FIRE AND SAFETY CRITICAL WORKSTREAM MEETING 19-06-2024
STEWART PARKER …walking away, signing it off is complete and some of the Tier 1s are accepting that documentation. That, to me, is scary. I’ve had some very big meetings with British Land and a few other major property portfolio and I’m seeing buildings in central London, 13, 14 storeys high, with huge issues. There is no way that we would stop a fire penetrating from floor to floor or from room to room compartment wise. And it’s not the component, it could be the installation which is one problem, but the other problem is if we have maintenance companies who also don’t understand what they’re looking at, then all of a sudden we’re putting people in a false sense of security. This is happening at every hospital, this is happening at schools, hotels,. all high-risk buildings, and I’m just worried about what we accept as a document and a sign-off to say that that item is safe.
And do we have to educate the Tier 1s again because the Tier 1s have done a great job with health & safety and keeping us safe onsite, but not everybody is going to be up to…So, I’m wondering if there is a standard for the third-party, when someone goes in and signs something off because I’m looking at certain third-party providers out there and they’re looking at your filing cabinet, not at the finished item. So, I think bringing up to speed supervisors, managers, estate managers, facilities managers, where we can turn around and say to them listen, this is the minimum requirement for anybody who is overseeing your establishment, and this is what you need to know. It’s just getting scarier and scarier, as legislation seems to be really putting the squeeze on and watching the explosion of people talking about National Occupational Standards and watching people talk about competence, competence, competence.
RICHARD Well, Stewart, that’s what we’re hoping to do today, to make a start on that. Emma, are you a property manager?
EMMA ATKINSON Yeah, I work for a social housing company, so if anyone knows you’ll feel my pain at the moment. 11,000 properties in the portfolio, 4 of which are high-risk buildings, one is 13 floors, 3 are 19 floors. I’m just skirting on the 19 floors under the 50 metres, but I have received my call for my building safety case reports which need to be submitted before the 8th of October. So, obviously I’m interested in what everyone is discussing here today about competence…
RICHARD Well, we’re interested in what you’ve got to say as well, Emma. Let’s get back to the main event: Cliff Kneale, Paul White are the co-leaders of this, so I’m going to hand over to Cliff.
CLIFF KNEALE Firstly I’d like to hand over to George Stevenson to give a little bit of background and context. And then we’re going to go through the agenda for today and get started from there.
GEORGE What I wanted to do was just explain that what we’re doing here is not reinventing the wheel, we’re building on stuff that’s already being done. So, BIM In Asset Management, we’ve got a number of different workstreams underway. We’ve got a digital records workstream, one on interoperability and another looking at scenarios that need to be addressed to support business cases. We’ve also got this group, safety critical assets, which is principally fire and smoke at the moment. We’ve also got a group looking at soft landings and PFI. So, the reason I’m mentioning that is that this is in a wider context, this working group has got other workstreams that can take on some of the load. And it may be that we look at decarbonisation as well. So, what we’re trying to do here is look at things from a point of view of building on what’s already been done, and there’s quite a few people on this group that have already contributed a lot over the last 2 or 3 years to what information needs to be in the golden thread.
So, in principle, what we’re doing in both BIM In Asset Management and BIM4Housing is looking at better information management, not 3D modelling (although that can be part of it). And we led the group that was looking at asset information in the golden thread and we’ve done a lot of collaborative working with people that have got knowledge, manufacturers, for example, that you can see there. You’ve got groups of designers that have come together, often these are from competitive organisations, but they’re collaborating. And one of the key things that we’ve recognised is that different people want information for different purposes. You’ve got, perhaps, within a housing association somebody looking after small works, and somebody else looking after compliance. The asset team are probably looking at lifecycle. And then you’ve got the safety managers who have got a different perspective, all of them critical, but they all need the right asset information.
So, one of the things that we identified from the working groups from BIM4Housing is what evidence should we be gathering. And the way that we broke that down was to say what’s that asset there for, what’s it doing? What do people do to stop them from working? What information do we need specifically to ensure that it performs properly? What systems and methods should we be employing to make sure that things get installed and maintained properly? The level of competence is a critical thing and also how do we record changes? So, this is one example of what we've done, we’ve done 12 key asset types. Fire door, for example, we’ve got an explanation there for, say, procurement people as to what it involves. This is going into the detail of what sort of risks does it mitigate, what do people do it to stop it from working, what information is required.
So this is going into a granular level of detail, but the team felt that it was important, and there’s lots of subject matter experts on this group that would probably concur with that. What tasks and procedures should be followed, and also what levels of competency. And finally how should we manage change. So, we’ve done that already, which you can download any time from the BIM4Housing website, for 12 key asset types. Also, what we’ve then done is looked at standardising inspections. For example, we’ve had a team of almost 100 experts in fire doors have contributed to this in the last year. But we didn’t invent it, we took it from the health service, the NHS. It’s got a methodology of how you have a Type 1 survey, which is just looking at new doors. A Type 2 is just a one-off inspection of existing doors, so you get the right baseline, and then you’ve got a Type 3 which is the ongoing inspections.
And by doing that, this is a publication that we’ve produced and we’re now moving on to dampers, fire stopping and cavity barriers. So, this publication is underway as well and a number of people in this group have actually contributed to that. I also then wanted to bring it back to the big topic that everybody is talking about at the moment, and that is safety cases, safety case reports. It's important to recognise that you need the right asset information to be able to support that, you need the evidence. And what we’re doing with this group is looking at what the evidence is. And it’s not a matter, as Stewart was saying earlier, of individual assets, it’s actually how they work together to actually support the process, and this is the most recent guidance that we fed into. So, the way in which we’re looking at this is that if, for example, a fire breaks out in a kitchen and is generating smoke, how do we ensure that the residents 9and maybe the fire fighters) are safe.
