LAUNCHING BIM IN ASSET MANAGEMENT, 20-05-2024
RICHARD ….meeting for BIM and asset management right at the beginning of the year, it was kind of a pre-meeting. This is our official launch. We’ve kept the numbers down today for the simple reason that we really want to get everybody involved in agreeing our thoughts on how we should move forward, but also putting your thoughts forward in how we should move forward. I’m going to be picking on people throughout to try and get everybody to have something to say. If you’ve got anything that you want to show during the meeting, please have it ready. We’re not looking for a series of presentations today, think of it as like a taster starter menu and the main course is probably the workstreams that will come out of it.
GEORGE (shares screen). I was asked to take over as Chair of BIM4Housing back in 2020. At the time the focus was on BIM being a 3D modelling solution and it was about housing. But that wasn’t really the way we wanted to take it, we wanted to focus on the information rather than 3D modelling being at the heart of things, so we very much changed that. And also rather than looking at it from a housebuilding perspective we were looking at things in response to the Building Safety Act and all of the things that were coming down from that, so we were looking at it more from a construction perspective. What we did was we established it from a point of view of recalibrating it back to better information management and we set up a number of different working groups who were looking at things from a particular perspective.
We had development, design, construction. These working groups all had a particular interest, often there were people that were in the other groups as well, but it was the focus. We then used that to say how could things be improved if we had better information. For example, how can construction do things better if the development teams give them better information. And conversely, how can operations teams work more effectively if they get better handover information. The working groups identified things that they felt needed addressing. So the working groups are defining the requirements and the workstreams are the doing people. We were looking at data and we come up with standardised data templates, standardised procedures and, importantly, classification and reusable data libraries
Fire safety was by some way our most active group and we came up with some fire safety critical assets. Sustainability has been big, and we helped establish Zero which is a large movement now in the decarbonisation process, and also digital records. Those are all workstreams that have happened over the last couple of years. We were also asked to lead the Golden Thread Initiative which is really defining what information is needed to satisfy the golden thread. We were responsible for the Asset & Survey Information Group, but we’re also working in coordination with about 100 other people who were dedicated to try and address that and that was fed back to the government. The working groups, we had largely on Teams, this is an in-person one that was done at Digital Construction Week and we’ve got another one this DCW down at Excel.
What we try to do is give people practical examples of saying why do we need the information, so what’s the purpose, and that’s very much what we’re trying to do today. For example, it may be that you’ve got a fire that breaks out in a kitchen, what are the measures that are in place. It’s not just the fire doors, you’ve also got to make sure that everything else is going to be working. And then we’re using that to then say what’s needed at the various different gateways and from an asset management point of view it’s critical that we’re continuing that process. The sorts of things that we also drill into on the asset types was to ask what risk is the asset mitigating, what is it susceptible to, what do people do to it to stop it from working. What information is needed about an asset to ensure that it performs. Then, what procedures are needed, what levels of competency and how should product changes be recorded.
We’ve run probably 200 working groups over the last three years and well over a thousand subject matter experts have been involved in them. And this is the sort of thing that we’ve got on our website, it’s all free to download. We've done it for smoke vents, fire doors, cavity barriers, dry risers, fire alarms etc. The next step that we’re doing is to…I’ll just show you what one of those looks like. This is the fire door, it’s explaining what a fire door is, all of its component parts. We’ve gone to this level of detail on all of the different areas. This is a detailed brain-dump from people who are real experts in fire doors saying what risks, what do people do to them (like painting over them). What information do we need from a point of view of specification, construction, installation, maintenance.
And then what sort of standard procedures are there (which Alan is going to cover in a moment) in terms of inspection and maintenance and then what levels of competency is needed for maintenance. So this is a distillation of some tremendous knowledge from the industry. And then the last thing that we’ve got coming up is the things that we think break the golden thread. For example, the incorrect design, selection and installation of fire safety products, how do we militate against that? How do we ensure that building services design not being completed when construction starts is a problem? From an asset management point of view, how do we ensure that you’ve got the right information on that asset to go through its’ lifecycle? And then on the Building Safety Act, how do you make sure that the safety case isn’t just a snapshot? We’ve got a report coming out on all of those.
The reason I'm showing you all that is that's really where we've got as a resource that is going to be relevant to any type of building. So that's why we're opening this up now to schools, hospitals etc and we’d like to do the same type of building from that.
RICHARD Why are we doing BIMinAM, George?
GEORGE What we believe is that a lot of the resources that we’ve created will work across all types of projects, but what we want to do is get asset managers and people that are involved in the operations side of things and lifecycle replacement to be able to draw on that and help us build that drive through the…people like Neill, for example, from EA-RS, they’re working on all sorts of different types of projects, not just housing. So therefore how we can we get it so that we’ve got the same level of engagement that we have in the existing sector. Ben, for example, he’s working in PFI and PFI Handback is a very topical thing at the moment. So what we want to do is say how can we leverage what we’ve done and get the same level of engagement.
RICHARD I’m going to bring in Alan Oliver. One of our key outputs from last year/this year was a very impressive document which Alan has collated, authored, chaired meetings on, standardising fire door inspections. He did that initially for the NHS, we now have a version which is for residential. I think this typifies what we want to do with BIMinAM in terms of spreading what our work and the economies of scale by spreading it out across the industry.
ALAN OLIVER In 2019 I set up a working group under NAHFO (National Association of Health Care Fire Officers) to write a paper on how to inspect fire doors in hospitals which we turned into this reference document because although the NHS is arguably the biggest owner of fire doors in Europe they didn’t have standardised systems for inspecting them. We came up with the fact that you need to inspect doors in three ways: you need a Type 1 inspection on a brand new door to make sure that it’s been delivered as per the fire door manufacturer’s fire door test evidence and that it’s been signed off in a fully fire compliant state. We then say that for an existing door, where you don’t have the golden thread of information, you need to have an assessment of that door to find out whether it’s suitable and sufficient for its location.
