early in the process. But if it follows the same principles as CDM where there is a responsible to build your CDM file s the scheme progresses, then that principle is well understood and it just needs that same vehicle, in my view.
RICHARD FREER George, that isn’t a million miles away from what we did a year or so back, is it?
GEORGE STEVENSON I agree.
CLIFF KNEALE In answer to your question, George, there’s a close link between the design responsibility matrix and information exchanges which is defined in ISO 19650. But since BIM has come along, at first people were reluctant to adopt it and suddenly all people talk about is the level of information needed. And that comes from the design process activities, but then the way that it’s shared really is the CDE, you need to make sure that that information is then managed once you’ve produced it you need to make sure that it is checked and verified and shared in the format that everybody has agreed upon so that you don’t get a file that you can’t open.
So that’s the information management part of it, but we seem to have moved away from, we’re not even getting the right information, let alone at the right time and in the right format. So you need to go back to the design responsibility matrix, get that right first and then you’ve got half a chance of getting the information that you need.
GEORGE STEVENSON I’ve just got one last thing to throw in here and that is that on Monday I had a meeting with some people that are part of another part of what we’re doing. This company here ORCA, they’re a software company, but they are part of this food equipment service, they’re maintenance people. And one of the things that they want to talk to me about was how can we look at what the impact is. They do a lot with supermarkets, for example, or more importantly fridge companies, and if the fridge goes down the impact on that financially is significant. Not just losing stock but also the impact on shoppers and the like. So, what they wanted to ask is whether their perspective of looking at what the impact is of incomplete information was…
I thought that fed really well into what we’re talking about here. So I’m going to have another session with them, they could probably provide some good stuff for us in here. They’re not just doing food, air conditioning and things like that, but it’s that mindset really, it’s like on the PFI that Cliff was talking about earlier. If an air handling unit goes down, what spaces is it affecting and what penalties are coming through. And therefore that heightens the importance of the maintenance of that air handling unit as opposed to others.
WILLIAM BORTHEN Yeah, it’s asset criticality really, there is a hierarchy of how important different asset types are and some are more important than others and have an impact on the business in different ways.
GEORGE STEVENSON And invariably, the information about which equipment is supporting which systems which are supporting which spaces isn’t being delivered. It’s staggering really, but it really isn’t being delivered. I don’t know whether you would agree with that, Ruben, but it’s not easy to do that in Revit, for example. We often find that there is a disconnect, we get the information about what systems are in the building, but we don’t often get information about what assets are part of that system. And we certainly don’t get information about what areas and spaces are being supported by those systems. That’s stuff that’s got to be done retrospectively.
RUBEN ROMERO VIVANCOS Yeah, I think the better we have done is using COBie. We get that response to this question, but it’s not necessary to do that to build, is the answer sometimes.