One way of doing that is to make sure that we’ve got the right level of compartmentation and in doing so, just knowing that the fire doors are good isn’t enough. We need to make sure that, for example, the penetration seals and the dampers are solid. Also, we’ve then got to look at other measures like smoke control, detection and signage and we need to make sure that all of those things are working and are in place in order that we can be confident. Now, within the industry the golden thread concept has gone very, very well, we’ve got massive adoption from people that are investing heavily into it. But again, it’s a matter not just of being able to asset tag and track doors, although that’s a good thing, we also need to be able to look at the manufacturers information and also what spaces are being protected by that item. So here we may have a range of software applications that are all creating golden threads, but we need to be able to pull them together and federate them.
So I'm just going to give you an example of how that can be done. The information in the O&M, somebody might argue that that drawing, some people might argue that that drawing is adequate to tell people where the fire compartments are, or what measures are in place and the specification. But actually you probably need to be fairly experienced in reading drawings, i can’t read that drawing, i wouldn’t know enough to be able to interpret things properly from it. So, what we’re doing is making it so that you can bring in a door schedule, for example, and you can identify which doors are acting as fire doors and then you can actually see those together in a coordinated form. So there we’ve got a much simpler view, you can see which are 30 minute and 60 minute doors. You can also see where the fire compartments are and then you can glue that together, so you see it as a whole. And what we’re now doing is making it so that we can have 360 photos for each of those areas that can then be tagged with what that asset is and also what its condition is.
Now, if we can do that then that makes it a lot easier for people to do their risk assessments, and also to be able to inform the safety case reports that are so critical to the process now. Finally, from a legislative point of view, this is now absolutely critical. It’s not optional anymore, the information needs to be there to say that the information that’s needed for Regulation 38, for example, is there and the client has got to sign-off that they’ve got sufficient information. And also the contractor has got to sign-off that they’ve provided it. I think that’s really positive because it means that O&Ms, for example, are going to be taken more seriously. So, what we’re doing at the moment is looking at what asset types are needed from a fire safety perspective and then once we’ve got that we can then look at the other elements that are also safety related.
CLIFF KNEALE I’m just going to go through the agenda for today. Firstly there is going to be an introduction from myself and Paul White, we’re leading this jointly. I’m an information manager and also a digital transformation lead. I help companies move from analogue to digital, as it were.
PAUL WHITE I’m an independent consultant, I generally major in smoke control systems, fire dampers, smoke control dampers and various ducting that goes with that. However, I’ve been in various of these groups so I’ve always seen the fringes of fire doors, a little bit of glazing. So, a good holistic view of a lot of things that are needed, including penetration seals around pipes and things. i have to declare that I’m probably incompetent because I can’t show you any pieces of paper to say that I can do any of this stuff, but hopefully from Steve Gore’s slight smile there you might see that I do a lot of work in standards and bits and pieces, so there is a lot of experience, but I can’t give you a bit of paper, I’m afraid. I’m working on how I try and do that, but that’s a different thing.
CLIFF KNEALE Well, you are a subject matter expert anyway in fire critical assets. I'm more of an information manager helping us all to go digital, which is part of the requirement of the golden thread. The rest of the agenda is we’re going to discuss the purpose of this Fire Critical Assets Working Group and we’re also going to overview meeting number 1 which was attended by about 40 people. We can identify the objectives and outcomes of this working group and hopefully agree some workstreams to achieve these outcomes. And then we might have time to look at some lists of building types, systems that they might contain and some products that make up these systems, as a starter to kick things off.
The purpose of BIM in this group, the overriding objective is to improve the management of fire critical assets for all buildings, not just residential, and to ensure the fire safety during the operational phase of these buildings. So basically if a fire critical asset isn’t working properly, or if it’s properly managed it will be less likely to fail in the event of a fire, but that’s really the outcome that we hopefully are looking for. During meeting number 1 which was about a couple of months ago, it was attended by about 40 people, and several objectives and challenges relating to fire safety information and management were discussed. They ranged from ensuring interoperability of fire safety information to standards like FIREie which is relatively new, COBie which is a schema for handing over information and IFC.
This kind of interoperability question will help the smoother exchange of information which, of course, in turn will help us to keep it up-to-date and to maintain a record of the asset. So, that kind of covers digital records, standardising information, software that’s interoperable and integrations with software. That's one thing that needs to be sorted out as part of this huge regime change. And then there's the actual asset management process itself. It was felt that there was needed to be a little bit more clarity on the asset management process which was simple and easy for people to understand, but not necessarily technically designers, but their building managers or facilities managers. And they’re being tasked with managing these assets and to make sure that they all work.
There was also a discussion about checklists, for example, Regulation 38 it was discussed that this is hardly ever handed over in the past, but people are starting to talk about it now, but there was some question about perhaps we could have a checklist for that just to reduce the confusion over what Regulation 38 is and what should be actually handed over to ensure compliance. There was also discussion about competency in compliance in fire safety installations, with a focus on the third-party certifications and training. A lot of talk as well about all of these standards that have come out recently and people working more collaboratively, not in silos, sharing resources, having some kind of a centralised information hub which keeps things simple and is not just full of information that you have to wade through to find what you need.
Then there was also, George has mentioned quite a bit of this already, the change management of fire and safety assets, fire safety assets. Because obviously we know these buildings are up for a long time, so in 10 years’ time how do you mange the change of that? Is it notifiable? And then, of course, the standardised inspections and also accountability from accredited bodies to improve fire safety compliance. So, quite a lot was discussed during the previous meeting and I’m not really sure whether or not any objectives were actually pinned down: this is what we’re going to do, these are the workstreams that we need to set up and these are what the outputs are going to be. In the end, what are we actually going to come up with? Hopefully something that’s useful. So, that hasn’t been determined yet, and hopefully we can determine that today. So, the purpose of today’s meeting is to go over these objectives, they were kind of challenges that i viewed them as objectives, and identify which of those have already been dealt with by other groups that have been set up. We have a digital records group, we also have other groups, design group, interoperability group.
