Impact Workstream Meeting 07-03-2025

GEORGE STEVENSON …Chris have been developing. I think it’s a really good, because we’ve got all of the other workstreams that are really looking at better ways of getting things right, we’ve got the Golden Thread and digital asset capture and all of those things. But what we’re trying to do with this is say what happens, why are we actually bothering?

CHRIS CRAGGS It goes beyond the record keeping though, George. It’s what’s the impact of this asset working or not working and it could be financial, it could be commercial, it could be customer experience, it could be sustainable, it could be safety. So, on the one hand the record keeping that contributes to this. On the other hand. the financial, just to take it simply, we talked about this when we were talking about an air handling unit for an operating theatre. And the impact on operations that were cancelled and patients affected, and obviously financial and so forth. And the point of this was this is a phenomenon, a parameter which doesn’t exist in the construction phase, because whether units work or not, it doesn’t really matter.

Of course, you need to build them in and they need dimensions and they need to fit and everything else, but their operation is irrelevant. So, it doesn’t exist as a feature of a construction BIM, COBie parameter. And then all of a sudden once it needs to be used, there is a new set of features that need to be created that say if this works or doesn’t work, it has consequences. And what are those consequences? And how do we alert people to their monetised value? So, quantify it in a way that is actually meaningful. Crap, if this thing doesn’t work for a week or a month or whatever, this is the impact on our business. So, it was the observation that this feature set doesn’t exist…

T may exist in design because people should be mindful of the assets that they’re purchasing and their reliability and so forth. But by the time it comes to people building, it disappears and then it comes back in operation. And it wants to be obviously recorded accurately, so the record keeping, but then particularly played I think. Because for us this is a feature that guides users, operators, asset owners to carry out a) due diligence at the point of purchase and then b) maintenance of the asset in appropriate regimes to make sure that it doesn’t break down. So, that was the point of this impact parameter and it would be great to get a group of people together who probably were affected by this sort of thing because they’re at the operations phase, and say how do we move this forward?

What is the range of impact, what we’re calling taxonomy, and then how do we create a template that you can use to quantify this and to bring this to people’s notice so they think there really is a pounds, shillings and pence impact on it? So, that was the framework and Terence, you’ve got a presentation to share.

GEORGE STEVENSON I think everybody that’s on the call has been involved in our other BIM In Asset Management or BIM4Housing meetings. But what I wanted to say was that the principle I think everybody understands, what we’re trying to do is bring together people who are likeminded and want to see change. So that we can act as the frontline, as it were, in carrying this into the rest of the industry. And the way in which we’re doing that at the moment, we’ve got various different workstreams which are trying to fix the problems of getting good quality information. Either through digital asset capture or by having much more rigorous digital handover, O&Ms, health & safety files, the Golden Thread, digital records etc.

So, we’ve got workstreams that are doing that. Just to clarify, the purpose of the workstream is to actually do something. So, the objective is that the workstreams take instructions from a working group who says this is what we need, and then the workstreams then get together. And the idea is that where possible they’re task and finish things where we can actually say this is what we’re going to try and do. And over the next 2 or 3 meetings we’re actually going to try and come up with a solution. Now, it may not be the final solution, but it will be something that’s a deliverable, that’s why I’m so encouraged by the work that Terence and Chris have been doing.

But just to build on that though, Chris, what you said there is an understandable perspective on the way that the industry works. But actually there’s something called soft landings which has been in place now for almost 20 years. And the principle of it is exactly what you were saying earlier and that is that information should be checked and tested much earlier on in the process. So, as things are designed and then installed, they’re actually tested and inspected by the operations team 6, 9 months before handover. The problem, is that very few people are actually doing it, Chris, so you’re quite right, that’s something that we need to address.

The other thing is that there is an information exchange process and schema called COBie. Now, COBie is designed to standardise the way the information that is required, and the determination of what is required is in the hands of the client, so that’s why your impact parameter is a critical part of that. But the way in which that’s communicated is still probably best done through a COBie schema because that’s something that most people understand. The problem is that very few people are implementing COBie properly. And what you were just talking about there, which is the impact parameter that will be an attribute or a series of attributes, or a series of properties that we want to add to maybe a system, or an asset, or a process.

And that’s completely accommodated within the COBie schema, the trouble is that a lot of people don’t bother with it. So, what we don’t want to do is reinvent the wheel, what we want to do is understand from our community here examples of the why, because that’s really the big driver. Let’s work out what the impact of this missing information is and then we can move up the line to figure out how we sort it.

CHRIS CRAGGS I just want to go back on that. I’m really very much less interested, and this is going to be heresy in these four walls, in the information than I am on the operator’s awareness. And therefore the response to the fact that when this thing goes out it has consequences and therefore I’d better look after it properly. So, this for me is much less of a COBie parameter that I can record, and it does require then site evaluation because the impact of a given asset will be different on different sites. So, the site then has to personalise it, but consequently then pays much more attention to record keeping because now, all of a sudden, it’s quite critical that we do our services three times a year.

And we know what’s being done to it because we’re trying to avoid this thing breaking down which costs us £150,00 a week. But the starting point has got to be awareness of the £150,00 a week. If we don’t have that, we’ve already said and it’s the classic situation with any SOP manual, it gets handed over and they’re completely forgotten. For me, the motivation for maintaining it is because I know what the impact is and if I don’t do this thing properly I’m going to start losing money. And one day, 5 or 10 years down the line, the client is looking at me and saying why aren’t you doing this thing properly because it’s costing me money and there’s a process for this.

That’s my take on the thing. So, we maybe at slightly parallel paths on this, but this is the interest for me, that people really understand that safety, sustainability, but above all financial. That’s the thing that will keep people’s noses to the grindstone and make the difference between, because digital records will neglected just as well as lever arch files and paper will be unless there is a motivation to keep them up-to-date.

GORDON PRINGLE Could I just make a point. George asked earlier on when we were talking about some of the stuff that we do. I’m in building services, so I provide equipment that heats and cools our buildings that we live in, whether that be…historically not residential properties, but now we are doing residential properties because heat networks are the governments direction of travel for carbon reduction. Whether it be from an air source heat pump, or whether it be from a boiler plant (it’s not going to be a gas boiler plant because we’re trying to get carbon out of the process). So, it’s going to be some form and everybody is going to be hooked up to those heat networks.

Which is all actually from a design point of view a brilliant idea. So yeah, everything you said earlier on, the contractors go and build these things to the best of their ability and that ability is pretty broad-ranged, from the good, the bad and the ugly. And then put in the technology that’s specified or not specified, or they’re encouraged to do so. But what transfers the energy to all of these users, residents, dwellings, are now on a one common circuit where water transfers that process. And one of the big things about transferring that with water is that it can corrode. And if it corrodes and creates particular debris it blocks all of the stuff that’s super-high efficient in that process of delivering heat to people’s homes.

