Impact Workstream Meeting 21-03-2025

IMPACT WORKSTREAM MEETING 21-03-2025

TERENCE HORSMAN I think what would be really good is to get the word out as we noted in the minutes from the last meeting. I and Chris also have shared it on Linkedin, so if we pull together and spread this throughout our network I think we can drum up some support from the initiative which would be excellent.

GEORGE STEVENSON What we’re doing here, the impact workstream is there for us to formulate both the financial impact and the safety impact, and all of those sorts of things, for better information. Or the impact for poor information. So, this is just one component, a really important component, in the other things that we’re doing. So, for example, we had the digital asset capture workstream on Wednesday where we had 50 or so people on that, you can go back and look at that.

We’ve also got the Golden Thread workstream coming up on the 2nd of April and we’ve got digital handover coming up on the 3rd of April. So the reason I’m saying that is the impact of what we’re doing here is so important because it’s actually giving us the why we’re doing all of these things, rather than just the how. In the others we’re doing the how, this is really focused, I think, on the why.

TERENCE HORSMAN I think that makes a lot of sense. And it’s also about evaluating the impact of system and asset downtime and quantifying what that impact actually is. And I wanted to share with the group a model that I’ve now created. It’s a first prototype, so it’s here to be challenged, so please do, and to be enriched. But how do we go from arbitrary parameters to the actual pounds, shillings and pence of what the impact of a particular asset downtime is? And also, what is the effect of evaluating a maintenance proposition at the commissioning stage and at the handover stage, to that asset or system performance?

ANDREW PERRY I’ll give you some thoughts on that. In terms of the impact of asset failure. If you’re an organisation and you know your core key critical business activities. What is your organisation? What are your core activities? What assets and systems support those activities? I.e. what are your enablers for your outputs and your revenue stream? What resilience have you got in those systems? And what is the impact of failure? And what is the risk of that impact landing, based on resilience? But then you also take into account obsolescence, reliability, condition. What maintenance requirements are appropriate to actually keep those systems operational and maintain uptime?

Then you start to drift in to the history of breakdowns and reactives. And you start to then form a risk matrix of the risk, the impact, the probability of that risk crystallising and the cost to the business. Not just in terms of fixing the asset, but also in terms of lost revenue, lost production or other costs that come against your business efficiency. So, you’ve really got to have people that understand the business and then understand what part of the facility support that business. So, it’s a three-dimensional aspect and a risk somewhere will shift a risk somewhere else, out of an acceptable range into an unacceptable range. So, what do you need to do to rebalance those risks? 3D chess is how I look at it.

TERENCE HORSMAN I think that’s a really fair point. It’s certainly a multidimensional model that we need to create, I agree. And very interesting points on planning of obsolescence, what are the redundancy measures put in place as well. Because clearly it all stems from your core business objective. If it contributes to the core business objective then it ranks higher than other aspects that perhaps are more…if my coffee machine in the pantry goes down, I might be slightly grumpy during the day, but that’s about it, right.

ANDREW PERRY And then you start to look in what industry are you in? Are you compromising accreditation, certification, regulation? All of those aspects. If you can’t prove if you’re a manufacturing or pharmaceuticals and you have clean room environments that you can’t maintain or prove or calibrate, then your business is down. So, it’s anything that impacts on your business.

CHRISS CRAGGS You’re talking quite knowledgeably about this, Andrew, have you worked on this before? Do you have a matrix that you referred to?

ANDREW PERRY BSRIA have a very good one, it’s part of their risk-focused business-focused maintenance guidance notes. And there is in fact a matrix in it. I have used it in a PFI context to look at what were the principal risks to losing schools in London. And in terms of availability for a school it’s keep the lights on, keep[ the hot water running, keep the toilets flushing. if you lose any of those, and these are all reflected in the key availability criteria, you need to look at what are the risks in those sort of things. And i’ve got a live example of one somewhere, I’ll put it in the chat if I can find it. But if you go back to the 2001 one you might find some daft bugger called Perry who’s part of the steering group.

GEORGE STEVENSON And Jo Harris from BSRIA, who’s one of the authors of this, she works at Sodexo now and she’s one of our big supporters. So, we can wrap her into this, she really understands this stuff.

TERENCE HORSMAN I think that would be fantastic.