So, we need to review them in terms of which is already under somebody else’s remit and decide which of them we can work on effectively. So, we might be wanting to add a few objectives or omit some of them, by considering the whole process as an asset management process, we’ll just step through it. So, once we’ve come up with a list of objectives we then want to develop actionable steps to help improve fire safety standards and processes during the operational phase. so, that’s what today’s meeting is about, just to hone in on the objectives, identify some workstreams, what they’re going to actually be producing.
PAUL WHITE I’ll just share my screen. In terms of what we’re looking at is we’ve got to start to isolate the systems that we’ve got in the building. And not all systems apply to every building, but obviously the more complicated that a building gets, you will have more systems within it. A system will quite often take the format of various different products, for instance, a fire door is actually a system which involves different parts being put together to give you an assembly which is a system. And some of the products are built into other things to help them to maintain the compartmentation, or whatever it is that they need to do, and so you have associated things. So, you’ve got a system initially with different products in it and there might be some other interactions that you might need to take notice of.
And then the next part is that you’ll have a different type of product, but you may have more than one of them. So, within the product you might have BIM asset 1, BIM asset 2 and BIM asset 3. So each product, a door or a fire damper, you might have different assets associated with that individual item or product. So, just to have a look at a system to start with, and I’ll pick one that I know, a smoke control system. You will have a panel, you might have a fan, you might have nshevs which let the smoke to the outside, and you might have smoke control ducts in a more complicated building or a basement. You might have smoke control dampers mounted in shafts and ducts. And depending on where they are, you might have penetration seals. So, the majority of people initially would think about all of that and they wouldn’t necessarily think about the cables and the penetration seals.
If we take the smoke control damper, again staying with bits that I can work you through, this is probably an asset reference, ti might have some sub-assets, a smoke control damper will have an actuator. We haven’t decided if we need to consider that as a separate asset or not, or whether we can include that within the smoke control damper assembly. But you’ll be starting to generate the information that we’ve been looking at: the manufacturer, the model, the size, the classification in terms of its fire resistance, where it is, how its connected, how its installed, what are the maintenance instructions and is there a maintenance record that needs to be completed, and how often does it need to be inspected. And you’ll see the catch all at the bottom there is ETC because when we look into this there’s lots and lost of things that we possibly need to capture, and I think this is now what we’re starting to look at.
So take your system, pick your products that make it up and then determine what criteria that you need to do for that. And then we start to get to the interlinking of things, and if we take cables, cables are used to link this whole thing together. And that becomes a bit more complicated because there will be different cables for different things. You think, oh, a cable is just a bit of wire, however, a lot of these cables may need to be fire resistant and therefore they become another asset. And they’ll be different, so you might be having network cables going around from a panel to the dampers, you might need heavy cables to run the fans because they have a very high voltage and current requirement. You also need to have penetration seals round the cables where they go through the walls. So, there is interlinking that is going on.
And then the other point that you need to bring into this just to bring it together is a lot of these things are mounted in certain ways and they’re having other functions in terms of compartmentation. So, we need to link them to the walls and the floors. And the walls and the floors, I’m more and more starting to see that the walls and the floors are the key asset where we have to start. Because many of these other things that go through them, cables, ducts, dampers, if you don’t know what the wall is then you don’t know how they interlink and whether they should be used in that case. And there is a hundred-and-one pieces of evidential photographs of ducts and dampers now being installed properly. So, the interaction is there where we’ve got cables, smoke control and penetration seals.
Now, I’m kind of thinking that if anybody is doing FM and things like this then this becomes quite a daunting thing and these are the people that we need to help, we need to train them and we need to gather this information for them. So, hopefully if that’s a quick overview of I think where we’re looking to be, that’s an idea of the depth of critical assets and the critical asset information that we’re going to be looking for.
STEWART PARKER Can I ask a question on that? Where I am with it is that’s led quite quickly into where I was coming from. So when we look at building regulations, especially Part 2a, and I work with National Occupational Standards day in and day out, and it’s easier for me because I’ve got a format to work to and I think that’s what we’re trying to get to, we’re trying to have this format that works across this. I like the fact that we’re looking at systems rather than just an item. I would call a wall a system because, like you said Paul, we have multiple penetrations for multiple reasons going through that wall, everything from cables to data to pipework to ductwork. But at some stage we have to make that decision to support people at the end and make sure that it’s #1 done correctly and installed correctly.
Even immaterial of the qualification thing, but whether they’re competent or not, but it’s more about the compliance. if we can’t rescue somebody at that point…if we’re looking at the finished products as a problem, we’ve got a problem throughout the building. So, where you said training, Paul, and bringing that on, it’s just alarming that we haven’t got a standardised approach to the third-party looking and making decisions on these fire safety critical components.
PAUL WHITE All of those are very good points, Stewart, and two things really. One is we know that we’ve got a huge legacy issue which this group isn’t really trying to solve at the moment. It’s important to the FM people because they’ve got to generate the information, I think that you and I know we’re going to be generating a lot of the information that says this hasn’t been done right. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily unsafe, but we're absolutely going to be generating a lot of information that this hasn't been done right now. The point that we’ve got at the moment here is you know that I know all of the issues with all of this. What we’re trying to do with this is just gathering the information, so we’re trying to give people boxes. And if it’s been installed wrong then that’s a cross in the box.
STEWART PARKER Yeah, you’re correct Paul, but I’m not so much…the historical problem, I would literally categorise that historical problem in one box. But what’s more frightening is that the historical problems aren’t as bad as the new problems that I’m seeing. Now, when I say the new problems, where Cliff had mentioned about the digital process of bringing things together and understanding it, I’ve seen multiple companies that are not complying in any way, because they’re not qualified to do the job, then going on to produce applications to give to certain members and those applications will, for instance, there is an app out there that passes dampers with text screws…
PAUL WHITE Again, we’ve got some points that we can discuss, this forum is a bit wider than that. What I will say is that this information that we’re going to be developing and will be the basis for the apps, because that’s where we need to be. Because if people can’t answer these questions, and if apps are allowing people to pass something or fail something, this isn’t…we’re looking at what bits of information that we need to look at here, first off. The compliance part of it is a different thing, but the point about this is if you’ve gone in and somebody said is it installed like it’s supposed to be and it isn’t, then your highlighting that compliance issue. So, don’t confuse what we’re trying to do here with meeting compliance, what we’re trying to do initially is collect all of the information that we need for people to prove compliance. But at the moment, how people develop their apps is up to them, but this will be the basis and then the decisions come out after that.