The downside is that when it fails in a residential complex, it’s the residents that have got to pay for it because it’s on a factored charge through an escrow account with a maintenance company. That if I was being cynical, some of these maintenance companies like to make a bit of money out of repairing things. So they actually quite like stuff to fail because they make a lot of money out of it. Some of the escrow management companies lift a percentage charge out of that process, they quite like things to go wrong as well. What they don’t like is transparency of digital technology that tells them don’t touch it, nothing’s wrong with it. There’s nothing wrong with it, so don’t do maintenance for doing just doing it because you used to do it, do it because you need to do it.

So let computer aided facilities management and computer managed maintain services tell you when to do things. Because as I sit as the BESA vice-chair of the BESA affiliates, the Building And Services Associations’ suppliers, my big frustration as a technical distributor. So, I’m not a wholesaler, I don’t sell everything, i just sell the stuff that I sell, but I know what it does. And more importantly, I know what it doesn’t do, so I don’t misapply it and end up with a customer who is frustrated with it. But I damn well make sure that people are using the technology of these components to tell them when something is wrong. Now the machine’s not that intelligent that it can bloomin’ fix it, but it can effectively tell them when, on a daily or weekly basis, when it can go wrong.

I can't really show client information because the people that own these things are just getting to grips with this kind of new deliverable. But it also challenges, if I talk about water, a glass of water is crystal clear. So why, if that glass of water is in your heating system or cooling system, why does it not remain crystal clear? It changes its colour and proposition because something is going wrong, or we’re adding something that we think helps it. And I’m not on either side of the debate whether we should use chemical inhibition to stop corrosion, but chemical inhibition to stop corrosion is like taking an aspirin when you’ve got a sore head. The other way of doing it is to stop you giving yourself a sore head. Don’t take an aspirin for the sake of aspirin because the aspirin companies want you to take an aspirin, sort the flippin’ sore head.

TERENCE HORSMAN It’s a really interesting point, Gordon, and it’s actually a perspective that I hadn’t appreciated before. I think what’s really interesting here is that we’re coming at this from different angles. Chris and myself come at it from a kitchen maintenance servicing angle and then George, you’re coming from a building management system angle. And Gordon, a completely different perspective as well, and that’s exactly the type of debate that we need to settle. I think that using COBie data to capture this information makes a lot of sense, as in parameters, and it’s sort of to realign the effect of my presentation.

But what I was aiming to share here is why should we even care about these in-service parameters in the first place? And to share some examples of the working model that we’ve created so far around different dimensions of data that we can evaluate, when we’re looking at the impact that a particular asset makes to either a system or an organisation. And we’d love to share those thoughts and knowledge within this working group so that we can come up with a model that could actually be deployed in a number of different circumstances. Whether that is kitchen maintenance or building information, or if we’re looking at public housing or corporate housing. If we, as a working group, can create that best practice model.

Something that is easily configurable, easily adaptable, implementable by others in industry and we can share that, I really think we could have an opportunity here to revolutionise the way that people are thinking about those asset parameters. And if that does come to the forefront, primarily on the financial impact, then I’m sure people are going to adapt it because they’re going to see the benefits of having proper maintenance regimes in place and understanding what the risk are associated with, with those assets.

GEORGE STEVENSON I absolutely agree, and just to reinforce that, because we’ve got some people on the call that are from residential markets, so just to put context in this. The whole point about the Golden Thread is now clearly identified that it’s not about managing individual assets. It’s about managing collections or systems or assets, and the building is a system of systems. And all of those systems need to be able to interoperate for the building to be considered safe. So, I think that plays beautifully into what your’e going to go through, Terence.

TERENCE HORSMAN So, here are a couple of examples. Clearly if we look at a building constructed of systems, systems within systems and eventually assets, there’s a wide variety of assets within buildings. And organisations will interact with those systems in a very pragmatic low-level way. Burger King uses ice-cream machines, serves about 50 customers an hour. If that asset doesn’t work, clearly that’s a revenue opportunity, repetitional risk, it’s going to hurt that Burger King organisation. It could also be much more business critical assets, air filtering, HVAC systems, particular assets and components that make up those systems that deliver really life critical services and compromising those has drastic effects.

This is what we’re trying to achieve, we’re trying to create a model, or a mindmap if you like, consisting of a variety of different parameters that can then encapsulate and give you a normalised view of what the impact of downtime and what the impact of that particular asset is. So, it’s actually going to a very operational, very pragmatic view. Obviously the weighting between all of these different elements and dimensions will depend on your particular use case and the business use case, and the particular asset that you’re dealing with. But it’s about creating a model, and perhaps we capsulate that into COBie data and sling it into a BIM, or this could be starting out a separate tool, a separate spreadsheet, it doesn’t matter. It’s something that allows those that use to think about what the actual impact of that asset going down or not operating as intended.

This is what we’re talking about when we’re talking about weighting. So, we normalise the different parameters on a scale of 1-5, for example. We give different weightings to those different dimensions, and we can then see in a normalised way what assets and what systems are most business critical to my organisation. And this effectively could be happening at the soft landing stage, George, as you suggested, actually it would be a great tool. You would go through and not only inspect whether assets are operating and systems are operating as intended, but also what is the impact of downtime. That can subsequently inform maintenance schedules, it can inform regular check routines, it can inform the type of services that we provide.

And, as Chris suggested, I think at the end of the day money talks. So, evaluating and quantifying to a pounds, shilling and pence figure what the downtime will cost you n a particular time period is going to move people. Now here we’re talking about relatively minimal financial loss for this ice cream machine, but clearly if you’ve got fire suppression systems, fire safety systems, critical building safety systems that go down, that financial loss is going to be significant. It could cost organisations millions of pounds and it’s important that we bring that into the model at the earlier stage. Trying to create a model that is agnostic, so it could work in different settings, hospitals, hotels, public sector, private sector, retail. And for different classes of assets, different systems. So, it should be a relatively high-level model that can be applied to any type of system and asset.

So, I’m happy to be challenged on these 4 points, by the way. But in my vision the objectives of the working group should be that we become the guiding force for this industry push towards the standardisation of in-service asset impact parameters. I’d love to collaborate with all of you and thanks for joining the call today, it’s really exciting to really understand those different industry viewpoints and collaborate so that we have a balanced and multilateral approach to this. I only know what I know, we only know what we all know, so if we can collaborate that would be the best way forward. I'd love to celebrate examples and share those examples within the team as well, so we can share that with the wider BIM community that we’ve been enjoying in the other webinars.

And I think it would be a really good update if we could share the models and make that really pragmatic. Of course it needs to be interoperable, so whether that’s COBie data or other types of standards. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel if we can piggyback off of existing frameworks, clearly that’s the way forward. Do we all agree with the objectives for the workstream?