ANDREW PERRY And obviously bringing the up-to-date, bringing in digital twins.You could run what if scenarios to say what if we lose this system, what’s the knock on effect?or actually what’s the first signs that we’ve lost this system? Where does it appear? If somebody rings up and says it’s cold and you track back and you think oh, OK, is it a boiler? Is it a pump? Is it a control valve? All the way along you can run what if scenarios.

GEORGE STEVENSON Can I just build on that because there’s some real case study examples of that. In hospitals what often happens is that somebody will contact the help desk and say it’s too cold, or too warm. And what can happen is that the engineer goes out and starts adjusting the fan cool unit, or adjusting the heating or the cooling system. Whereas actually, if they go back and check what the performance of that space should be they may well find that it’s in spec. And by messing about with it…

ANDREW PERRY They’ve buggered everything else up.

GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, exactly. So therefore what has to happen is that the information about that space and, for example, how many people are working in that space. it may be too hot because it was designed to work with 6 people and they’ve got 12 in it. So, one of the things that certainly is happening now is that that type of intelligent interface between the help desk and actually getting somebody to apparently fix something that doesn’t need fixing is important. And the other aspect of this, this business focused maintenance.

I came across this probably 20 years ago and it was a revelation to me because they’d identified 70% of things go wrong just after they’ve been maintained. So, what the logic of that was is if something is working, don’t touch it. A planned maintenance activities where you’ve got regular maintenance may not be the best way of doing things. it makes more sense, perhaps, to have monitors on things that alert you when something is going to go wrong and therefore you focus on that side of it.

ANDREW PERRY There were some very good questions and thoughts coming out at the CIBSE maintain to perform thing, I’ll drop my notes from the day into the chat. it starts to bring a little bit of focus into how we need to look at things. It was the one at the back end of last year. It was asking will tech replace the engineer.

GEORGE STEVENSON Chris Jeffers, he’s also on the CIBSE group, he works at Mott McDonald, I think.

TERENCE HORSMAN I love the discussion, this was really useful, it’s great to be able to pick your brains on the subject matter.And it sounds like we’ve got a couple of people in our network that we may be able to get involved with this as well. I wanted to touch on the notion you expressed, George, on systems failing after they’ve been maintained. And it’s actually really relevant compared to the model that I’ve put together here. (shares screen). This is based on a live use case of ice cream machines in Saudi Arabia that I’m working with Chris on a project on. Where they’re looking at their uptime percentage of these ice cream machines that are notoriously failing within the service proposition.

And when we dial this back to core activities, to the business focus, clearly Burger King wants to sell ice cream, it’s a basic use case. And what we found is that basically they were cost cutting on their maintenance spend. So, they were going for the cheapest of the bunch and it was around £3,000 per annum that they were spending on the maintenance of these 12 assets that they had within their portfolio. But actually by upping the spend on maintenance by getting proper maintenance done, in accordance with SFG20 standards and manufacturer’s standards, we were able to decrease the forecasted downtime by 4% per annum.

And as a consequence of that they actually saved a significant amount of money as a return on investments. And as that portfolio grows that would only increase. So, I definitely share your vision on that, George. It is extremely important to measure the effectiveness of the maintenance itself, what effect does it have on downtime? If it has a negative effect, you should definitely steer clear. And if it could be optimised with technology, even better. But if you’re seeing an increase in asset uptime, as we all do with our cars if you get your annual service done, it increases the uptime of your asset, then there is a business case to be made there.

GORDON PRINGLE I think maintenance, proper maintenance and the competence of maintenance contractors carrying out the correct aspects, is key to this. Whether it be the correct component that you’re putting into the machine, that maybe Terence is referring to, because a cheaper component has been purchased. Whether it be an unintended consequence of effectively, in my field in mechanical building services side of things, draining drown or significant water loss in a closed sealed system. So a heating and cooling system, generally closed sealed system, you lose water in there and you lose pressure and you bring oxygen in and you create corrosion. And one of the aspects that we look at is live system monitoring. So, you basically evidentially, within a day get the unit into alarm to basically focus people’s attention that you’ve started to have an issue on performance of the system.

Which will impact on the system, unless the system returns back to the status quo that you had before the maintenance aspect was carried out. So, you focus the mind, as long as the mind at the of the evidence is competent to understand, or just starts to get frustrated with the alarm. And that’s where you get into this BMS situation and alarms situation with many things on computer aided facilities management and computerised maintenance management systems. Which some soothsayers will say well, it just sets off so many alarms, we don’t know where to start to basically configure the correction of the system.