So, this is purely fact driving on legacy stuff and it’s purely fact finding in terms of where we go at pre-handover inspections. And what I will say is that in the next 3-4 weeks in another area that I’m working in there are now, George showed you on the fire doors, there will now be for fire dampers, it’s actually 4 inspections. One is the pre-handover inspection, and then basically if you’re going to and do a pre-handover inspection you’ve pretty much got to be a designer because you can’t assess the walls and the interactions without being a designer. And if people are going round doing it as it opens and shuts, then they are the wrong people to be doing the job. And I know they are out there as well as you do.
RICHARD Stewart, where are you from?
STEWART PARKER I’m Parker NVQ, so basically I work for qualifications structures for the SQA City & Guilds, Ed XL, I do a bit for ECITB, I do a lot with Pad Deco? 34mins 12secs. So my first and foremost 30 years in the industry have been doing ventilation, in all aspects, but currently at the moment I work in hospitals, nuclear facilities etc. So, I’m seeing it from one area that works very well, in nuclear, for instance, there is no, and I know that they’re not restricted by costs and times and construction…
RICHARD Are you a specialist in nuclear, Stewart?
STEWART PARKER Yes, we are…what we do is, we work in all kinds, decommissioning, we do a lot in the power stations and then a lot in the military complex side of stuff. I understand that we’re looking at solving some of the issues, but I think that the digital side of things, it can spread that quick. We’ve only got to watch the news…
CLIFF KNEALE I absolutely agree with you. I’ve seen when CDM was first introduced, there were 15 lever arch folders and things got worse for a while, until everybody got it down to 15 pages. So when the new raft of regulations are introduced that often happens. The same thing happened when BIM was introduced, things became less efficient rather than more efficient, because everybody had to get up to speed and understand.And if you don’t have the process right the technology is just going to get you to the wrong result quicker, it’s not actually going to help at all.
So, it is important that we stick to trying to understand what the key things are, it was ? 36mins 9secs County Council actually where they had a consultant came in, and they had 15 lever arch folders on how to do CDM, and they just got it down to 15 pages. I think that’s what we’re trying to do here for fire critical assets management. So, let’s look at the objectives and the challenges that came out of the last meeting and then see if we can add to those.
PAUL WHITE I know George doesn’t want me to mention the dreaded design word, however, this record of this asset starts at design. And if we look at them as fields, if they’re populated properly at design then that gives the working approach for the installation and then you have the inspection and then that forms the digital record for everything that’s been done with that asset. And it makes it easy as part of the building regulation 38 information for the building manager to absorb all of that information. And then their last bit, with all of the other stuff there, is how often do I have to inspect it, when do I have to inspect it, and how do I record it.
So, the bit that we’ve been missing and the bit that nobody wants to do, is actually doing the design work. And it’s recording this design as we go through, but then that leads us to populating the other bits and pieces and giving us that digital record.
GEORGE Paul, just to clarify, I very much recognise the importance of getting the design bit right. I’m just saying that within BIM4Housing we’ve got a design group, and what I want to try and do is…this whole thing could be completely overwhelming, how much that we’ve got to do. So therefore I think that we’ve got to break it down into some logical smaller groups to be able to tackle things, but try and make sure that they’ll glue together.
PAUL WHITE Yeah, I think maybe what we’re looking at is that we need to look at systems, then break that down into the products that are used in the systems and then we develop how we generate the information for the product. And having gone through it now 2 or 3 times with different things, if the information doesn’t start right you’ve got no chance of catching up. And then the bit that isn’t clear is who is the person that starts this process of collating the information? That record can then be filled as it goes through. I’ve looked at the process quite solidly over the last 9 months and hopefully it will give some solace to Stew.
There is a process, the issue we’ve got is where you join that process. So, if you’re going to a site to inspect it for the first time you’ve got to add in all of the information that’s important, which is what is it, is it in the right place etc. Whereas for stuff going forward, hopefully that’s provided in the design. The key point here is we’re generating the list of systems, the list of assets and the list of asset fields, if you like.
GEORGE And the point that you’ve made there is a really good one and that is that it[’s a matter of identifying both what those systems and assets are. But one of the things that I rally want to get out of this ultimately is for us collectively to get a record of where they are and what they’re doing. Because if we can get that then it means that a lot of the things that Stewart has just been talking about can be glued in. But the problem that we’ve currently got is that I think most building owners don’t actually know what assets they’ve got. They don’t know, actually, where the fire dampers are. They might know that they’ve got a hundred fire dampers, but they don’t really know where they are. And therefore when an inspection is done and maybe somebody has gone and done a survey and recorded it, what we need to do is make sure that each of those individual fire dampers have got a unique ID and we actually know where they are.
PAUL WHITE That’s absolutely key. There’s thousands of fire damper inspections out there, but they are just a paper copy and it’s how we get that information out of those. Now, a lot of it is being done by app now, so it should be a lot easier to interrogate, but it’s not necessarily fill in the right thing…
RICHARD Wait, wait, wait, we’ve got an agenda and we’re going all over the place, not for the first time. Let's get back to the agenda which is about what we’re actually looking to do with the group. What I suggest is if people are coming up with points put them in the chat, so we’ve got it in writing and we won’t miss anything.
CLIFF KNEALE (shares screen). This part of the meeting is to review the objectives, these are really challenges that were mentioned in the last meeting. And to see what’s already been tackled by other working groups. So, ensuring interoperability of fire safety information through standards like FIREie and COBie and IFC for the smoother data exchange. There was talk about digital records as well and basically standardising information which also means the classification of products and roles and systems and that kind of thing. So, we’d need to agree, as a group, which parts of this is going to become part of our remit. I know that there is a group interoperability, so perhaps if we come up with any questions for that we could pass that on to that group, rather than try to tackle it ourselves. So they can consider it with everything else that they’re considering for the whole workflow.