GEORGE STEVENSON Yes, can I just explain my thinking with this, Terence, to differentiate between a working group and a workstream. We may not have it right, but this is the methodology that we’ve been following. The working group is there to have a relatively high level strategic discussion about what needs to be done. The trouble is with working groups, if you then get into how you do it, you can lose people. So, that’s why we differentiate between working group, which is permanent, and a workstream which is a task and finish exercise. For example, one of the areas that I think this is particularly relevant for at the moment is PFI. Now, we’ve got a PFI working group because the PFI side of things, it’s the recipient of a lot of the things that we’re doing here.

So, if we can identify, within BIM4Housing we’ve got a design working group, a construction working group, an operations working group and those meet every couple of months. And therefore what I think we should be trying to do, in order that we get the message out to as wide an audience as we can, we should keep this as a workstream and then feed it back in. I’m not saying we shouldn’t change that, but that’s the methodology, I’m making that point so that we can…the trouble is people come along to meetings and unless they see things happening, they lost interest. I think you’ve got a great framework for us to start building on anyway here and then we can move off that.

We’ve got the digital asset capture workstream, for example, the 360s, which Barry is running a session on ink a couple of weeks’ time. That can be a component of what we’re looking at here because Barry has also got examples, one that he’s been telling me about where the loses for an organisation in having incomplete information are massive. The other thing is, if we look at PFI, we’re working on some PFI colleges at the moment. And we were having a review with the construction team and the operations team and one of the key things, there was no information on the lifts. Now, the financial impact on the PFI if that lift goes down is huge because it can make the whole of the college unavailable. And that starts to run into tens of thousands of pounds penalties, apart from the inconvenience.

And part of the reason for that is because of the way these things are procured. People like Schindler and Otis, it’s a separate work package. And therefore the information about that is considered discrete, as is the maintenance. So, what I’m told, you often don’t get the maintenance information about the lifts because they consider that to be their intellectual property.

RICHARD FREER Can i just interrupt because I’m not clear, and I’m sure I won’t be the only one. You started talking about Terence and Chris have set this out and you started talking as though yes, but no, kind of. And now you’re giving lots of examples, but I feel that we still haven’t got to the point of what you were saying at the beginning.

GEORGE STEVENSON OK, I was initially just explaining, Terence has got it down there as a working group.

RICHARD FREER And you’re saying this is a workstream.

TERENCE HORSMAN A workstream, yeah, sorry, that’s my mistake.

RICHARD FREER No, no, no, I just wanted it to be clear for everyone who’s not as familiar with our terminology, there are a lot of new people on the call. So, within this we have tasks to accomplish.

TERENCE HORSMAN Yes, but I’m thinking in terms of tasking, a great starting point would be to really think about those operational parameters and what feeds into those operational parameters. And once we’re in agreement of the different data points that feed into evaluating and normalising the impact of downtime of the impact of a particular asset or system failing, we could then create a workable prototype. It could be as simple as Excel, but just to show to the wider community this is a particular framework in a way of thinking and evaluating the in-service asset impact.

CHRIS CRAGGS Just to come back in again, because that first example that we heard I thought was a ringingly perfect example of the sort of things that we’re talking about. So, this central distribution of heating, or indeed cooling in some parts of the world, what’s the impact of this failing? There’s some cost there and there’s some customer experience there and there’s really a liability. And then as you were pointing out, somebody is possibly profiteering from it, or possibly benefiting from it. So, there are two sides to this, it’s a bit like a balance sheet, but we need to quantify both of those. If you spend another thousand or one-hundred thousand pounds on maintenance, what do you achieve in the way of a greater reliability? And therefore less financial loss, less customer experience loss, if that can be quantified as well.

So that, for me, is an absolutely perfect example of starting the discussion about balancing what I spend on maintenance and my maintenance regime against what the impacts are when this thing fails. And it’s the impact of what this thing fails, as Terence has said, that we just don’t have numbers on this in the industry. Whether it’s domestic housing, commercial, hotels, whatever, it’s just not a thing and I think this belongs absolutely in asset management. The assets have got quantified impact and that’s a balance of what it costs to do it properly against what the impact is when it fails. So, that was a perfect example and so whether it’s air handling units, or central heating, or ice cream machines or lifts that don’t work. Everybody can very quickly, from their own experience, bring these examples out, how do we turn this into a standard? That, for me, is the question.

RICHARD FREER So basically, what you’re saying is for this workstream it’s about getting examples and using those to what?

GORDON PRINGLE Challenge the norms of various sectors that are just not quite catching what we are at the forefront of introducing here. Bear in mind that some of these institutions and organisations at different levels. You’ve got different FM companies that are innovative, that are basically wanting to do reactive, predictive maintenance. And you’ve got a wide sweep of them that are just doing what they’re doing. And it goes back to Terence’s point earlier on, you don’t know what you don’t know. If you don’t know it, you won’t be able to implement it. But I’m a cynic (a wee bit, because I’m Scottish), so occasionally it goes with the territory. There are some organisations that don’t want technology to change it, there’s some people that are really frightened by the technology.

There’s some people that are basically scared of the technology because it takes them into a sector where they need to find out exactly why things are going wrong. I revert back to that water analysis, if that water doesn’t need to change colour, then we don’t make it change colour and it stays super-efficient and it doesn’t do any damage. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful place to be? Unless you make a lot of money out of when things go wrong when you’re putting that chemical into it to allegedly save it, but actually it’s causing more problems than you actually know about. Some of these organisations are making a lot of money, they have a lot of money to put marketing budgets to stop the soothsayers of technology to come into this process.

And I am really seeing this, I’m seeing with clients who are suddenly saying that that monitor says we don't have a problem, but they’re saying that we do. Yeah, because they’ve got a vested interest in making money that they think you have a problem. So, look what we know, look at ?? 34mins 48secs and building services engineers are basing some of this stuff. And some of the guys who have contributed to that process still revert to the five senses of taste, smell and all of the rest. If you can hear water sloshing around in a heating system, you’ve got a problem. If you don’t hear that, that’s a good thing. If that water remains clear in view of particular? 35mins 9secs and it looks like it does from a tap when you take it out of your heating system, here’s a really good idea: don’t touch it. It’a a closed sealed system, keep it closed and sealed as much as you possibly can. And if somebody comes along and says nah, you need to clean the whole system and treat it with our chemicals, tell them to get lost. Since they’re doing it for their own short term vested interests.

And it goes back to that whole process that George was talking about. The problem that you’ve got in building services and construction services is there’s so much stuff that’s done in small work packages that comes together to make a big system that nobody really understands the big systems. And it’s all tiny bits of smaller construction contracts that kind of come to an end when the complexity of it becomes quite significant. They think they’re trying to manage it, but they’re struggling with it and it segue ways into your PFI thing. Some of these PFI owners are getting a bit nervous nowadays because they don’t have any MOTs on any of these buildings.