Which can be fairly pragmatic, depending on the level of criticality, the location of the door, the size of the building and taking all of those factors into account you risk manage it. And then if you’ve already done a Type 1 or a Type 2 inspection on the door you can do an ongoing PPM, Type 3 inspection. That was the basis of the paper that we turned into this reference document, we had it very much peer reviewed by a number of people and then we had it NFCC approved and they wrote a foreword to it which was brilliant. George became aware of this document about 18 months ago and asked if I could help to adapt this into a BIM4Housing version, which we did. And again, we went through a very long and very serious peer review process which involved the BIM4Housing team. We then sent it out to a number of other people.
I’d say that the peer review of this document, adapting it from healthcare to residential, was so good that I’m actually now in the process of revisiting the original document because there was information that came out of this, especially from people such as Roy Buckingham from Assa Abloy, that was so valuable and was missing from the original healthcare version. So, the information was transferable and it’s brilliant that we’re all the time trying to learn from this and updating it and keeping it fresh and alive. While I was doing that most of last year, I also created a new NAHFO document on how to inspect fire dampers, fire stopping and cavity barriers and we’re now in the process of turning this into a BIM4Housing residential version. And there will be generic ones in the pipeline.
Thanks very much for all of those people within BIM4Housing who are already aware of this knowledge and have already been involved. I know that EA-RS Group are represented here today and I want to say a big thank you to one of their companies who were massively involved in creating this document and will be doing the BIM4Housing version of it. But, if anyone today wants to get hold of these copies they are electronic, please let Richard or George know. Also, if anyone wants to get involved in creating a BIM4Housing version of this NAHFO document I’d like to hear from you.
RICHARD We’re looking across all sectors, education, PFI, right across the board.
ALAN OLIVER Absolutely, it was actually the NFCC who said you could create a generic version of the healthcare version because 90% of what’s contained in this document applies to every fire door in the country. But, of course, residential doors have got things like composite doors that you’ve got to cover, I’m now looking at university version and we’re looking at halls of residence and the cluster halls of residencies. So, all of these documents, most of the information can be shared, but there’s these little bits that make the difference.
RICHARD You need that specialist input, which is absolutely what we’re aiming to do.
KIERAN DOWNES I was going to ask what type of involvement you are after, what do you need on the project?
ALAN OLIVER That’s a good question. A number of people have peer reviewed the BIM4Housing version and people come up with some really important stuff. I mentioned Roy Buckingham, he said well, you’re covering internal fire resisting doors and you’re covering final exit doors, but what about fire escape doors? What about those doors that get in the way of people escaping? Ones that might have special security devices on them and things like that. And that was one of the obvious things that we need to revisit the healthcare version. So some people are very technical, other people are very pedantic about proofreading it in terms of the fact that sometimes you might be mentioning British Standard and other times it refers to it as BS. Things like that, looking to standardise the wording.
There will be people here today with a variety of skills. Some people will be experts in proofreading, some people will be experts…it’s not so much maybe the fire door, but what surrounds the fire door, the substrate and all of the other things that go with it.
RICHARD we’re not just talking about peer review here. Our typical modus operandi is to hold meetings, roundtable meetings to get input, we put documents out, we ask questions via email, conversations, individual meetings, specialist meetings. It’s quite an in-depth process that we use for any of this stuff, it’s not just banging out a document and then people making comments on it. We’re very much into meetings. A very key ethos for BIM4Housing and BIM In Asset Management is output, we’re not a talking shop, George determined that in the very early days. We like output and that’s what we focus on.
GEORGE The other thing is that working groups means working. So we’re going to be running working groups each month and we hope that the people that come along to those aren’t just sitting there listening. We want people to actively contribute and we’re going to be asking you all to actively contribute shortly.
RICHARD Please do use the chat. All of our meetings are recorded and we issue highpoint notes of each meeting along with a video link to all who attended or said they were going to attend or who might be interested. Another output, one of our more significant outputs over the last six months, is a Miro board which has been put together by (primarily) Jarek Wityk and Das who leads our design group.
JAREK WITYK (shares screen). Firstly I’d like to say it’s not just mine and Das’ work because it started with the design team, all the meetings we had which are running for the last two and a half years. We’ve been kicking this subject of building safety around for some time and after one of those meetings I thought, OK, I don’t understand this, we’re talking about it a lot but I need to put this on paper and that’s how this document has been created. It’s very much a live document, if you’ve seen the post that George posted on Saturday you had a PDF version of it. That already has been changed and updated since because we had a couple of comments, we added a page here with the acknowledgements of all of the people involved.
The first draft was in October 2023 and this document is full of reference links to the government websites, or other respected websites. You’ve got links to documents, all of these symbols here, if you click on them, this is actually an embedded PDF document which you can download straight from Miro board. Or you can just click that icon and that will bring you to the source website where you can read more about it. In this document we have questions where especially Das and Simon, we had quite a few meetings together which led into the creation of this document in that format because it looks really different than when we started. There’s a lot of questions in yellow when we specifically highlighted them because we need feedback, we’re not sure about it or there is more information needed. So, any feedback…in similar, there’s also wordings, sometimes there might be incorrect wording of some guidance, we had the duty holders and principal designers, the description of it, there was a few comments that people posted and that has been updated. Any comments, any critical feedback or any other feedback will be really handy.
What’s good about this document, we’ve got this standardised workflow process which explains the steps which you should take. On this page it’s what’s already happened, the registration transitions for high-risk buildings has already happened. This part has already happened and so it’s just an explanation as a reference so you can understand where you’re supposed to be when you register a high-risk building. And the next page shows you the process of what you should do to check whether your building should be considered a higher-risk building. Whether it’s a new building or an existing building and you’re planning refurbishment work, you should follow this diagram and it will guide you through and basically tell you whether it should be regarded as such a building or not.