Also things like standardisation, we’ve been looking a bit at using Uniclass, but quite often it doesn’t have codes for certain systems, for certain roles, for certain products. But they are open to suggestions and they do update it every 3 months, so that might be something worth considering. We know that FIREie, according to some people, isn’t quite up to spec, but are we actually able to influence that? And to make changes to that, or not. One of the key things that was mentioned was the asset management process. I think it would be a good idea to map that out in the main steps. if you were to deliver a project, what are the 8 main steps that you would take? We could do that with the asset management process, just to give us a skeleton outline. And then we could start filling in the boxes from there. There was a lot of talk about checklists for inspections and Regulation 38, competency and compliance.
I don’t know if everybody thinks having checklists is good. If we had this management process we could start filling in the boxes and have checklists, as you go along. Competency and compliance, we could put in to the process what competency is expected of the installer or of the person maintaining it, or of the designer, for example. Then there is collaboration which is I think what we’re doing here and simplifying information, centralised hubs where people can go and find the information that they need. So, hopefully we can keep the output very simple, the 15 lever arch folders to 15 pages example. Change management also, we need to consider whether that’s part of our remit and whether questions like if you’re changing something down the line is it notifiable to the Building Safety Regulator or not? What do you have to do if you want to change something? Do you have to go all the way back through the design process again? or can you just go and swap something out? We’ve mentioned checklists for inspections already, but there was also talk about accountability from the accreditation bodies because someone in the last meeting was saying that some of these accreditation bodies really need to be a bit more stringent about whether they’re giving accreditation, or not, to someone.
And I don’t know how we deal with this in this meeting, if we would vote on these or what we would do, but we could come back to them and I could go onto the next question which is really about the asset management process. We can start to discuss that and then after the meeting we could draw an outline process out and then decide how we’re going to put meat on the bones.
RICHARD Shall e just ask if everybody agrees with those points and if they want to add anything. Does everybody agree with what Cliff has done there? Does anybody have any disagreement or thinks something should be made clearer? Or thinks that something should be added in? Stewart, do you think anything should be added in there?
STEWART PARKER No, I think it’s exactly where we need to be, it’s what Cliff said, putting meat on the bones.
RICHARD OK, we're gonna assume that everybody agrees with those since nobody's gainsaying.
CLIFF KNEALE Yeah, I would say that the top line here is basically being dealt with by the digital records and the interoperability group. And then this line, I think our group starts here with the asset management process which will include checklists, it will cover competency and any compliance that we need to be adhering to. And then this will actually, if we cover these 3 points mainly…I think change management should be up here as well. But that will give us the resources which we can put onto the centralised hub for people to refer to and hopefully it will be something really simple, just a ready reckoner where you can just go, right, this is what I need to do. It’s got the non-negotiables, not every single T crossed and I dotted. Unless ew want to go down that route, but I think that people are already swamped enough and busy enough that there is a danger of nothing getting done.
Just to kick things off then I’d like the group to answer some of these questions. This is BIM In Asset Management, but I think one of the first questions we need to answer is when does asset management start? Does it start once the building is handed over to the FM team? Or does it start much, much earlier? Should it be considered earlier on in the process so that it is actually manageable? Otherwise you could be handing over something that you don’t have any chance of being able to manage at all.
BEN EVANS From my selfish perspective which is a PFI context, so hospitals, schools, looking after assets for investors, and we engage with 2 or 3 of the major FM companies. So, they’ve been struggling for years to rectify defects going back 10-15 years, not just fire related, but any assets. So, as far as their concerned asset management started even a few years after operations, to be frank, while they get things moving. But my experience is in an operational capacity, so asset management should start obviously at that design stage.
SHARON McCLURE I agree with everything so far.
PAUL WHITE Does this allow us to do a poll? From my point of view the asset management really does start at the design because that’s the point where the first schedule us generated and that information should have things like the location and other associated details. So, the damper, then it will have the size information and it will have where it sits in the ductwork and it will have where it is in the wall. So I don’t really think that there is any issue that asset management starts at design because that’s when all of the products are selected and everything is brought together. And we know those drawings exist, we have compartmentation drawings, we have ducting drawings, we have shaft drawings and we have wall drawings. Now, how we have change management during that process, that’s a different thing, but the point is that is where the asset is selected.
BEN EVANS But I think it’s perceived as an additional cost because in PFI a lot of authorities and trusts won’t pay for the required design work and also the updating of drawings. So FMs get constantly frustrated and kind of have to work around and manage accordingly.
PAUL WHITE Yeah, I understand that Ben, but the point is if you’re not letting people be compliant then you’re putting yourselves at risk.
BEN EVANS Yeah, indeed.
STEWART PARKER I think measuring compliance as well throughout it, like you said Paul, you’re right. We should he able to overcome a lot of the issues at design, but it’s measuring it as the building goes on. Normally historically we’ve been looking at buildings when they’re finished and we do some kind of post-installation check-off. I think it’s measuring it throughout and with the design it lands on somebody’s table, they might not be competent at reading it, but what they should be able to do is know how to read a document and say that marries up with that. So we can have it like a pre-installation, installation and throughout eh build, to be honest.
PAUL WHITE But Stewart, that’s what I mean, there are schedules of dampers from very early on, there’s schedules of ductwork. And the schedule is where it starts, we need one of these here, we don’t care what it is, but this is asset number 72, it happens to be one of these and that goes through the project. And that way that keeps everything together.
STEWART PARKER Without getting too technical, Paul, what I’m trying to explain here is there’s a component, if you put it in the horizontal position, or you make a mistake and you put it in a vertical position, it can alter the fire rating of that item by 50%.So, we have to understand how we’re installing it, not just how it’s designed, we have to measure it to make sure that it’s been installed correctly.