RICHARD FREER What I’m hearing is the reason why we’re doing the workstream. What I’m not hearing clearly is what the workstream output is.

GORDON PRINGLE The workstream output, in my opinion, is evidence. Systematic, deliverable evidence that shows people along the way the good, the bad and the ugly. And if you want to have a workstream that’s effective you’re going to have to have case studies that basically shows this is what we can do and we can implement them across the process. But case studies are really, really difficult. I’m trying to get a case study out of a hospital where we’ve got monitors issued, they’re stopping me, the lawyers. The lawyers are not going to sign-off on this because they actually don’t want transparency. They don’t want to put their name up, particularly if the monitor starts to go out. Why? Because the PFI owner doesn’t want bad news.

RICHARD FREER So Terence, your output is examples, case studies?

TERENCE HORSMAN I think the output is, well, first of all this is the first meeting.

RICHARD FREER Sure, absolutely, but I think that’s an important time to determine that.

TERENCE HORSMAN So, I’m thinking to firstly evaluate the parameter model that we’ve created so far and actively challenge it. Make sure that those parameters are agnostic and flexible enough to meet a variety of use cases. So, we can look at actual examples, we can be really pragmatic about it. How would it work for this water treatment for example, this heating system? How would it work for this HVAC system? How would it work for these lower level assets? Have we captured everything? Now we have a consistent model. Once we have a consistent model, let’s see if we can get some people on the team that can actually help to supply real world use cases.

And maybe we can do a pilot. And it’s going to take some hard work to get that going, but let’s get some use cases. Gordon, to your point, we’ve got the practical examples of what such a model can actually do for you pragmatically. And then we could share those findings with the wider community. That’s the way I see that going, our pathway to success.

GORDON PRINGLE That’s what we’re doing, in isolation with individual clients, but the bumps in the road are the technology does become very disruptive. And people are quite insular in the tasks that they do and if you’re challenging the tasks that they’ve done for a very long time, even though those tasks have not evidentially supported an efficient system, it’s still what they’ve done, it’s still what they’ve been used to doing. And some of it is a really hard nut to crack. And, of course, add into that technology, and I go back to my processes as BESA. The problem in the Building Engineering Services Association is it’s mainly guys our age that are at the top of it, it’s not a young, vibrant organisation and they do not embrace change and you certainly don’t embrace technology that significantly.

They kind of do in 2D and 3D in CAD and Revit technology of structural building and making sure stuff goes into the space and fits. It’s really the serviceable from the point of view of BIM level 2 and COBie and all of that kind of stuff, but they’re only toying with it. And ?? 40mins 18secs because it’s hard work and it’s generally needing to be done on top of their day jobs. And their day jobs are quite frustrating because they’re trying to build things really quickly and switch them on and get them across the line from a practical completion point of view. I use this analogy quite often, you’ll often go to a party and somebody will post a social media post that shows that party looked like it was lots of fun, with lots of lovely nice dresses and everybody was having a great time.

But the 4 hours that you were at the party, it just was dreadful, but the images make it look as if it’s brilliant. So, we’ve got all of this marketing that goes and kind of proves what it does, sometimes it’s just not the reality. And god knows we know about that at the moment…all the way to our daily news, we are getting fed some nonsense.

TERENCE HORSMAN Oh absolutely, and according to your point, I don’t think this will not be an easy journey, but I do think money talks. If we can really quantify the impact of those particular systems and assets in a way that allows those users to better organise their data, and better organise their facilities, people will use it. If they can save money with it and improve the user experience I think they will use it. It’s also why I think we need to perhaps have a bit of an effort to make sure that we’ve got the right people onboard with this workstream. We’ve got 13 people on the call right now, but ideally speaking we’d have a range of input into this.

GORDON PRINGLE I’m quite disappointed that we’ve only got 13 because some of these bigger groups have got hundreds and hundreds of people. But then when you delve into impact, you could probably say that…let’s say 20% of the people in the room are marketing. They’re trying to look at an angle to market their process. They do not know how to make an impact. They know how to market it, they know how to dress it up, but they don’t really the technicalities of the impact. And forgive me for the suggestion, if I had a pound for everybody saying that they want to do a pilot, it’s like for god’s sake. I’ve shown you 4 case studies, if it doesn’t do what it says on the tin don’t buy it. Stop saying to me that you’re going to do a pilot. Just roll them out and you’ll find your good, your bad and your ugly.

GEORGE STEVENSON I think that the analogy that you’ve used there with the party is a really, really good one. And part of the process that I think we can do here is to actually get real life experiences of the fact that the way that things are being done at the moment isn’t working, and what is the financial impact of that not working. My view, as far as this workstream is concerned, is if we can identify examples of things that have gone wrong and what the financial impact, the business impact, maybe even the legal impact on something is. And then we can track back to say how could that have been avoided. I spent yesterday at a building safety managers conference looking at risk management. So, this is looking at safety cases are put together. And the people that organised, they’ve come from the RAF.

What they do, they went through the process that they identify the plan do check act process. And they’ve got something called bow tie, which is very similar to what you’ve just shown there Terence, of saying what is the risk and then how is it actually being addressed. So, you’ve got something that you can then work at a high level and then drill down to a lower level. And I think that methodology absolutely reflects what we’re talking about here. Has anybody else got any other examples of things going wrong that would help Terence with this process? Has anybody from the social housing sector got examples?

EDWARD COSTER How long have you got, George? I suppose the example that was presented yesterday, although it was around structure, I don’t know if that’s really suitable for this. But the fact that the lack of knowledge they had onsite about a building meant that they carried out a full evacuation of that building which cost £100,00 for 24 hours is quite convincing. So, it’s about yes, we need the information and we need it available to the right people at the right time. In this cases it’s how do you ensure that this information that we have stored on our databases and everything else can actually get to the engineer on call who comes out from the local authority to this building because there has been a failure.

And they can say oh right, we know this building is a concrete RC frame of this age built to these standards, therefore this crack is either very, very concerning, or less so. Because that was the problem that they had, they didn’t have enough information about the building to make an informed decision. And if you don’t have enough information you have to take the credible worst case scenario. And I thin you can apply that to so many different instances, it just happened to be a structural failure in the example provided. And I can think of many occasions like that where the organisation has the information, but the people that need it don’t have it at the right time and that caused so much wastage.

GEORGE STEVENSON Ed, would you agree that what Terence has put up there, at least in concept, is quite similar to the bow tie methodology?