And then it follows through all of the steps and gateways explaining what should be done and where. This is also linked to ISO 19650 process and again full of documents like fire statement form, if you click on it you’ll have access to the PDF form, or you can download it or view it straight from here. It’s a really useful, valuable resource.
RICHARD Jarek, how residential specific is this? How much of this proportionally is relevant to other sectors?
JAREK WITYK It’s relevant to all buildings, and not only high-risk buildings because all of the Building Safety Act and the Fire Safety Act and other regulations and relevant legislation. It’s applicable to all buildings, not only buildings actually because it’s common to other types of assets, but mainly the buildings, but not only high-risk or high-rise, it’s applicable to everything.
GEORGE Yes, and it’s also very relevant to retrofits and refurbishments. so, from an asset management point of view a lot of the things that projects have, if you’ve got more than tow contractors on a project you need to have a principal designer and a principal contractor. It may be that within our new community here that there’s different interpretations of that and I’m sure it will be questioned and challenged. Some of the things are probably not appropriate and we need as a collective to be able to go back to the government and say you’re asking for something that’s unreasonable here. So we do have a collective power to be able to coordinate that, rather than individual firms having to try and battle against this huge thing.
At the end of the day what everybody is trying to do is make buildings safer, so if they’re putting things in place that actually will cause people to do workarounds we need to pick that up and feed it back.
JAREK WITYK When you log-in to the Miro board, I’m not sure exactly what’s the landing page, but I think it’s the last page open, but this is the whole environment. As you can see in here we’ve got some work in progress stuff, some other information. For example, we’ve put aside information related to existing buildings which we weren’t sure where to put this into the whole process because there was a lot of confusion especially when we started while the whole industry was in transition in terms of registration of the buildings. But now we’re past that stage and that had an impact on how we presented the information and there was a last minute changes even on Saturday before publishing it. But what we really need now is feedback, so when you log-in to this (I’ll post it in the chat) there is a log-in and link on a page in here and you’ll need a password here. When you enter you will be able to comment, so when you click on any item you can right click and add a comment. But when you add a comment make sure you press this arrow button.
GEORGE One thing I’d like to ask, one of the things that has been raised with me, for anybody that’s involved in PFI (for example) or involved with a contract at the moment that has been already let, this is change in legislation. Quite clearly, it’s change in legislation. So depending on how the contracts have been written it may well be that there’s an opportunity to renegotiate the collection of or improvement of asset information in accordance with the new Building Safety Act. So I’d like people who’ve got experience of that to give that some thought and maybe feedback to us whether they think that is an opportunity to get that done. And also, who the responsible person is.
RICHARD We’re working on the basis that rather than spilt into various and sundry working groups that this community right now here, plus others, are a working group. We’ll meet once a month and decide issues to be addressed by workstreams. To get us started we’ve come up with three workstreams that we’re proposing. We’d like your views on that and also if there are any others you think we should include.
GEORGE The three that we’ve come up with, first of all there is the business case. We think that’s a useful workstream because we need to probably coordinate people to start thinking about why do we need the information. Is it for statuary reasons, operational, is it because we’ve got fewer people that are adequately competent coming through because we’ve got people retiring and the knowledge needs to be transferred to the next generation. So we think the business case workstream is a worthwhile thing. As I’m going though these if you could give some thought as to whether you’d be interested in joining one of these and helping us flesh them out.
Number one is the business case, number two is digital records. So how do we create, audit, update, maintain what’s needed for fire and building safety and also for PFI hand-back. Or, for whatever reason we need digital records. And then interoperability. Just as in the design and construction world, there’s a lot of work gone on as to how we can integrate different systems, but in my experience that doesn’t seem to happen in the same way in the asset management community. All of you will be using a range of different software applications for different purposed, but all to often the information about the assets that are being either inspected or maintained or replaced or condition assessments are done on them, they’re all done in isolation.
That may not be the case, but that’s certainly been my experience. So how can we make it so that the information about which smoke dampers are being inspected is consistent with the smoke dampers that are being planned for replacement. Those are the three workstreams that we’ve come up with: 1) business case 2) digital records 3) interoperability. If you feel that you can give some time to one or more of them then please just put that in the chat that you’d be interested.
RICHARD Anyone got any comments on that?
JACK DEARLOVE Just to jump in on that interoperability piece. I’ve worked in design for 10 years and construction for 10 years and working in a digital BIM environment for the last 15 years. I’ve delivered countless digital…we’ve got the great work that happened with ? 34mins 47secs and how we manage information during design. But I’ve got to be honest, in the last 20 years it’s been a real struggle to bring that information together and then hand it over to the client. And then also making it available to the client in a way that’s human readable that the client and FM teams can actually use and keep it relevant. George mentioned there about capturing information around a particular piece of kit in a building.
I think we can do that, it requires skill, capability, education, technical skills, all of that good stuff that we can manage in the contracting world. But then once it goes over to the client it’s about keeping that information relevant as well, so how do we keep it up-to-date. I’m keen to talk more about that interoperability piece.
RICHARD Jack, you said it’s very hard to get the information together, in what way is it hard?
JACK DEARLOVE I’ll take you through a bit of a lifecycle of how we get that information together at the end of a project. The first challenge is the specification. We have the BIM Level 2 spec which is now the information mandate in ISO 196590 and we have that whole piece around specifying the information that’s required. To do that you need technical knowhow and technical skills to do the specification in the first place. That’s the first challenge, how are we specifying this information? And is it specified for the right purpose? You’ve then got the contractual relationship. That specification then needs to be put into the contracts and it needs to be understood and passed through onto the client, the design team, contractors and the supply chain which can be massive.