PAUL WHITE Yes, but what we’re talking about here is where does asset management start, I want a fire damper, it’s X, it’s asset number 1. And if you look at any schedule for any of these things they’re numbered 1-70 or whatever it happens to be, and a lot of the systems generate that number almost automatically, so there’s schedules for everything.
STEWART PARKER It might support what you’re doing, Paul, but I have put the National Occupational Standard for design of dampers in the chat.
PAUL WHITE Again, we’re not talking about the selection, we’re just talking about when do we start recording the fact that one is needed.
STEWART PARKER There is a paragraph in there that’s really helpful, if anybody wants to read it. Because some of this has been done before, like you said Paul, you probably were involved in it. So, I think it’s worth going back on some of the stuff.
CLIFF KNEALE I think we’re saying that the design and engineering activities lead to the product selection. That then leads to the installation which then needs to be commissioned and a third-party sign-off and then maintained. Would anyone disagree with that as an outline process of asset management? We haven’t gone through to obviously that it needs to be inspected periodically, just to make sure that it’s working.
PAUL WHITE I’ve done a lot of work on this over the last 9 months and we start with a schedule which is the design schedule which has an asset reference against it. I’m not going to go through what’s in that, but it gives you various bits of information like where it is, what it’s associated with. And then that schedule should then move over to the installer, or the procurer, and they will buy it against that asset management list. And then it will be installed and somebody will say, yeah, I’ve installed it right and I agree with all of this. And then the inspection part fo that comes after that. But the starting point is still the design schedules of all of the parts. And that goes for everything, for valves, air handling units, everything. Every contractor and designer has lists with numbers on them.
CLIFF KNEALE Yeah, they’re equipment schedules, aren’t they?
PAUL WHITE Yes, absolutely.
GEORGE Could I just contribute something here from the asset management side of things because we’re doing this day in day out with our FM clients. And of the things there is a misunderstanding about is that you need to leave it until you know where everything is installed before you produce stuff for the asset management teams. That’s not right. One of the early things, if you can tell them what asset types (not products) are going to be installed, just at a type level that is enormously useful because it gives them an understanding of both the systems and what the types of assets are that are in there. And they can actually use that to start building their maintenance plans, and certainly be able to understand what competency levels they need etc.
If it’’s done in a progressive way, which is the way COBie has been designed to work, you start with the spaces, you then add the zones perhaps, and also the systems. You’ve then got the asset types and ultimately you then found out where the individual assets are being installed, but you don’t need to provide that at the beginning.
STEWART PARKER I think it’s all very good and valid points. I think what we have got in our respective industries is combinations of assets as well. Just because something has a 2=hour rating there and something has a 2-hour rating there doesn’t mean to say it has a 2-hour rating when it’s built together as a system. So, where we look at the design, you're right. If we look at asset type, that’s one way of looking at it. But it’s quite clear with the amount of new, and I know Paul is involved in a lot of the testing but when we’re seeing new tests with certain components in certain fire walls, fire screens, fire curtains for example then somebody will run off with that product and go and install it in to an equivalent, but it’s not a tested method. So sometimes we find assets that are very well installed, in principle the design is OK, but it’s just not a tested method. And it falls short then because, again, you’re trying to do something that’s compliant and it’s not compliant because it’s not been tested that way.
GEORGE Agreed.
PAUL WHITE (shares screen). Please ignore any of the detail on this. This is a typical design schedule and if anybody is in any doubt these come up very early in the project, certainly before procurement. And you’ve got a reference, a location, where the system is and somebody has actually done a bit more work here as to how it’s installed, they’ve even given it classifications (which are incorrect). But what i’m saying is this information in tabular form comes very early in the project. So from my point of view, that is the basis. Now, the bits that you’re talking about, Stewart, come in the next few boxes. Somebody’s made some decisions to get to some of the information they've put in there, but it’s not enough yet, but that will need to be filled in.
But that’s the starting point, somebody says I need a smoke control damper here. And it’s very important from procurement point of view that they have these schedules because that’s what they base quotations on. And if they want another one they have to go and buy another one. So, this information all exists, it’s just maybe not in the format that we perhaps need it in. But schedules like that, and that’s just one of 5 that I’ve got, there’s air handing units radiators, everything. Basement smoke extract, fans, they’re all there and they’ve all got a location, generally. And it’s not a difficult thing for us to get that information and it’s all essentially digital as well. And it’s probably in some sort of BIM model, to he honest.
CLIFF KNEALE But on this list here we’ve added in the equipment schedules up here. But this is a working group, it’s not a workstream. I’ve added some stuff here just to capture it really, it’s not going to be the finished product, obviously.But we just need to consider it so that we actually have some objectives. Are we in agreement? Are we going to come up with the asset management process? Looking at these main questions which were just a list of questions for starters. So how do we know what systems and products and assets are in the building? Where are they located? Are they part of a system? Who manages the asset? Are they competent? Who inspects it and how do they inspect it? Where’s their checklist? Are they competent? How often and who maintains it? Who repairs it? What about if it needs to be replaced? Who does that?
And across all of these steps what standards in compliance needs to be considered for all parts of the asset management process? Does anybody want to run chip in and say what the deliverable will look like from these workstreams?
KAREN TRIGG The main problem I think I've come across on sites is that you can have everything done at the design stage and everything is in place and what products, and as Stewart was saying, when things change you’re not necessarily coming up with compliant products anymore. But you're so far down the line away from the design stage that in the past they don’t go back and check. So when they put a replacement in, in effect it looks the same, I work in fire door hardware, door closers. So a door closer will look exactly the same as another door closer, but it won’t necessarily be certified in a push side fit, for instance. And if you're fitting that on a push side door how does the client know that that door is not actually certified? Because things do change, and that’s my concern, how do we stop from design to finished contract changing?