So, that’s my kind of thoughts on it. And at the end of the day as we were saying earlier on, George’s analogy of keeping the system running for as long as possible, not doing planned preventative maintenance, that doesn’t sit with some contracts for FM contractors who want to do planned preventative maintenance, because they get paid for it. But regardless of what status it leaves the system at the end of their works.

TERENCE HORSMAN It almost seems like that conflict of interest.

GORDON PRINGLE Short term invested interest and not looking at the greater picture. And that’s where we are with the PFI situation at the moment. Those that are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel are seeing it as an opportunity and others are seeing it as a train coming directly at them. But others don’t even see the light at the end of the tunnel because they’re still in the tunnel, they’re still focused on what they’ve been doing for the last 30-40 years.

ANDREW PERRY It’s the focus on the short-termism. I saw a classic example of this on a site survey last year. DVLA which was coming out of PFI, we were in an internal plant room on the 18th floor and it’s got an internal gutter which was cast iron. So, it’s about 50 years old and it was fading left, right and centre. So, because of the tensions between who holds the risk FM Co. and the lifecycle etc, what they were doing there was piecemeal replacements of every time a piece of cast iron pin-holed and went, they’d just chop it out and replace it with a bit of plastic. So, over the 20-odd years this had been done ad nauseam.

But each time this gutter failed, bearing in mind it’s Wales and it is a little bit moist down there, it would flood this plant room and then it would flood the lift landing. And you’d have to spend quite a lot of resource in terms of mopping up. After it had gone a few times, why they didn’t actually say right, we’re going to rip this out and we’re going to replace it in plastic and this problem will go away. But because of the arguments over budget and FM Co. not wanting to spend and SPV saying well, it’s only one leak in pipework, you just have to fix that leak.

Why somebody didn’t take a long term view and go you know what? if this pipework is knackered it’s going to happen every time it rains heavily, let’s just do it and we won’t incur the costs along the way. But you’ve got commercial tensions and short-termism as opposed to the long term risk management. And that’s where we are today.

TERENCE HORSMAN Can I ask a question on that particular example, I find that fascinating. Who, in that case, was maintaining the Golden Thread of that asset? Because surely someone must have been responsible for that. And data could tell you the recurrence of that asset failing.

ANDREW PERRY It’s down to FM Co. to maintain it, but what can you do to cast iron 6-inch internal pipework? You can’t really maintain it, it’s come to the end of its life. Because it was only pinholing in places, the SPV didn’t see that it was a lifecycle application and basically wanted to keep their pot of money and force the risk down. So, it’s all about risk management and FM Co. didn’t want to spend £20-30,000, they only wanted to spend £500. But it’s the knock-on effects, the fact that you’ve got to have a cleaner or two there with two Aquavacs for probably a day.

And you’ve got the fact that people are traipsing water all through the plant room, it’s going into the lift lobby. It rolls on, it’s not just the fact that you’ve got to replace a bit of pipework. It’s all the consequential costs that you’re go to mitigate.

GEORGE STEVENSON Again, as I say, the different workstreams are coming up with some very interesting things that connect up. Let me just give you an example of a conversation that we had recently. In the digital handover one, we were talking about the importance of recording the information about a specific asset. So, maybe a fire damper or whatever. One of the things that’s been interesting to me is as I’ve been looking through this it’s become clear that most of the asset management systems, they’re not recording the information about the assets, they’re recording information about what’s being done to the asset. Because that’s what people get paid for.

ANDREW PERRY There is a bit of a sea change. There’s now an approach that says at every maintenance intervention the condition of the asset is recorded. So, if you see it slowly going, and these fields can be flagged so when somebody says oh, it’s gone from a CIBSE grade B to a C, or C to a D, that it raises a flag and says oi, you need to think about this.

GEORGE STEVENSON Absolutely, that’s really encouraging. But the interesting thing is that we work with the FM contractors, they’re using Maximo, compliance software, Plan Radar etc. But actually if you look at what they’re doing, they’re actually recording the activity that was carried out against something and not that particular asset.

ANDREW PERRY And you lose the ability to do proper root cause analysis and trend analysis. If you don’t get it first time, you need to actually do the trend analysis to do the root cause, but there’s an opportunity being missed. And it’s only really now just coming through, but these things matter.