Then you have to have the capability and education and expert technical skills across all of those stakeholders in that relationship. Then you need somebody to actually manage and put the effort and time in to check it, govern it, reference it and eventually federate that information into a useable. Then you need to share that information in a way that clients can understand, and/or FM teams can understand it and then use it, and keep it relevant in that in-use phase. So if a door changes or a layout changes how does that information then get baked back into that great piece of information that we’ve federated and created. I must say, it’s a Herculean effort to create that federated model and data and I really want it to be used in FM and the asset managers.
I haven’t seen that side of the fence that much, I have worked with clients and FM teams, but the feedback I have had is they’re not using it in that FM space. So I’d really like to talk about that a bit more and how do we get that great piece of information to be used in the end zone.
RICHARD Dave Williams from Origin (Places For People), in your experience as a social landlord how is the information that you get at handover? Is it what you’re expecting? is it what you want?
DAVE WILLIAMS When it comes to the asset management and compliance side of things it’s usually not what we want, to be honest. Because it’s more to do with the data not being in a format that you can just easily import into an asset management…
RICHARD Let me be clear on that. Is the data what you want, but you can’t find it easily? Or is it not what you want and you can’t find it easily?
DAVE WILLIAMS It’s not in the format that we want and we can’t find it easily is probably the best answer.
TONY Jack, one of the challenges is that at the time when you’re designing a project most clients don’t know who’s doing their FM, so what level of detail goes into your model, whatever format that takes, isn’t defined. Then, close to the end of the project the client then starts to appoint an FM contractor who will, if it’s a mature or a bigger business, CAFM systems, they’re running their own data streams, they know what asset information that they want, but at that stage it’s way too late for the contractual design to collate a good asset information model, let alone populate the BIM with that data. So, it’s really early education of the client, unless you’ve got a Places For people type client that’s doing this as a repeat and maybe has that maturity.
The other challenge is that clients don’t budget for managing data. If you’re going to go to this effort and cost of having a great BIM, whether that’s better information, a BIM model, 3D model with data, if that’s going to be maintained that’s a cost. And then that comes back to the business case, once the business case are spending X each year on maintaining the BIM model (even the CAFM model). I’ve had it, a long time ago, pricing and updating O&M manuals as part of a variation on a PFI project, and the client was saying I’m not paying that. And me saying you have to pay that because contractually we have to maintain the O&M manual.
RICHARD Where are you from, Tony?
TONY I’m independent, I’ve kind of had a sabbatical for a few years. I know George from 4 or 5 years ago and picked up on this and was getting quite involved in BIM, I was with Bouygues E&S and we were starting to transfer data directly out of Bouygues UK’s BIM models into our maxima CAFM system. Very early days, sort of proof of concept, and coming across problems and issues and resolving them as we found them. I’ve kind of been very much out of the industry for a couple of years, in the next month or two I will be back.
ANDREW WARING I’m the Digital Director at Digital Guerrilla, we work quite closely with the Scottish government for the past five years to develop a standard specification schema for their learning education investment programme. I think one thing that’s missing potentially from the working groups here, you might want to add a 4th one in and it’s something that the previous speakers have touched on is standardised and known schema specification for all of your various requirements. Whether it be fire safety or asset management PPM, there seems to be that if it’s there it’s very difficult to find. There seems to be a lack of completely standardised and suggested schema and content specifically for asset management, so what data actually needs to be provided.
I’ve read over all of the fire doors, AOVs etc and all of the information there, but where is just the table of data that you need that very clearly states that this is the data that we need and this is when we need it. I think we need to start collating all of this good information that everyone has put together into an open format database of project delivery. So if we’re asking the questions for handover what fire safety are we doing, how are we managing this, how are we doing that, there is a set recommended list of data that we can provide. And that will solve some of the issues of specification and contract because you could use that as a starter for ten, the standard information management plan. The standard information management plan was developed for all public authority clients in Scotland which comes with a predetermined list of assets which can be used as a starter for ten for this is what we generally maintain on our education facilities, can we use this as a basis. So, I think that’s what’s sorely missing from a lot of these discussions.
GEORGE I think that would possibly fit into the interoperability workstream. The workstreams aren’t intended to be the fixed ones, the idea of the workstream is you probably have two or three meetings, produce something and then if there is something else that needs doing then we have another workstream. So, the workstreams are very much task and finish types of process.
WILLIAM BORTHEN I’m from Asseticom, I’ve worked in asset management for the last 20 years and for me in the operational phase, I accept everything that everyone has said before and especially Jack sayng that a lot of hard work goes in to building these really great models and providing all of that accurate information at a really granular level. Which is really useful for asset managers and FM providers, but because in asset management quite often you’re operating a broad estate of properties where the data has come from all different places and some of that data is really matured. You’ve got a new build with all the great BIM data, but you’ve also got a building from the 1900’s that you don’t have any information on.
So a lot of the data structure is based on the lowest common denominator so when that BIM model comes in you’re only picking out a really small amount of that data just to populate your CMMS system or your CAFM system. Just the asset types so you can run maintenance models and plan lifecycle against it. So a lot of that good date gets lost or isn’t used and there’s not the infrastructure to kind of maintain that good data.
And the other side of it, because you’re generally a steward of those assets over a period of time, not the owner of that asset quite often, you might not be specifying that BIM data or information model so if you’ve got properties that are leasehold and there’s been a speculative build and someone else has specified what’s in that data, then you’re just taking that second hand and you’ve got no influence on how that’s compiled and you’re just trying to bend it to fit what you’ve already got in place. Those are some of the challenges that I see.
RICHARD Adam Sanders, George was telling me just before the meeting that you’ve come up with some interesting ways of using better asset data to improve risk assessments.
ADAM SANDERS It’s been really interesting listening to what you guys are saying. We don’t quite go to the resolution that you are in terms of BIM and the way that you’re specifying assets, but we’re doing a similar version. This is mostly concentrated in residential buildings, more in the private sector. A little bit in social housing, but we do struggle in social housing with housing providers and getting them to manage their information. But if you think that there is legislation now for the high-rise buildings or HRBs to have these safety cases, we’ve got to manage these buildings as systems, we need to know what assets are in them, we have to have a scenario-based risk assessment now. And the Regulator was suggesting that we then have a claim argument evidence model against those scenarios to manage safety within a building.