EDWARD COSTER The visual concept, it’s almost working in reverse. When I’m doing a bow tie, I put my hazards on the left hand side and I have my event in the middle saying this has happened. And the other side, I have the outcome. And on the left, between that hazard and the event happening, you have your preventative barriers. And for each prevention barrier you have things that can undermine that barrier. So as I say, we have a fire alarm system in the building that keeps us safe. But it could break, so what do we do to ensure that it doesn’t break? We maintain it, those kind of things. And we make sure that we’ve got competent people doing all of these kind of things, that’s the concept.

And then on the other side we’re saying the events happened, what mitigation measures do e have in place? So things like the fire service response and contingency plans, what do we do, where do we house people, all of this kind of stuff to lessen the impact. So, you’ve got a holistic risk management package there and that’s how the bow tie works. And it is a really, really useful tool, we could do a separate session on bow ties at some time if anyone is interested. It’s a tool that’s been used for a long, long time in high-risk industries, it’s nothing new, but it is new to our sector.

GORDON PRINGLE I do agree with you, i share that completely in the sense of…we present the problems, people will experience the problems. From within our presentations we look at people’s faces and we really get into the nitty gritty, we look around a room and they all go because that’s what happened at that job. And it’s like we know it is, because it’s happening in every single one of your organisations. You’re all construction contractors, but you’re all making the same mistakes, why are you not learning from these? You’re not learning from these because sometimes you’re getting clear sentiments?? 50mins 29secs that suppress the knowledge to come out.

Because the construction contractor or, even worse, the PFI guys, don’t want you to understand that it’s actually across the board. They are making the same mistakes because they don’t know what they don’t know. And then they do, sometimes, George, you made the reference to the legal side. The problem is when you consult with the lawyers, they suppress it. The lawyers are not driving guidance that betters the industry.

GEORGE STEVENSON I agree, it’s a matter of getting to the nub of what the problem is in each case. One of the chaps that was at this event in London came up to me and he was saying one of the examples is smoke stacks in buildings, where you’ve got a centralised smoke ventilation system that everything feeds into. And if that’s not managed properly then that can impact on the whole building. And the way that the regulations are now organised, if you do anything that needs to be notified back to the Regulator you’ve then got the problem of how long is it going to take them to respond. So, the quality of workmanship with the new legislation is being, at least in theory, overseen and the quality of materials are being overseen. But the regulations themselves are potentially becoming a blocker.

GORDON PRINGLE And the problem is we can’t delay construction contracts, you can’t have people standing still waiting for decisions.

GEORGE STEVENSON So, let's step back a minute. Let’s step back from construction because I think what Chris and Terence are looking here is operations. But the point is the work that I’ve just been describing there, it may be only be two days’ work to put something new into an apartment that then needs to be hooked up to the rest of the systems. But because it’s being done on a high-risk building, by law it’s got to go through the Regulator. And then it will probably take 9 months because they’re just so overwhelmed.

I was talking with somebody last week and they’ve been doing work in Scotland with an organisation that does communications equipment, they put antennas and things on buildings. And again, it’s probably two days’ work, but because they’re doing some work to an HRB, at the moment the law says that they’ve got to go through the Regulator. So, we need to find better ways of doing that.

TERENCE HORSMAN The conversations really interesting because clearly if you have to go through the Regulator that really feeds into that legal framework and the legal operational costs as well. That cost of downtime has just skyrocketed as a consequence of the criticality of that particular system and the building in which its operated. So, to some capacity the parameters around the building itself feed into the operational parameters from that particular system or that particular asset as well.

GORDON PRINGLE But in many cases it’s unintended consequences, surely, some of the stuff is unintended consequence of the regulation. Now, we’re all in favour of regulation after Grenfell, but its gone so far. And we all knew that even when Grenfell was getting promoted and the issues regarding it were getting clarified, who’s going to regulate this, who’s going to monitor this? The building safety officers don’t have the capacity to review this, they can hardly do what they’re doing at the moment and we’re burdening them with so much more.

BARRY BASSNETT It’s a really interesting conversation, but I just want to go off and give you a slightly different steer. We’re looking at it from the construction industry point of view, but a lot of these problems have been sorted out already in other industries, asset information. So, for example, the aerospace industry, the cost of failure for aircraft is an internationally regulated business. I just think that sometimes we can look a bit inwards and maybe there’s other industries we can look at as examples and take some of the lessons learned from them. For example, one of the things that most mechanical engineering companies and maintenance uses is a thing called meantime between failure.

And that’s a really interesting concept because it allows you to look at how long is that lift going to last, but also inform the inspection interval and all sorts of other things. So, while we’re looking at this and looking at Grenfell and BIM and COBie and all of those interesting things, I think part of the job might be to look at other industries and see what they’ve done to solve this. And to be honest, an aircraft is a much more complicated system than a block of flats. How have they managed to deliver this? What factors are they looking at? So, it’s just like a slight aside and maybe that’s something that we can bring into this working group to see what’s best practice in other industries.

Because the aerospace industry has already sorted this out and it’s far more regulated. They will know, for example, if a toilet fails on an airliner they can’t put that airliner into service. And there’s a much more dramatic thing if a component fails in an aircraft, then people die. So, there is a huge impact, so that industry might be something that we can look at. I’m not saying we copy everything because it just won’t work, but it’s another thing to look at. Rather than just getting engrossed in COBie and IFC and BIMs and 3D versus 2D, let’s look at what other industries have done to solve this problem.

GEORGE STEVENSON All I would say, Barry, and it’s important for you to understand this, this is coming from Orca and Chris Craggs, who are not construction, they’re into the operations side of things. So, the point that you’re making is exactly right, we’re trying to learn from other industries.

BARRY BASSNETT In the construction sector we have this whole BIM lifecycle from feasibility, design, construction, handover, demolition, sustainability. I think there’s a lot of lessons we can pick. We’re in an interesting position because we’ve almost got a blank piece of paper. As Gordon and others have pointed out, there’s so many different examples of things and collating those. And putting them centrally so we can use this as evidence, so we can then talk to our clients and say to them this is what you need to specify. In a handover document, this is what you need. And Boeing don’t take on a 777 without having an instruction manual that is ten years long, and changes.

And also they get into trouble if they change it, if you remember the recent history. So, I think there’s some interesting things that we can look at and George, you’re absolutely right, it is the operational side, it’s what do we do with this building now that we’ve built it? So, it’s just a point to look at, i don’t know how we could do that. But this whole concept of meantime between failures, an interesting one that they use in maintenance engineering process plans of car building, aerospace building, manufacturing in general. It’s an interesting idea to put into place.

TERENCE HORSMAN I think it’s a really good idea and I’ve got some people in my network who might be able to show some knowledge of how they do that in the aerospace industry and manufacturing. So, I can reach out to see if we can get some practical examples to share with the team, it’s an interesting approach. Why reinvent the wheel?