GEORGE STEVENSON So, one of the guys the other day said they were in a situation where in this particular building there was 6 lifts. And obviously if a lift fails in a building. In one of the buildings that we’re working on at the moment there is a lift in a college, there’s only one lift. Now, if that goes, the whole of the first floor becomes unavailable because of disability. So, what he was saying was that when they actually went into it they discovered that the lift motor had been replaced 5 times over a period. But they’ve got no record of which lift had the motor replaced.

So therefore it could have been the same motor in one lift that was replaced 5 times, or it could have been…Most of the asset information that’s currently being recorded and is in the CAFM systems isn’t tied back to a unique asset, and that’s what we need to be doing.

ANDREW PERRY This is where the informed or intelligent client function, the asset management function come in, to drive that quality of detail.

TERENCE HORSMAN Yeah, and that stems from quality information from your service agent as well. Or from that lift maintenance company to give back a job report without any information around what asset exactly had the maintenance intervention.

ANDREW PERRY But it probably is because there’s a need for the lift contractor to actually tie back in to LOLA and other stuff. It's more than likely down to the service provider or the help desk operator to actually input the data. Or somebody from the FM Co. going I need to know which lift this has come down. It’s as much a culture as…

GEORGE STEVENSON What I found interesting, on lifts in particular, is because it’s a specialist item. And the lift manufacturers have been a law to themselves, to an extent, they don’t want to provide much information because they want to retain the maintenance contracts. So, their records of what they install are often considered to be private, which is madness, in my view. And in general terms, from a BIM perspective and from an asset perspective, the lift is just the lift shaft, as it were. But what actually goes in it is done by Otis, or whatever. Now that information should be recorded in a standardised way, but when I talk to lift companies they’ve no idea about COBie. And they see it as something that they do.

ANDREW PERRY Well, because in terms of COBie as a lift contractor, you’re how long is your subcontract chain, your contract chain. Lifts are usually part of the electrical packages. Sometimes it might be a specialists package depending on the nature or the beast.

GEORGE STEVENSON What I said there, does that make sense to everybody on the call? Gordon, have you any experience of lifts?

GORDON PRINGLE No, I don’t have any experience of lifts. But regardless of the functionality of the asset, it’s an asset that the factor or the FM provider has a duty and obligation to make sure that if they’re feeing and charging for the function of repair, what information are they giving the ultimate rules? Or the guys that are paying for it, if we go back to factored accommodation for HRBs. George, we had a conversation last week about het networks and how the race to decarbonise the UK’s heating and cooling networks and all of the rest of it and heat recovery. There’s a lot of work going on here, but theres’ also a lot of concern because of the competence of the construction network and maintenance network, and the obligations of the factors.

But the factors are lifting a margin out of all this maintenance work, so they basically see that as a revenue generation source as well. So if the unexpected client i.e. the property owner on these networks is no longer getting the cost of a boiler replacement, they’re getting the cost of replacement of commercial pumps in a heat network, by Jesus that’s going to be big cost if these things start to fail. And they have been proven to do, that’s why you’re getting DEZNES, the Department of Energy and Net Zero & Sustainability basically coming into it with HN tasks, the Heat Network technical assurance scheme, which is going to regulate hot water and heating to these networks.

And I don’t think that most of the contractors actually understand that this is going to happen. This is happening next year, to protect all of us as home owners on these heat networks from exorbitant heating and cooling costs, and repair costs. So, regardless of the cooling system or the heating system, or the lift system, lifts are a classic. But the big lift providers like Otis and all of the rest, they’ve got absolutely brilliant data on most of these lifts. But George is right, they don’t necessarily wish to open that up because they want to keep it commercially confidential for themselves.

And, like any manufacturer, obsolescence of components is seen as a profit sector. And maintenance of components is seen as a profit centre as well. But a reputable manufacturer wants to basically have longevity elongated. So they can basically have quality in there, in my opinion.

GEORGE STEVENSON I think it also speaks to some of the ways in which some of the ways these contracts have let and that is that they’re based on service level agreements. And therefore to some extent, as long as the lift is going up and down, it may be that that’s the level of interest that people have got. I don’t know, but it can be the case, people like Gordon and Andy are far more knowledgeable about these things than me. But often maintenance companies, or even clients, they’re not really interested unless something has gone wrong.