So for instance, if you had a scenario of fire might spread from a flat into an escape route, you’d then come up with a claim why that wouldn’t happen or shouldn’t happen. An argument which would say I’ve got fire doors and compartmentation in place and then some evidence that would say my fire doors, I’ve got this many fire doors, they might be flat entrance doors, they are installed to this third-party accreditation and installed by this company, I’m inspecting them and I’ve done this door survey. You’ve got all of these little bits of evidence, either it’s static it’s specification, or it’s some kind of PPM to say I’m going to keep doing it. And that means that we’ve got a bit of a system there that says if these things don’t happen, or if this door is replaced and it’s not to this standard, or if this inspection doesn’t happen, I’ve got to reevaluate my claim.
And we can only do that if we’ve got the information in the first place. Even small buildings now, we’er trying to move clients away from a fairly traditional risk assessment approach into a slightly more, I hate the word holistic, but into a slightly more holistic systems management approach. And to say look, just don’t say that the doors are X, let’s collect the door information and then you’ve got something to manage. And then the next company that goes over and does a door survey is actually inspecting against an asset. But our biggest challenge is getting other software to talk to RiskBase, especially competitors, we’re saying look guys, we can’t try and all do this ourselves because we’re just going to keep fighting, we’ve got to share that information.
RICHARD It sounds like you should be in our interoperability workstream.
ADAM SANDERS What Andrew was just saying a minute ago was literally music to my ears, so I’m really keen to.
DAVE BRADBURY I’ve been very fortunate to work with Jack predominantly over the last 6 years, but I’ve also done 20 years in the oil & gas industry in North America, both on projects and on operations. I know it’s not buildings, bit it’s a higher degree of intensity than what it is in the building side. Very simply, most of these standards we’re talking about are actually geared up for projects, not for operations. They’re about how to collect the data, before the collection how do you make the right decision and that is part of the golden thread, don’t forget, it’s the decision and who made it and what sizing information followed all the way through to operations in the light of Grenfell when they didn’t have that information.
Basically it comes down to more education with the clients directly, not necessarily with the FM people or the asset maintenance people, but with the actual clients. Because the Building Safety Act makes the clients accountable, whereas before they kind of been by standards and passed the accountability off to main contractors, builders etc. So there needs to be a lot more education with the clients about what’s going to be delivered in the projects and get involved at that time because if they want something different they have to write it into the contracts at the very beginning so everyone can then gear up towards the right price. And the clients need the education because they’re going to get hit with a bigger bill which they’re not expecting.
So, more information that you're gathering, collecting, collating, auditing, validating increases the cost. And it’s not just the cost at the handover time, it’s actually costs during the ops because most contracts in the buildings are given to FM teams and maintenance contractors as a lump sum. That doesn’t invigorate the accuracy of the data after every change so that the information that they have to work to is always up-to-date. So I’m afraid that there is a cost and education piece in this that needs to be put across.
RICHARD Yeah, a lot of that has got to be down to making the business case to the client. Richard Whittaker, how do we make the business case to the client? How have you been doing that?
RICHARD WHITTAKER It’s been a bit of a slog because we work in different teams and it’s not necessarily silo working, but each team has its own priority, whether it’s asset management, maintenance or development. And joining things together has to have a vehicle of efficiency and the transfer of information. And when we started our journey we started with PDFs that needed a simple scanner that transferred the information to the asset management system. That’s a pretty simple thing that was never achieved, we just couldn’t get it to work. So now we’ve invested in Active Plan now because that does it for us, so we don’t really have to do anything as a client because everybody’s got all these other priorities: damp and mould, legislation, Building Safety Act, everything that’s seen as a high priority that can send people to jail.
So it has to be something that brings the efficiency and the expertise to a client because typically they have a smaller team and don’t have the expertise that’s within this working group, for example. They rely on the experts to bring the solution and the ease of transfer with it. That’s not a simple journey because it took an age, but it’s a simple solution once people get it. You won’t be at risk, you won’t have to find additional resources in terms of staff and things like that and it’s a small investment to make your duty of care to residents and board members and the executive team.
RICHARD Neill, you’re a specialist fire safety contractor, how reliable are the as-built records that you’re given?
NEILL SHIRLEY I’ll take a pregnant pause there while I stop myself from laughing. Sadly we are a little bit towards the coalface from the point of view that ultimately we then deliver the ongoing PPM. For me it’s really interesting to listen to all of the different aspects and the different viewpoints and the knowledge that’s on this call is second to none. I actually think we can come right back to basics on the whole of this and we need to change the culture with the clients. Until we get the clients to understand the importance of everything that we’re discussing, sadly at the coalface I think we’re going to struggle and continue to struggle.
We have the joys to get an FM company to send us an asset list which is half completed, half not and say we need a price back in the next two days and, by the way, you start onsite in a week. It’s the challenge that we face and we get round it and we sort it etc etc. But ultimately the key to this is actually changing the culture and getting clients, FM companies, to truly understand what we’re looking to achieve. Because if we can get them to understand the message and the goal of what we’re looking to achieve I think we’ll be halfway there. The challenge is you can’t boil and ocean and so how do we get that in to them. I do wonder whether it could be led by the insurance companies.
RICHARD That’s come up a lot in our meetings that it could be insurance company led.
NEILL SHIRLEY Previously having worked in the security industry and looking at grading of intruder alarms and what’s going to be required, that was absolutely driven by insurance companies specifying to clients that you have to have this for us to insure you. Whether or not we can utilise that in the wonderful world of fire I’m not sure, but we need to change the culture and until we change the culture I sadly think that we, for everybody on this call we’re going to try our very best to continue moving things forward, progressing things, getting new legislation. I wrote a CPD on the fire safety regs and I’ve delivered to it to about 450 people in the last year, it amazes me how many people don’t even realise there’s a responsible person, that’s been around for how many years?