BARRY BASSNETT That’s sort of my point, people have thought about these processes where you’ve got a massive supply chain, an aircraft has over half a million components. How do you bring all of those together and make sure the thing stays up in the air? They must have some solutions, so it might be useful to pick their brains and just say what shouldn’t we be measuring and what should be measuring.

EDWARD COSTER I couldn’t agree more with Barry, we’ve been doing an awful lot of that in terms of our safety management, looking at other industries. Nuclear, offshore, aerospace, they’ve all had their Grenfells at some point and they’ve learnt from that. And all of them have also looked at other industries that follow the same path. Why learn from your own mistakes if you can learn from someone else’s? And they’ve been through that whole cycle. So, that is a really fertile area to look at and I think a lot can be done from that. Yes, we need to adjust it and make it relevant, but there is probably an awful lot to bring in there. And I’ve dropped in a couple of links that give a bit of a crash course in bow ties.

GORDON PRINGLE I agree, I’d commend Barry for his comment in that regard. But that meantime before failure, we had a client that has 3 high-rise buildings in Manchester and they were about to replace the pipework systems because they’d had a few failures. And the first question to them was when did it last fail? And they went, 18 months ago. Right, so get monitors in and let’s find out where we are now so within 7 days we’ll find out what the fluid is doing to the existing system. And if that comes back positively, suspend any replacement work and look at the process with more information, now that you’ve got the information. Because if there’s no significant monitoring that tells you to change anything, don’t change it.

So, that saved them £1.4 million of planned capital investment. It’s not guaranteed that that system is going to last forever, but they’re now monitoring it instantly on a daily basis. And as a result they kind of see what impacts on internal collusion, which was their issue. So, forget about the process, forget about collusion, you don’t need to bother about all of that, it’s just the process. So, going back to people don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t know products that they don’t know. Most of this is reasonably new, we’re not putting in old components that they’ve been using or we’re looking at it from a different angle. And Barry’s point is absolutely spot on. An aircraft, how they get these things flying, I have no idea.

But I know how to do heating round the building, because that’s pretty straightforward. You don’t need to be a brain surgeon and you don’t have to talk in brain surgery terminology, unless you’re trying to confuse people. If you bought a house on a heat network and your heating is coming from energy from waste development that’s 2 miles away, you’re on the hook for a percentage of that system…INCOMPREHENSIBLE AUDIO DUE TO DISTORTION…Netherlands, properties over there. I tell you one thing, they’re working a damn site better than they’re going, we’ve got between 14,000 and 17,000 at the moment doing 2% of the UKs heat demand, they want us to get to 20. But if they don’t make sure that these people have heating and hot water in their houses, that’s a big Grenfell moment for the government’s proposal to carbon reduction policy.

TERENCE HORSMAN Yeah that’s a really interesting point, and they have been adopted in the Netherlands, heavily, and it’s part of the carbon reduction. There’s a lot of industry happening in Rotterdam Harbour, for example, and waste facilities which then get hooked up to Rotterdam heating, domestic properties, commercial properties. But yeah, the investment that’s happened there is significant, so I’m sure more will fall out as adoption increases. I think we’ve got a very clear pathway of what we wish to achieve. I can bullet point this and share it with the wider group in terms of the actual deliverables and the output that we want to follow and the approach that we’re going to follow going forward.

I think it would be really powerful to start to share that and publicise it with the wider community to hopefully get some increased number of registrations for this workstream going forward, to get a diverse point of view. And then we can really start to hone in on the actual deliverable and get expected timelines on that. I can distribute the existing mindmap and the slides I’ve already produced. I can distribute a Doodle poll, I think, just to find the next suitable meeting. Hopefully we can arrange that for mid-March to keep the momentum high. With word of mouth and sharing what we’re trying to do would be really good, so I’ll reach out to my network and see if we can get some examples from manufacturing or from aerospace industries.

But if you do have connections or people that you think would be interested and potentially fit one of these expert disciplines. I think it would be excellent if we can share the knowledge here and really tweak the model. i think we’re on to something here, it seems to resonate with a lot of people. We just want to make sure that we’re delivering something that’s fit for purpose. How does that sound to everyone? Is that suitable next steps?

GEORGE STEVENSON That’s great.

RICHARD FREER generally speaking, if we do a Doodle poll for a data most people don’t respond and when they do respond it’s all over the place. Please don’t think I’m being rude, but generally speaking it doesn’t work. It's better to set a date between the leaders and give enough time that people are likely to be free. If anyone misses the meeting there’s a recording and highpoint notes, so there’s plenty of opportunity to catch up.

TERENCE HORSMAN 21st of March I can do 9.15am, UK time.

RICHARD FREER Right, that’s what we’re going to go for, Jiss will get the invites out.

GORDON PRINGLE Do you need anything from me? Shall I look to see if I can give you a couple of minutes of live system data? Because it doesn’t matter what the datas are delivering because if you have this data from various different devices, that operationally makes the system work better. That’s what we’re actually trying to do.

TERENCE HORSMAN I think it could certainly work. Real life examples would be most welcome and I think the bow tie example is interesting as well. What I can do following this meeting is distribute very brief bullet points of what we’re trying to achieve in the workstream. And if you’ve got relevant examples, whether from your own industry or things that you’ve observed that you want to share with the workstream, that would be fantastic.

GEORGE STEVENSON Again, feeding back, Terence, to a real life experience, the things that happen happen in these meetings. So, if we send something to people and ask them to do something, invariably, even though people are very interested and committed in doing it, we find that people just don’t have the time. I’m not being negative on that, I’m just saying the practically of it. It’s a matter of catching people and them being very efficient in terms of what we’re asking them to do. I’m a real culprit of this, I keep getting that wrong…

RICHARD FREER People have advocated their hour and a half, but that’s what you’re going to get. There’ll be the odd one, but realistically speaking…do you know how hard it is for me to get a date out of George for a meeting? It can take weeks! You’ve done it in 2 minutes, well done, because it’s in the meeting.

GEORGE STEVENSON On that bow tie bit, Ed, is that something, without talking about proprietary software because i don’t think we should be doing that. But I think the bowtie methodology.

EDWARD COSTER It’s a methodology, you could just do it on paper if you wanted, analogue style. There’s lots fo systems out there, I’ve just done it using drawing software. In a lot of cases what I would say, also that first link I dropped in there for Risktec, they have an area called their knowledge bank. There’s a lot of interesting articles on there, some about the digitalisation for risk management, there might be some other interesting things to read in there. Risktec are a very advanced company for helping people manage risk around high-risk industries. Like a lot of these organisations they like to share a lot of information, it’s the sort of culture in safety and high-risk. Which is reflected here as well and that’s good, the DNA is there.