GORDON PRINGLE And it’s only when the reoccurrence of that cost is happening frequently that somebody at the end of the chain that’s paying for it then starts to say just hold on here. This didn’t happen before, so why is it happening now? Maybe they didn’t have a lift and they climbed the stairs, but they can’t do that with the Disability Act and all of the rest of it. So, an unintended consequence comes into that process. But it depends on the level of the client, I’ve got a pal of mine and he’s a surveyor so he kind of thinks about building aspects.

But a lot of the tenants in some of these affluent blocks just pay the bills and never, because fortunately for them the cost of living crisis is not hitting them. They’re pretty affluent people, they don’t really question it. And then it’s only some people that actually say hold on here, the level of charge here is just extortionate. Are we actually getting a service level of delivery?

GEORGE STEVENSON Coming back to where we are with impact, what I’m expecting that we’re going to get from impact are some real examples, which we’re already getting which is fantastic. It’s a matter then of saying OK, how can we use that knowledge to feed back up the process to stop the thing from happening in the first place? And I was with Ed Coster the other day and he was explaining, Ed do you want to give an update on that misting system? We went into a building that’s got a misting system instead of sprinklers. And Ed was sharing his experience of what the maintenance implications are of misting systems.

EDWARD COSTER Hopefully there’s no advocates for misting in here because although actually it’s in the right location, misting fire suppression can be very good. But in general residential there are some challenges around it and there’s a number of things. One is it tends to be proprietary systems, so you can’t change misting heads in the same way that you would change sprinkler heads. So you can’t just say here’s the spec, I can go to any manufacturer and fit that head. So, you have a problem there right away that your fortunes around maintenance are very much tied to the original manufacturer of that system, so you’re tied into that monopoly.

And also you’ve got some more exacting kind of maintenance requirements in terms of testing of heads. On a fairly regular basis of taking heads out to be checked and putting replacement ones in, so it puts a greater maintenance burden. So, although there are some advantages to misting in terms of smaller tanks and all of the rest, there’s some challenges around maintaining them. And you can end up with systems which become obsolete rather rapidly if a manufacturer goes out of business, or if you don’t continue your maintenance as you should do.

Because if you don’t maintain misting systems, of course there’s the risk of misting heads clogging up which is a far greater problem that with sprinkler heads, because of the size of the holes. That’s an example, I don’t want to take over. And don’t get me started on lifts, because that’s another difficult area for residential buildings. All I can say is a lot of the major manufacturers, they seem to fit lifts as a loss leader to make their money back through maintenance. And some of their parts don’t seem to last as long as they should do and are misleadingly named. So, drive unit…

ANDREW PERRY There’s a lot of different types, a lot of it comes down to where is the lift made. It may have a brand, but actually where is the lift made? And what is the intended use? Is it actually suitable for a high traffic, high use? Or is it a lighter manufacturer? But it all comes down to as the opening gambit was, what was specified in the design is not necessarily what you find on the ground. And there are some different qualities of lift that are not fit for purpose, but as the builder will tell you, it’s a lift, isn’t it? It meets all of the outline criteria, it’s a lift. It doesn’t mean to say that CapEx costs reflects the reliability.

EDWARD COSTER Another example is an awful lot of the lifts that I’ve looked at across residential, although they should be fire fighting lifts, miss one of the main features of a fire fighting lift when you look at them. And these are all buildings built in the last 15 years which is quite concerning, that the level of scrutiny at build is fairly low. That’s a big area, very messy.

TERENCE HORSMAN I think there’s a pull towards OEM, equivalent manufacturers pulling towards a servatised product proposition where they sell a unit with the idea of maintaining that unit throughout it’s asset lifecycle. It’s only become more and more prevalent since the introduction of IoT devices. And we’re seeing this in the commercial kitchen space a whole lot where we’re installing assets that are completely locked down. In the sense that you need to be an OEM approved service contractor to get access to the panels and unlock the information. You need to be OEM approved to source the parts which, hey-ho, they are the only resellers of those parts. Unless you go to the original component manufacturer, which is a whole different game.

And then the maintenance records, like you said George, are flowing through that manufacturer as well, so they retain the data, they retain the information. I’m very interested to explore where that responsibility sits, who updates those records back? How do we continuously evaluate the business impact of things like CIBSE asset conditions? Are pertinent to be able to understand where the asset is in its lifecycle. if that information does not flow back into our own systems, or potentially even into our BIM models, how would we be able to even evaluate that in the first place? I don’t know if people have got views on that.