That’s the sort of challenge that we face with end clients, and I’m not being rude to end clients because it’s not their day job. They might be making cans of baked beans, they might be a multi-conglomerate, but until we can get it on their radar at the very centre of the crosshairs I think we’re going to continue to struggle. I won’t go through all of the struggles that we face because I’d be here another half an hour, but for me culture and possibly insurance-led might be two of the keys to the solution.
RICHARD Ben Evans, tell us about the information that you’re getting for PFI schemes. I understand that you run a number of those, how’s it working for you?
BEN EVANS We rely on both the building contractor back when the building is built and then the FM contractor to have that information. But clearly over the years that hasn’t happened, there’s been quite a wide mismatch in all areas, so from the formatting FM won’t have the CAD drawings, architects won’t release potentially the full working CAD drawings, so we end up with a PDF. And then in the typical PFI environment they’ll do some work and then have to update a PDF which is not really ideal, it shouldn’t really work like that, it should be working on the base as-built drawings in a digital format. But that’s widespread across the PFI environment, to be honest.
I work for Albany Infrastructure, we manage PFI investments on behalf of investors, large insurance companies etc. And I’ve also been involved in the IPA working group for asset condition and hand back recently, they’re soon to publish a documentation which is going to give guidance to local authorities and government departments about how to approach hand back and asset condition. And obviously a large part of the whole asset condition piece is data, we refer to it as base data, it’s actually a list of data requirements, with or without the contract requirements that sit over it in the PFI contract.
There’s obviously a health & safety side which it doesn’t really matter what the contract says, that trumps any contract particulars because some of these contracts were crafter 25-30 years ago, so legislation has changed. And so it’s a case of having a dialogue with government departments, NHS Trust clients, as to how you want to take this forward because once you take over the asset…the PFI contract ends, you’re going to need to manage it accordingly. So that conversation will start in earnest because there’s about 50 PFI contracts that expire in the next couple of years, then it ramps up to the big Trusts, the Q hospitals, I’m involved with quite a few. So we’ll be looking to see what’s been done early on in some of the early deals which are quite small asset, schools etc.
RICHARD Yeah, we’ve got PFI included in one of our workstreams and I’m wondering if it actually needs its own workstream. It’s quite a specialist thing in a lot of ways, I know a lot of it overlaps, but at the same time it’s quite a subject in its own right.
GEORGE I think it probably is, but there’s a lot of cross-filtering as well. If people are happy to have a crack at the initial three workstreams we can then grow out from that.
RICHARD Cliff Kneale, you’re a former clerk of works and now you’ve been involved for some time in information delivery. Have you got anything to say to Ben? Or other people like ben who just aren’t getting what they’re looking for.
CLIFF KNEALE I started out as an architectural technician and ended up onsite for a few years. That was very informative for me to see how the actual information produced by the design team was used onsite, at the coalface. Sometimes the drawings were hanging up in the site office and weren’t even looked at and people would just more or less do what they wanted. And when it comes to delivering the information as everyone has been saying if it’s not clear on the contract what’s needed you’re very unlikely to actually get it if you haven’t asked for it. Nobody has got the time or the money to produce something that’s not asked for. But even if ti is quite often that information is coming from far down in the supply chain and the request for that information hasn’t been cascaded down, so it’s also not delivered.
Quite often you’ll find information delivered and it’s just incomplete, you might just have even a template of something that says that this is, for example, a drain survey and when you actually open it up it hasn’t been completed. But, if you just receive that in your email you’ll think that you’ve got the drain survey and forward it on to somebody else who just files it away. So, there are all sorts of ways that you get gaps that the information can actually fall through so this is why it’s important that not only specifying the right information and making sure that everybody provides it and that message is cascaded down the supply chain, but also once it’s been delivered it needs to be verified. Somebody needs to actually say, yeah, this is actually what we needed and it’s complete, you have to confirm its completeness. Then obviously that would then go into a database and be used to help to run the building going forward.
GEORGE Steve Brown, I know that a couple of years ago we got together and started looking at how digital twins could be practically used and you’ve been doing a lot of work in that area. Could you just give us a quick explanation of what you’ve been doing?
STEPHEN BROWN I’ve got multiple roles, but one of my main roles is I’m head of digital twin at Sweco. So, Iv’e been doing quite a bit of work with the UK teams. I work at group level in Sweco, I work all over the countries. I’ve been interacting with smart housing in the UK and asset management, particularly around water actually, less than buildings, in the Uk teams and helping them bid for certain things. In Sweden I’m currently working on a digital twin for a new wastewater treatment plant which will be the first one in the world, no one has ever done one. And they’re doing it now, they’re not really mature enough digitally, so all of these things you’ve been talking about in terms of handling, collating and then taking forwards digital information.
They’re right in the middle of updating themselves so that they can do that and in the meantime they’ve got to build a new wastewater treatment plant because it’s about to go end of life, so they’re using digital twins for that. So I’ve been doing a lot of work around industrial assets (my background is mechanical engineering and industry 4.0) and now inside this work I’m turning it to urban planning and asset management and asset management of industrial twins and really looking at, I’m going to call it AIM (Asset Information Management), rather than BIM because for me a building is just an asset, so complex assets.
The key enabling technology for digital twins has been this thing of interoperability of data. Getting data, reusing data, for different people to do different tasks. So data that was designed for somebody else being used later on in the process, particularly maintenance sides, and all of those things. And how the hell do you bring all of the data together? Not right now, but at some point when you want me to I can talk you through how you move away from information models to ontologies. And ontologies are really interesting because an ontology is effectively an information schema and you’re free of the format issues.But you include the format issues in it, but you’re not bound to any of the format issues, you’re really looking at what the hell the data is without the formats. And then you can add first order logic to it, if then else?.