GEORGE There is a method that can be used to do that that we’re tapping into, technical submittals. Most construction companies operate something called a technical submittal and it’s a formal process whereby the product that was supposed to be installed, somebody is then suggesting an alternative, quite possibly because of value engineering. And the construction companies are geared up to do that, everyone I’ve come across has got a method of doing that. And therefore what happens is that the product that was supposed to be installed is then put into this technical submittal process and then the product that is being proposed is entered. And then somebody needs to look at the difference and then approve it. And unless it gets approved it doesn’t get put in.
KAREN TRIGG Who’s looking at that to approve it?
GEORGE Normally, the formal way of doing it is that it should go back to the designer. It’s owned by the construction company, the processes, and they go back to the designer. Now, the reason it’s significant now is that if the main contractor doesn’t do that then under the new legislation they effectively become the designer.
PAUL WHITE It’s kind of like that. The responsible person doesn’t know what they’re getting, this is the problem. And in terms, I don’t know whether Karen is talking about during the design, because during the design, yes, because the designer is very clearly responsible now. Trying to find out who the actual designer is is still a very difficult point. But if you don’t understand what you’re looking at you trust the person who’s giving you the technical submittal, and that’s how everybody has worked since forever. Ah well, you’re saying that it does this, right, we’ll accept that and we’ll use it.
PAUL OAKLEY The issue is the robustness of that technical submittal process and what we’ve seen on some of the projects is that it’s not as robust as it should be. Somebody has put it in and everybody is just, yeah, that looks all right, I’ll tick it. No one has got the time to go back and check the original specifications, does it comply with this, look at all of the drawings to see does it meet all of the criteria set out on it, every drawing is associated with it. So yeah, they just seem to accept that…
CLIFF KNEALE Do we have a group dealing with this? We have a group dealing with design, we have a group dealing with installation, because this group is going to be managing it, isn't it?
GEORGE Yeah, the digital record group is looking at technical submittals.
PAUL WHITE I think what we need from the asset management point of view is that potentially during the design stage if it’s swapped out and something else is put it, it doesn’t really matter unless you’re an HRB and you do it during the actual installation phase. But the point is that what we need to d is if somebody goes in to manage an asset and swap it out for another one, we need some warning to flash up saying do you have the authority to do this. And when you get into the occupational stage and you go in to remove this asset, we need a warning that pops up that says have you gone through the correct process to select the new product. And, by the way, you need to generate all of the other information that’s in this record to allow you to replace it. I think that’s all that we can do from this point of view which is we have to indicate that if you go into change a certain type of asset do you know what you’re doing. This isn’t just a data recording process, you’re performing design changes and I think that’s important.
GEORGE Yeah, one of the things that we’re trying to do in the digital record group is try and find ways of standardising these technical submittal processes because invariably the work is actually done by supply chains. So the argument I’ve made, which I think is being well received by construction companies. Is if they’ve all got different processes and different technical submittals, then it’s likely that the supply chain is going to get confused and do it wrongly. Whereas the technical submittal process, it’s quite simple, therefore why not have a standardised way of doing it which then everybody can work to.
PAUL WHITE I think I agree, the issue you’ve got is it’s a different type of technical submittal for every product, and yes, we need to do that. I’ve seen a technical submittal recently that was proposing a fan selected on volume alone. Now, that doesn’t mean anything and it’s dangerous and what it actually proves is that the person who is writing the technical submittal doesn’t know what they’re talking about. But a lot of people receiving that will go yeah, that’s all right, they’re doing it, it’s their design, that’s the technical submittal, off we go. But technical submittals are not designs, they’re just proposals.
CLIFF KNEALE I was just thinking from the FM side of things, we kind of got bogged down there a little bit, but quite rightly so, in the installation really. We’ve got a design group, then we’ve got a records group which will capture the information, but we still need to understand the process of it actually being changed. I mean keeping a record of the changes is something different. So I think we need to flag that up, but then we can now move on to it’s been handed over, so we’re assuming it’s been designed correctly, it’s been installed, and if it’s different to what was designed that has been captured and it’s been accepted by whoever is responsible for accepting it. It could be the contracyor design team or it could be the architect from the beginning, or the M&E engineers, whoever it is. It's then handed over to the facilities management team and they have to manage the asset.
So, I think the next question is they’ve been given this building with a lot of documentation, how do they know what’s in the building? We need to address that, do we need to simplify that whole process? And where these things are and how they’re all linked together, as Paul shared earlier with his slides with the systems and the products and then the assets. I think that was a very nice clear slide, actually.
PAUL OAKLEY When you talk about where does the asset management start you’ve got to go back to the PAS 1192 Part 2, you’ve got different starting points. If you’ve got an existing building, asset management is already going on and then you’re going to get a project associated with that. So then it’s the movement of the asset management into the project stuff, what happens in the projects and then how that feeds back. If you’ve got a green field site then obviously it’s a different scenario where generally you can either take the project at probably technical design stage most of the asst management requirements are going to come in, but some will come in very, very early on. And then you’ve got the sort of mixture of the two where you’re doing new build extensions or whatever based on existing assets. And then there’s decisions about what gets fed in on those. So you’ve got to think of the three different scenarios working on existing, green build or….
CLIFF KNEALE I think that’s a good point, I was just looking at it from when does it ultimately start, it should be at design, but as you quite rightly say there’s thousands of existing buildings that we’re dealing with now. So I think for an existing building it would start at basically understanding what you’ve got, doing some kind of survey, if you don’t have a list that is. And then making sure that it was compliant with the building regs at the time and that it’s now compliant with the fire risk assessment.
PAUL WHITE I think the records for individual products and systems are the same. The issue is that if you’ve got an existing building you’ve got to come up with some means of actually filling all of the boxes. So the actual stream of information needs to be completed whatever the building is. Now, it might be difficult, if you’re not a designer, to fill that in, but all of the fields that you’ve got…and if you can’t fill them all in that’s where your risks develop. And I’m not saying that people can do this overnight, but this is the problem. All of these assets all need the same record, we’ve just got to come up with what that is. And then if you’re unable to fill that record, then that becomes your issue. But that’s different to what we want about the information about the asset.