ANDREW PERRY I think you’ve got to look at it in terms of when you start to think about replacing it in lifecycle. Obviously reliability, number of reactive calls, breakdowns, whatever is a factor. And the impact on budgets already sort of financial aspects, this is where you’ve got to strike the balance between. And don’t forget to take business reputation into that. So, if you’re a developer of luxury high-rise apartments and somebody says i’ve bought one of those, but it’s crap because I have to keep using the stiars, what impact is that going to have on your reputation as a developer to sell further units?

So, it’s looking at things a little bit wider. So, it depends what your business is all about and whether you can pass the risk down. Do you develop it and then sell it on? After that, that’s it mate, done. But if you’re a management organisation, is that going to impact on your business? Are you putting additional management resource into pacify people to deal with complaints and sort issues, over and above what was originally envisaged when you struck a management charge deal? There’s lots of different factors to take into account and there isn’t one size fits all. Organisations have got to look at what are they about, what risks and what impacts do different assets have on our business? And that’s why it’s got to be a business specific viewpoint.

GEORGE STEVENSON For the social landlords that are on here, I saw a post yesterday that was from an organisation that’s collecting information about complaints. And there was a list of the social landlords on there that had had complaints against them. i can’t remember the context, does that mean anything to anybody? I thought it was really interesting because it was basically listing out all of the big…I don’t think Origin was on there, Ed.

EDWARD COSTER There’s no doubt a large portion of the complaints that come to us are associated with a maintenance issue of some type and quite often it’s a recurring one. Lifts is certainly up there because obviously it has an impact on people’s lives pretty rapidly, particularly if you have mobility issues. Or you live in a very tall building and you’ve got children and so on. Yeah, there are some critical elements. The other one is heating networks, particularly where you’ve got district or community heating networks there and the charges around them. That is becoming a big source of complaints. Along side all of the stuff around EWS1s which is another aspect, but i’d have to say maintenance of systems is up there. So, it does deserve the focus if we want to reduce out complaints.

TERENCE HORSMAN What are EWS1s?

EDWARD COSTER This is to do with external wall systems and cladding.

GEORGE STEVENSON From an impact perspective, what Andrew was saying there about reputational damage, I imagine that’s the sort of thing that the board within a housing associations would keep a very close eye on. And if there is a league table of complainants they’d probably want to get themselves out of that.

TERENCE HORSMAN So, I think putting this into practice now, I’d love to work towards a central model which we can test against all of these examples. I think we heard a number of examples throughout the call today which I think would be really good. The current model as it stands (shares screen) covers the following aspects. And I’ll just go through the different things that we’ve shared on the call today just to see if we’ve got that all mapped out.

GEORGE STEVENSON When we talked about this the other day, Ed, were you suggesting that we flipped it? I think you were talking about learning from the risk management.

EDWARD COSTER It depends what you want to do with it, at the end of the day. But if you’re going to look at in terms of an event, equipment failure being the unwanted event, and then on one side you’ll have the impacts like reputational, costs, whatever else. And the other side your causes, what’s going to actually trigger the unwanted event and what you’ve got in place to stop that unwanted event, like preventative maintenance, monitoring whatever else you have in place. And then you start asking questions about how good it is and what can undermine those. Then you get quite a sophisticated view of all of your controls on the preventative side.

And then likewise you can have controls on the well, it’s happened, what’s the reactive repair regime like? What are the mitigating factors like? Oh, we have three lifts, so if one goes down, or we have three pumps so if one goes down the impact isn’t as great, or it’s not even noticeable. So, you can look at it like that. So, very much then you’re moving into that realm of the bow tie analysis for each piece of equipment. So, I don’t know if that was the intention when this diagram was created. We always have to remember what was the model created for in the first place, how is it helpful. The bow tie model is very helpful and you could move that in into that type of model and perhaps then you’d get some benefit from doing that and understanding your system better.

And it’s a communication tool as well, it’s not just an analysis tool. You could say well, this is what we’re doing to prevent said thing happening and part of it’s our maintenance. There’s a question of what can undermine your maintenance and that’s incompetent operatives, poor instructions. So, then you ask the question what do we do to ensure that we’ve got all of those points covered, so you can start breaking it down. Every control you have in place you have to then question what can undermine that control? What’s going to make that control fail?Then you look at controls and go well, which controls are common across a number of areas?

So, if we lose that control, like block procurement, for instance, are we impacting a number of areas which them make that occurrence far more likely that if we were just impacting, undermining one control? So, those are the opportunities for analysis for using that process.