So all of these things you’ve been looking at and discussing now is really interesting. The fire doors for different usages, that’s an if then as/else? 1h 8mins 20secs, whether it’s in a hospital or it’s in a commercial building, whether it’s in a high-rise that’s less than 3-storeys or 11 metres, whatever the regulation, and whether it’s a very high one like Grenfell. All of this stuff changes in regulations, start to come down to what can you do with a little bit of first order logic to help people understand the implications. It’s all built into ontologies and in the digital twins I’ve been doing I’ve been using ISO 15926 rather than the BIM standards. ISO 15926 is the asset information standard, one of them, it came out of the oil industry, very deep, very broad and very complete.
And I think it would be really interesting to look at how to take this sort of learning from that side into ISO 19650 and how could we make it really easy to reuse this data, without losing fidelity from its original creation, but combining and aggregating it with other peoples’ information. At some point I’ll show you some techniques that I’ve done to put some of this rally advance digital twins in place and how we could use it for really simple digital twins.
RICHARD Yeah, I definitely think we’d like to see that, Steve. That’s definitely true, in our discussions over the last year or two we’ve had a lot of talk about digital twins and it’s very clear that a lot of people don’t really understand what they are, so that would be a good move moving forward.
STEPHEN BROWN Alongside this, Richard, I’m also talking to BIM4Water in the UK, so I’ve got a similar thing going on with them, they’re really interesting. They may be slightly further forward in their thinking around ontologies than you guys are, so I think there’s some really cool people in there that would probably like to be on this group. And then I’m also speaking to Anglian Water and a few others.
RICHARD Has anyone else got anything to add around this general discussion around information? Have you got what you need? How did you get what you need? Do you know what you need?
GEORGE Particularly if you’re an FM or a building owner who is either experiencing some good experiences, or less.
PAV SINGH I’m a technical director for Arcadis, but I work across Curzon Street Station, so stations experience and national highways. My general question, there has been a theme about the client understanding what they’re going to get and I’d like to find out do all industries have something called the employer’s information requirements? And establishing what they call task information and master information? i.e. something that coordinates what the client wants at the outset of the contract. And is there a consistency of these employer’s information requirements across sectors? So we’ve just head something about the water sector, we’ve heard about buildings, local authorities, all of this.
All I’m saying is the ISO 19650 Part 6 and all of this piece of work is heading towards a consistency, is there a working group that’s looking at supporting clients with a consistency of employer’s information? So that they get what they want out of it because sometimes they don’t understand what they’re actually asking for.
JACK DEARLOVE I agree with you, the ISO 19650 specs or the BIM Level 2 specs as it was before, are definitely coming through in terms of the frameworks and government projects. And we routinely deploy the MIDP or the TIDPs on projects and they’re used to various levels. The bit that I’m not seeing or I’m not aware of, and I think Andrew has mentioned earlier, is that piece what happens after. The government framework clients, I can’t name the clients, but it was a massive government framework with a really large institution, they had all of the right specs in place, a great design team specifying the right things to happen, a great BIM consultant on the project.
We’re all working and doing this excellent effort in terms of getting the handover, when it came to the client meeting the client bought his FM person with him, turns to the FM person and says ‘do you need any of this?’, and the guy went ‘no’. And so we wasted two years of putting the effort in. So, I think the specs and the standards are great and they’re there, but it’s really trying to understand what happens the other side of the fence. You’re right, the clients need to be educated and made more aware.
RICHARD Yeah, this keeps coming up, just today speaker after speaker about the client’s education. I’ve not heard anybody say how we do it, though.
TONY I think that’s a really good point, absolutely spot on. One of the things we’re doing at Bouygues is looking at use cases for clients to help them, what do they want their BIM model for, because they don’t know. They’re involved with a children’s hospital PFI, from a use case point of view the kids going in to hospital, you could have a virtual experience for a kid when the consultant says you’re going to have to go into hospital for a week because you’ve got cancer. The family is mortified, but you’ve got a state of the heart hospital and this kid could all of a sudden be not nearly so scared.
It’s a use case, but the complexity of PFI world that was never envisaged, but a non PFI hospital and there’s dozens of use cases for clients that’s fairly standard like that that would help them inform them. And then yes, invest some money to maintain that during the operation phase, help the client, inform the client and help them understand why they want these models.
JAREK WITYK I just wanted to jump on and relate to ISO 19650. As it happens, I helped to write the guidance note 3 which is about operation of the asset and I think that ISO 19650 Part 3 should be merged with Part 2 and that merged version would be a much better version which could be used for delivering the project. Because it is a great standard, it’s a great structure to build on and since its publication there was a lot of other standards which now cross-reference because at the time of publication of ISO 19650 this document didn’t cross-reference much because there was no standards to reference.
And the operational phase of an asset is a completely different beast, it has completely different requirements and I don’t think ISO 19650 Part 3 actually covers it, so it’s not really fir for purpose. It’s a great standard, but I think they should b merged, if you actually compare them and they’re almost exactly the same, there’s a 97% of exactly the same standards. So, we really need new, better guidance, or use the other standards which someone mentioned, they need to be used together rather than just rely on one ISO 19650 standard.
DAVE BRADBURY The standards you’re talking about, again as I’ve mentioned before, have been very understood by the project team and the people pre-handover. It’s how they have a competitive edge, whether they have BSI accreditation that they’re working to these, it’s very much a pre-handover. But the same amount of effort has not been put on post-handover to the clients. I’ll give you an example tying in to exactly what was mentioned about 10 minutes ago. I was working for a main contractor and a request for a proposal came in from a client asking us to outline our digital twin strategy. Now, I know that you could say digital twin to 10 people at the moment in this industry and you’ll get 15 definitions.