CLIFF KNEALE Yeah, we could be getting into semantics here. Ultimately it starts at design, but if the building is existing we might say that so when does asset management…the maintenance of the assets starts once it has been built, but ultimately asset management starts at design. And then if you’ve got an existing building you’re actually more involved with maintaining the asset, so it’s a slightly different question.
PAUL WHITE But that’s the point, and I’m sure that Stewart will start talking. The issue we’ve got is that we have all of these assets, they should have been installed properly, but they’ve haven’t been, and this is the point. And when somebody is coming around and inspecting it they should tell you why it hasn’t been installed properly. And therefore these things further back up the record which should have been done at the design stage which we know full well they haven’t been, you can’t fill them in because it’s not right. However, at that point we’ve got to come up with…that’s where risks come into place. The record that we’re talking about is still the same, it’s just going to have empty boxes that haven’t been filled in, and that’s what demonstrates your risk profile.
STEWART PARKER I think that’s the blend in period that we’re in at the moment. Like you say Paul, if we can get the asset management from design and through its process to its sign-off, if we can manage that asset. I understand we might start to maintain assets after they’re installed, I’m seeing a big push in buildings at the moment in my field where the assets are becoming live quite quickly throughout the build, even though the building is being continued. If it’s a 10-storey building and you start on the first floor and you build up, you are going to want to protect the rest of the building. So, it happens quite quickly now in modern buildings, but those empty boxes eventually will get filled up because we’ll managing it correctly from the get go.
At the moment, the historical problems is one problem, and a new build is what we’re concentrating on now with all of the latest legislation, regulations and laws, is another thing because that, to me, is an education in itself. Once we support everybody I think eventually in a couple of years we’ll be able to, like you say, the digital formats, the correct standardisation, we all have a format that we work to. Like at the moment, with some of the building regulations 2010, the stuff that’s been amended, from 11a to 11o, really good reading, all the track back stuff and the rest of it. If we’ve got that format now, moving forward we should be able to do it instead of having to track back.
CLIFF KNEALE What we’re saying is that for a new build it starts at design, and if the building is already existing it starts during operations. So, if you were asked to go and manage a building full of assets and you have no record, where would you start? Would you start with some surveys?
STEWART PARKER Yeah, surveys to begin with and it takes be back to that, you’re gonna have to have people who understand what part of the building and what components or systems they’re looking at. It can be frustrating because we see people who go in, I’ve been onto a recent site where the guy was doing the fire extinguishers, the fire doors and the fire dampers. And I looked at him and I thought that takes some doing. So, I think we have to be careful where we look at what their expertise really are in managing assets.
GEORGE I’d say the same, I’d just reinforce that. I think jumping into a survey before you’ve actually done maybe a desktop exercise of understanding what the building is, how it’s supposed to perform, any information that you can get, before you send people to site. Because when you send people to site that’s an expensive exercise and you want to make sure that they’re well prepared and, as Stewart is saying there, that you’ve got the right people going in to actually do the assessments.
PAUL WHITE I think we've got to pull this together and come out with some objectives for people to go away and do for today. And what I was going to suggest is that if people can prepare…can look at the systems that they’ve got in their own buildings, if they’re managing them, and if people who deal with products can describe the systems that their products go into. And if we can get those lists in as soon as possible, that will allow somebody to collate that so that we’ve got a list of the systems.
GEORGE That’s a brilliant idea.
PAUL WHITE Now, we have got some starters for ten, but I think it’s actually better that we rely on the people in the meeting and whoever gets the minutes, if we can put it right at the top, please supply all the fire critical systems that you think might be in your building or should be in different types of buildings. And then if people from the product basis, or the contractor basis, say I deal with all of these sorts of systems that are fire critical, then we should come up with a good list. And then if people can also then start to put under those systems what products are in them, then that would be useful as well. And then we’ve got a deliverable out of this meeting that we can start to discuss in the next meeting.
CLIFF KNEALE Are we looking for two things? An outline asset management process and the list of systems and the products that they might contain.
PAUL WHITE Yes.
CLIFF KNEALE So, we’ll come up with something to table at the next meeting and if anyone has got the time to do something on that, that would be greatly appreciated.
PAUL WHITE Yeah, I think that’s an action for everybody, please send in your lists. One of the things that we haven’t mentioned in here generally is sprinklers, that also counts. So, it’s active and passive systems, ventilation, pipes, cables, smoke control. But that’s my little list, I’m sure there’s things I might not have missed and I think it’s going to be interesting for some people to realise stuff that they’ve perhaps should be doing that they’re maybe not doing properly at the moment.
One final point from me is the critical thing here which is we are protecting the lives of people that live in these buildings. The other point to bear in mind is the fact that a lot of compliance now is about protecting yourselves and your companies and the people who work for you. I’m sure we’re going to see a few issues coming out of Grenfell and there is stuff there that could potentially break companies and put the people who work in those companies out on the street. So, the point of view of where we’re coming from with a lot of this is to protect yourselves, as well as the people who need protecting on a day-to-day basis. We’re not making this difficult or expensive because we want to, it’s because it is difficult.
STEWART PARKER I would like to add to that, it’s also because we’re being told to as well. So like you said there, Paul, quite correctly, Grenfell was a horrendous incident, it’s not moved fast enough in the last 6-7 years for me. Nowhere near it, and we’ve still had a spate of fires recently. Historical problems will cause fires, I get that, but I’d like to add that I can see there is a few manufacturers on here. The biggest thing for me is seeing the manufacturers input as well is really reassuring what they go though to give the client the correct items. It’s not bought off of the shelf anymore. That’s quite a good move from some of the major manufacturers.
CHAT
Stewart Parker
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2010/2214/part/2A
https://www.sqa.org.uk/files/aq/J4FN04.pdf
Sharon McClure (External)12:14 pm
Understanding the impact that all the small changes have further down the line is key.
Stewart Parker (External)12:14 pm