GEORGE STEVENSON To some extent, Terence, what I’m thinking with this is that although we obviously don’t want to dilute Chris’ focus on the financial risk because I absolutely agree with him, that’s something that’s going to cause people to invest or change. But if we can find a methodology which isn’t just, financial risk is just one of the risks, so if there is a methodology that works for other types of risks that people seem willing to follow then that seems to make sense.

TERENCE HORSMAN Yeah, I think that makes sense. I think in our original proposal (shares screen)…and perhaps we’re thinking about this the wrong way, so I’m happy to hear your thoughts on it. But we were thinking if we have all of these different parameters, financial is just one parameter that feeds into evaluating impact. But it is a very powerful way to normalise and evaluate these other parameters. For example, operational, how would you evaluate that? You could describe it, but clearly at the end of the day you’re going to have to make a judgment call on it.

And to do that it’s easiest to express it as a financial matter. The same thing for environmental, you could look at tonnes of CO2 saved, or the number of maintenance visits reduced, circular economy recyclability of that. But how are you going to actually, in a normalised way, evaluate that particular dimension? I think that’s where we’re arguing yes, you have to evaluate those different dimensions, but eventually you express that as a financial measure to be able to have a quantifiable way of evaluating that. Does that make sense?

GORDON PRINGLE It does, if you’ve got a system of continual monitoring process that demonstrates, in a non-technical manner, of graphical metric, there’s your answer. How you get that and what device you use to do it, or what process you use. The secret is to make sure that it’s systematic, that it’s got less human intervention because human intervention sometimes leads to disruption of task. Because they don’t copy the same task, they deviate from the task. So, that’s where I think from process and that’s where I would imagine in the aviation industry learns from mistakes because it’s analysing every single one of the millions of components that are in there. And if they get frequent failure, here’s an idea, they never use that flipping component again, they move to the next one to get the yield back up on it.

And it’s like any process. On the airline it took 320 or 380 or whatever, they’re building quite a few of them. A heating or a cooling system or any kind of process they’re building, or a construction, medical practice or whatever, they’re exactly the same. They’ve got a reception area, they’ve got 7 doctor’s rooms, they’ve got a surgical room. They are the same, don’t let any construction contractor tell you they’re unique, they’re not. So do the processes correctly. The pipes might be a slightly different way, but as long as you’ve got water in them and…they’re at the right pressure, they’ll work.

TERENCE HORSMAN I’m also aware that we’ve had a number of people on the call today that haven’t had an opportunity to contribute, so I wanted to make sure that everyone gets a chance to share their thoughts. Is there anyone else who wants to jump in the conversation?

JUSTIN GILLARD I have got opinions, but I don’t work on the FM side. Nexus BIM is a facilitator of a lot of what’s being discussed here. I was explaining to George before now, I have my own philosophies as an information manager feeding this system, in part based on what’s being discussed here. I have a philosophy that I deal with the entire supply chain on the simulation side. So, I’m working in a 3D world, the design world, one of my projects right now is actually gone to construction onsite, when it should have been done in BIM, according to the landlord’s wishes, and it hasn’t happened. My philosophy is that I right the protocols and the projects, I then explain those protocols to everybody, everybody involved, the relevant people.

So, when it comes to meeting I make sure not only is the senior person involved in the design at a subcontractor office in the meeting. But when they agree to actions in that meeting, the BIM modeller or the person doing the design change and the information change is also in the meeting because they’ll be enacting that change. So, a big part of the philosophy of how I operate is to police the system. So, I write the protocols, I police the protocols, I take the responsibility for departure and failure to a wide degree.And so if somebody hasn’t produced the information, because let’s face it, a lot of people say they can do things and they’re not sure how to actually do it. I just make sure that they get it across the line and regular meetings.

So, I live in a sort of idealistic setting, but I’ve been doing this for 10 years. I have got a background of 10 years in healthcare medical planning, so I understand the subject of what’s being discussed here, but I don’t have enough connection to facilities management. Something that was brought up earlier with regulation and all of the rest of it, all I’d say about is the sheer volume, or potential volume, of information that has to be gathered and managed and be quality information. My thoughts on that when I heard about regulation is the regulation industry will grow and expand and become more knowledgeable itself and more adept at asking for information, and we all work to these international standards. Those standards themselves will expand and become more encompassing in what needs to be captured. It’s also interesting for me to hear about there is sabotage around some of the practices and systems that we operate within.

In that it was interesting to hear that some people benefit from things going wrong. Obviously not the loss of life, but some people, we all have bills to pay and we’ve all got overpriced houses and mortgages. And across the land people are trying to make money where three isn’t particularly very much of it these days. And so some people are pushed to do things that they otherwise morally may not do. And if that is sabotaging systems that say you don’t actually need, if you introduce the system that actually proves that…which prevents that piece of work from being needed, well, that’s part of what we have to address. I suppose to actually take audit on these situations.

If that’s what we’re up against, if that’s what these meetings are basically up against is people within these FM environments management systems, if there are people that are kind of effectively sabotaging it, that’s part of the challenge for us to overcome that. And that is for me, when I speak to people in regards to the Golden Thread and their buildings I point out that there is now legislation, there is legal responsibility on people with regards to human safety. And sadly it’s had to come to that…under the Building Safety Act there’s two responsible people.

GEORGE STEVENSON Principal accountable person, there’s accountable persons and there is responsible people as well.

JUSTIN GILLARD So, that is a legal thing, it now falls upon someone’s shoulders. So, I do go through the Building Safety register looking for certain buildings from a business point of view, to manage their information and gather and aggregate their information for them. And what’s been interesting to me is I hear the legislation that says there is the chief responsible person. There is, in principle in law, a person, but what I’m finding is organisations are what are listed on that register as responsible, not individuals.

GORDON PRINGLE Nobody likes to give a name because we don’t want to personalise it, so it's an organisation, so they can hang the organisation. But at the same time one individual, that’s kind of authorising engineer.You might have an engineer, but he can’t authorise every single aspect of every single aspect of every in a building and in an asset. He’s not going to have that understanding.

JUSTIN GILLARD Where I’m going with this is that we are up against resistance, maybe sabotage. We have behind us regulations and standards, we have behind us legislation. And I think we have a responsibility, or we take that responsibility amongst us, to actually push against that and expand and improve the systems which have, in some cases, caused failure. And I think partly what we’re up against, as I experience myself, is a lack of will on behalf of some of the people whose job it is to do this stuff. Maybe they’re not particularly competent, I’m not saying that they’re incompetent, but a part of my role as a BIM consultant is to just raise BIM competency within an organisation.