GEORGE STEVENSON I think the other thing is looking at things from a systems perspective. So, looking at how an asset is actually part of a system that is actually working to protect a space or an activity or something like that.

TERENCE HORSMAN Yeah, absolutely. We spoke about legal compliance. Is it something like this, Ed? Where on the left hand side we have input controls and on the right hand side we have the business impact. Was that what you had in mind?

EDWARD COSTER Yeah, typically you’d be talking about the unwanted event sitting at the middle of your bow tie. Which in this case will be lift not working is your unwanted event. And in fact on that left hand side you’d be saying all of the things that could stop that lift working like part failure, people interfering with it, water getting into it. You’d be looking very much on that level and then you’d be against each one of those saying well, what controls do we have in place to prevent that happening? Your maintenance regime is one of your controls and clearly in terms of your business core objectives, that’s a sort of a, it’s not really causation.

That’s just something where you want to say it’s more about your risk tolerance. How acceptable is it for a lift to be down? Are we talking about a low-rise building with a couple of lifts for able bodied people? Or are we talking about a multi-storey sheltered housing scheme with one lift? Where the impact is massive. So, that would be more about your tolerance of failure.

ANDREW PERRY Can I chuck something into the pot, specifically to lifts. Probably about 25 years ago, Royal Mail when they were looking at how the lifts, particularly in railway depots, service the distribution of mail. They went through a process of changing all of their lifts that had belt operated lift doors to hydraulic rams. Because of the reliability factor in the belt drive compared to the reliability of the hydraulic ram drive. In terms of the heavy use factor and reliability.

And obviously you’re in a Royal Mail depot, particularly ones that are next to railway stations, your main sorting warehouse is at sub ground floor level and you want to get everything up to street level to go into the transport. If you can’t open your lift doors, you’re buggered. So, Royal Mail viewed lift reliability and performance at their core depots as a real business risk. So, they went through a process of changing all of the lift doors to hydraulic rams. It highlights the business risk.

EDWARD COSTER Yeah, and OK, the simple overview is lift not working, but then what are the specific hazards? And one of them is doors not opening because if the door is not open the rest of the system fails. So, that’s your initial analysis of what if questions you ask, like doors not working and people go well, yes, that happens an awful lot, it’s a big problem.

ANDREW PERRY So, you could say that is a factor in risks and likelihood.

EDWARD COSTER Certainly when you make your more sophisticated bow tie analysis, you do actually look at how likely is each event. So, you might put doors up there as very high and then some electronic component failing, relatively low, for argument’s sake. And you go through and then, or course, you can then start focusing your controls where the greatest likelihood of an impact lies.

TERENCE HORSMAN Where do we fit budget into this?

ANDREW PERRY Do you mean CapEx budget? Operational Revex budget? Or whole life costs budget?

TERENCE HORSMAN All three.

ANDREW PERRY Whole life is a combination of both, but this is where you come in to commercial tensions again.

EDWARD COSTER Yeah, this is the thing. The bow tie analysis is really a safety management tool. And then you’ve got to ask yourself the question on each one of those is is the control worth the cost? So, budget is really something that sits within all of it, it’s not its own isolated area, you’ve got to ask that question for each one.

ANDREW PERRY If you’re going to be a developer owner operator maintainer, it could be quite a key one. If you’re a developer that’s going to sell it on, like a lot of the commercial office building stock in the UK, you’re going to fit it as cheap as chips. It looks glitzy, but…if you’re one of the guys that then take it on, how are you going to manage the risk to your reputation for that particular office block.

EDWARD COSTER The point is the budget aspect, it fits into every single point, rather than it being its own separate stream.

ANDREW PERRY What’s your commercial model as a business?

EDWARD COSTER The interesting thing is when you do your analysis you can start putting a cost against each control and say this control costs X amount per annum.

ANDREW PERRY We’re straying into Bernard Williams country, aren’t we? He wrote the economics and facilities, it’s quite a thick and weighty tome.

GORDON PRINGLE Just a comment on that. I think we’ve got to get effectively an organisation buying an asset with a known risk that they’ve maybe had bad experience of then asks for MOT certification, or some kind of certification on certain functionalities of assets within that building. And if they’re met with blank expressions then they raise concerns and maybe discount the procurement of that building. That I have seen happening recently because some clients are basically getting away with risk lies and they want to basically examine the historical evidence on that risk.