Because as we know it gets said a lot, you don’t know what you don’t know, and there’s nothing wrong with not knowing, but it is important to find out what you should know. So, that’s where I place myself as a BIM consultant. As I said, what we’re doing is healthy, it’s addressing where failures are and we are fortunate to have connections with the Regulators and other people in the process to push this to become more useable, more accessible and more understandable. And unfortunately, to implement legislation that says if you don’t do this, for whatever reason, there’s consequences legally. And it will be interesting to see who the first company, organisation or person it is that is actually prosecuted for not maintaining or keeping the right building safety information. It’s a bit of a ramble, I’ve just been sat listening to what’s going on and I don’t really have FM experience. I deliver to FM teams, but I don’t communicate with them and that will likely change over time.

EDWARD COSTER Just on that point, when the Act was written it was principal accountable person, they allowed it to be a legal person rather than a natural person. It was just that distinct-on in law, for whatever reason they decided to do it, they did it. The other thing is that point of people, if they’re looking at the public register of HRBs, just be a little bit cautious because quite surprisingly for a government IT system it’s got a few bugs in it.

For instance, sometimes instead of the organisation that should be the principal accountable person it’s showing you another person, either the accountable person, or in some cases the named contact who uploaded the information as the principal accountable person. In other cases buildings have disappeared off the register. So, just a word of caution there, if anyone is relying on that data, because it’s not necessary as reliable as we’d like it to be.

JUSTIN GILLARD What I was driving at is this is where the regulatory industry, we need a feedback loop to them. So where as you said somebody has filled in the fields on a webpage, let’s say, uploaded. But nobody, it would appear, on the regulatory side has said you’ve got the wrong information on the wrong box. Because we’re throwing information into an empty room with nobody monitoring it, potentially. We’re giving lip service to legislation which is supposed to save lives and to prevent tragedy happening again. But it needs to have intervention feedback, maybe a report page, a report button on the HRB webpage that you said, Edward, where somebody could say this information isn’t right.

EDWARD COSTER Essentially what we’re doing at the moment is emailing the operational support of the Regulator saying we’ve got a problem with this one. They email back, quite quickly, saying it’s Ok on our system, but we’ve got a problem and it’s not displaying properly on the public register. And it’s been going on for a few months and it seems to be deteriorating rather than getting better. There’s clearly a bit of a glitch there, for some reason.

Like a lot of others, we’re concerned about it. It's also having an impact, not necessarily a safety impact, but because others are looking at the public register, like solicitors when there are sales going on, they’re saying hold on a minute, this is an HRB, but the building is not registered or it’s got the wrong details, and it holds up a sale. Then that is putting people’s lives on hold again, a bit like the external wall situation. It’s another barrier to people selling their properties, staircasing. So, there’s other impacts of this. I just thought I’d raise the point that if you’re looking for reliable data, that’s not necessarily the place to go, unfortunately at the moment. You’d like to think it would be, though, wouldn’t you?

TERENCE HORSMAN I think it’s a very interesting point you made, Justin, around the prosecution. I think once that happens, that precedent will certainly have a ripple effect throughout the industry. Just like HSE cases have certainly made their mark on day to day operations within high-risk businesses. The same thing will happen, I think, in both construction and logically into FM as well. I hope that the framework of evaluating asset impact allows us to steer for that behaviour before it has to come to eventual prosecution, but that will certainly kickstart the new way of thinking.

GORDON PRINGLE There’s an investment company that has used and seen the data that we have availed and that they’re actually using it to preempt the purchase of a building asset and get the information from that system. Which isn’t available at the moment because it’s not installed in that process and basically saying to that vendor, well, get it in and we’ll tell you we’re buying the building. Because there’s an uncontrolled risk that’s got no data and then they can get data. So it’s like that in the great scheme of things, give us the data and we’ll continue with the sale. And it’s right in Central London, a pretty big property aspect.

So I think the investment can bring out the FMs and construction contractors and all of the rest of it. The real? people are the investment people that are using data to power better decisions. And if that’s because they can look at operational performance of an asset that gives them the confidence, rather than just thinking everything is OK, until they buy it and find out that it’s not. And I suppose that gets to the whole PFI process as well.

TERENCE HORSMAN Thanks everyone for their contributions, I’ll distribute minutes and we'll meet late March.

CHAT

Edward Coster (External) 11:53 am

Lessons learned from the real world application of the bowtie method - Risktec

Report Title

Some notes on MTBFMean Time Between Failures (MTBF)

Definition:
- MTBF is a measure of the average time a repairable system or component operates without failure. It's a key metric for assessing reliability.
- Essentially, it tells you how long, on average, a piece of equipment is expected to function before it breaks down.
Calculation:
- MTBF is calculated by dividing the total operating time of a system by the number of failures that occurred during that time.
- Formula: MTBF = Total Operating Time / Number of Failures
Importance:
- It helps predict when equipment might fail, allowing for proactive maintenance.
- It aids in making informed decisions about equipment replacement or repairs.
- It contributes to optimizing maintenance schedules and reducing downtime.

Relationship to Facility Management (FM)
MTBF has significant implications for FM, as buildings rely on numerous systems and equipment to function correctly. Here's how it applies:

Preventive Maintenance:
- By tracking MTBF, FM professionals can implement preventive maintenance schedules to address potential failures before they occur.
- For example, knowing the MTBF of HVAC systems, elevators, or electrical components allows for timely inspections and servicing.
Asset Management:
- MTBF data helps in evaluating the performance and lifespan of building assets.
- This information is valuable for making decisions about asset replacement, upgrades, and budgeting.
Operational Efficiency:
- Minimizing equipment failures through effective maintenance improves building operations and reduces disruptions for occupants.
- This leads to increased productivity and occupant satisfaction.
Cost Management:
- Proactive maintenance based on MTBF can reduce costly emergency repairs and downtime.
- It also helps optimize maintenance resources and budgets.
Building Systems:
- Example application within building systems could be, tracking the MTBF of:
  - HVAC systems: to schedule filter replacements and system checks.
  - Elevators: to perform preventative maintenance on mechanical and electrical components.
  - Lighting systems: to replace bulbs or fixtures before they fail.
  - Fire suppression systems: to test and maintain components, ensuring functionality.

In essence, MTBF provides FM professionals with valuable data to make informed decisions about maintenance strategies, asset management, and overall building operations. By leveraging this metric, they can enhance building reliability, reduce costs, and improve occupant experience.

Piotr Bytnar (External) 12:09 pm

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/piotr-bytnar_in-my-opinion-the-future-of-aecod-is-digital-activity-7303376325120086016-iT-o?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABSR0P0BVf0o-c2KpnxwaS-EaH7sdolZhZk

Maybe you will find this interesting ,could not add the picture only

Gordon Pringle (External) 12:22 pm

Typical data set that shows you when a breach of performance has occurred allowing those to understand what may be required.

Chana King (External)

12:23 pm

I am a project manager (business projects not buildings) and have joined the group to learn more about BIM4Housing. My new project supporting the business to implement ISO19650 and an Asset Information Model and Uniclass coding across the organisation. So we have a common language about our buildings and assets.