So it goes back to MOT and some level of metric of maintenance evidence is kind of being requested by some asset purchasers. And it’s certainly coming to the fore I think in some of the PFI buyback which is creating its own concerns for some.

ANDREW PERRY Yeah, the requirements to prove maintenance in the PFI aspect, that’s a can that’s been kicked down the street by the FM Co. until the street is you’ve come to the end of the cul-de-sac. A bit like musical chairs, whoever is left holding sat at the desk at the end of it carries the can.

TERENCE HORSMAN Before people have to drop off, should we plan the next meeting? I think it would be useful to get that booked in.

RICHARD FREER Try the 11th because we’ve got the forum on the 9th and it’s quite likely we’ll drum some more people up in there.

GEORGE STEVENSON Is there value in sharing that mind map, Terence?

TERENCE HORSMAN Yeah, I’ll export it to PDF. I’ll drop this in the chat.

EDWARD COSTER That's on the same level as the building safety regulator isn't allowed to click on links in our safety case reports. It’s causing a lot of trouble.

TERENCE HORSMAN So, that is the mind map. It would be great to get some feedback on that based on the conversation. Just going through what we’ve discussed today. We spoke about reflecting it back to business objectives and core values. I think we’ve got that in there now in terms of commercial context. Obsolescence and condition. I’ve got condition in here, maintenance history perhaps we need to think about lifecycle should probably be in here as well.

ANDREW PERRY Yeah, if I can find it I will drop a real time example of the BSRIA risk matrix into the chat. It’s one that I did about 7 or 8 years ago. Basically because it was in the PFI context the actual consequence of the one failure cost a shit load of money.

TERENCE HORSMAN We spoke about OEM positioning. I’m thinking that could sit within market positioning, potentially. We spoke about service level agreements and how proprietary a particular system or asset or component within that system is, with the example of misting systems. We spoke about the number of reactive calls and the level of interest in a particular resource that just jumps up as soon as failures occur, instead of having a proactive approach.

What we’re covered today, I feel like that’s been reflected in the model, but it would be good to perhaps dwell on it for a bit and come back at the next meeting with practical examples which we can fit into it. And we might come up with some more ideas, especially if we can get perhaps Jo Harris and Chris Jeffers involved as well, it would be good to get their views. Is everyone happy with that approach?

GEORGE Terence, what package are you doing this in?

TERENCE HORSMAN Lucidchart, I love it, you can do online collaboration as well which is really useful, especially when I’m working with software developers.Thanks everyone for the contributions.

CHAT

Andrew Perry (External) 09:34 am

Notes from a session @ CIBSE Maintain 2 Perform Is Technology replacing the Maintenance Engineer?

Is technology the silver bullet to achieving higher performing buildings in operation ?

Is the focus and over reliance on technology creating a skills gap in adapting hands on engineering skills and system knowledge to a data led maintenance approach?

How do we reimagine the relationship between technology, controls and maintenance to achieve, and maintain, building performance ?

What are the challenges and opportunities to create and sustain a new way of working?

Have we lost sight of the need for “core engineering skills” and their value to building performance as a significant part of the current building stock is of 1980’s construction or refurbishment.

What does good look like?

The BMS enables systems to be connected - are engineers using the data to best effect - do they have the SQEP to understand how buildings operate an a “whole system basis” ?

Are assets running at optimum to maintain operational lifespan and minimum carbon debt as early replacement may impact on WLC (manufacture).

Level of user complaints at minimum as high 1st time fix level enabled by engineers knowing – what has failed - why it has failed and has skills / parts to fix it. This needs accurate asset data, fault history- common spares and OEM fault finding + system knowledge

Using data engineers know how the building is operating - in/out of design and energy efficiency parameters. If the data fails to make sense then “need to go searching”

A skill shift is needed to bridge the disconnect between traditional core skills and BMS system operation to give a more rounded training in system operation – the BMS is more than just a time clock !

might want to add a thread for "Regulatory " to compliance to cover off any Certification / Accreditation requirements

Gordon Pringle (External)10:10 am

This metric was used in CIBSE CP1 Heat Network: Code of Practice in the UK and could be used across many asset and systems configurations perhaps?

Terence Horsman (External)10:19 am

Andrew Perry (External) 11:32 am
Application of the BSRIA Risk Assessment - project was for a schools PFI which included a substantial amount of "Retained Estate" + the original builder went bust part way through the new build / refurbish / remodel plan