I worked with digital twins 15 years ago back in North America when we did it with PNIDs, PDFs and Excel spreadsheets. It’s a philosophy, it’s a methodology, it’s a way of getting accurate data, it’s not a 3D model. And for a client to ask a contractor what their digital twin strategy is shows that the client hasn’t got a clue that it’s actually their strategy and it should be put in standards and forced down the chain so that when the project gets completed they have what they’re looking for in order to fulfil their benefits from the digital twin. Which, in my personal opinion, there’s minimal benefits in buildings in offices and homes anyway because of the increased cost in order to achieve that.
So I think we’ve done a fantastic job of education pre-handover, we have to put the same amount of effort in with the clients, not necessarily with the FM teams because it all comes to the clients who tell the FM teams what they want, what they expect. But post-handover, there needs to be more effort from industry experts on this call to assist the clients.
GRAHAM H. STEWART I’m going to be quite controversial here. The previous speaker spoke about…I would say education is the key thing here. We’ve had various other committees like UK BIM Alliance writing hundreds of pages of theory with no practical application. So I think whatever this committee is actually going to develop has to be based on reality, what people can actually do and stop now describing theoretical nonsense that clients don’t even understand. And we have to educate absolutely everybody, even most of the design teams we work with still don’t have a clue what it is that they’re actually delivering.
The biggest failure with the Scottish government and the SFT that Andrew spoke about was they gave funding to clients to employ a client information manager who was supposed to look after all the information requirements, but the client still didn’t know what it was they were actually delivering or what they actually needed. So, education is the key thing here and whatever you’re writing, keep it very, very brief, don’t write hundreds of pages.
RICHARD It doesn’t matter how good it is if nobody bothers to read it.
ALAN OLIVER I’m just agreeing with everybody else, you’ve not only got to get people to read it, you’ve got to get people to understand it. And just coming back to the reference documents which I mentioned before, I suppose I was quite naive in thinking if you get a reference document like this and give people systems, that’s what you need to do, but actually that’s the easy bit. The hard bit is getting people to understand it and then start using it. It’s education, education, education.
RICHARD It’s getting people to make the effort to understand it, that’s what it comes down to.
ALAN OLIVER Yeah, but when you’ve got lots of busy people sometimes you’ve got to make the extra effort yourself to get them to understand why it is. You sometimes need training modules. I’ve created training modules which I deliver free to actually get people to understand this and promote it. The great marketing guy, P.T. Barnum, he said without promotion something terrible is going to happen…nothing. And that’s what people have got to understand, you’ve got to get it out there and you’ve got to get people to understand it. And if they don’t understand it they’re never going to use it.
RICHARD WHITTAKER I’ve been saying for years a client we’re not that bright and I can feel all the evidence coming across from what people are saying. Part of that is because we work in a different environment and our skills are applied elsewhere. Last year I had 43 sites, 23 contractors and 128 million 600-odd handovers, 2 insolvencies and complaints from internal/external customers. I need educating, but there is only a small amount of time for that education. Now, the thing for me is what clients understand, what board understand is risk.
And some don’t have a risk register, some have a 2-stage risk register. When you look at development, a 2-stage risk register manages risk now, but doesn’t recognise the legacy risk that’s important to a building once it becomes an asset liability. And that’s where we’ve now developed a risk register framework that includes legacy risk that asset need to study and understand because that’s their area of expertise. We can’t do it for them, we’re development guys, they can. So really for me it is about education and Alan’s point about having this guide that’s quite easy to read, board reports. 500-600 pages board reports, a dozen reports, you only ever read the summary.
You need the detail behind it if somebody comes to you with a specific question, but in order to operate your business you need all of the summaries and you make decisions off of that. There’s the same principle. a fantastic amount of expertise and detailed knowledge behind it, I can’t even start to try and get anywhere near that level. So that’s it for me, it’s about getting people to understand the risk and how they’re being protected. So you’re giving them a solution that helps them meet their duty of care, both legislatively and morally.
DAVE BRADBURY We’ve got something in our favour, this Building Safety Act is law. There is no getting around it, that law states who is accountable and who’s culpable and therefore we have the ability to be able to have a driving force to ensure full legal compliance. It really comes down to we’ve got something on our side now.
RICHARD So, recap. We’ve got three workstreams that we’re going to get moving over the next few weeks. We’re looking at a couple of co-leaders for each and I know a couple of people have already expressed interest in doing that. And we’re obviously seeing people and their involvement during this meeting which by the way has been amazing, I don’t think we’ve ever had such a high proportion of people getting involved in a meeting before. That’s next steps from out point of view. I think it was Andrew with the suggestion for another workstream, but I think we’ll possibly continue along George’s path of just the initial three and see how it goes after the first meeting of those. Does that make sense to everybody?
GEORGE It does for me, Richard. What i would like is if people have got any suggestions as to what additional workstreams might be worthwhile doing, let us know because we may be able to wrap them in to those initial ones. Because really I’ve just defined in there some things I think are useful, but obviously we can tailor them to work accordingly.
RICHARD An exercise we conducted on the Fire Safety act a year or so back whereby I did a number of one-to-ones with 50-60 various organisations over a period. I’m not going to be able to do that this time because I’ve got other commitments, but we are going to hook in a couple of people to do some fo those one-to-ones to get a little bit more detail on what people are doing, how they’re handling it. Everybody is doing things in a different way and it’s good sometimes to get a proper look at what people are doing, what’s working, what isn’t working, how it can be improved. And if we can all share that information it can save everybody a lot of time.
GEORGE I’d like to thank everybody for their contribution, if you think it’s been worthwhile what we really want to do is make this grow, so we want as many people as possible. For example, Ben, if there’s other people in your PFI community, maybe even your competitors, I think that would help everybody if we’ve got everybody rowing in the same direction. So, if you know other people that ere like you that you think may be interested please let them know about it. We’ve got the BIM In Asset Management website which is just something basic, it’s something we can grow from so please point people at that. Obviously the BIM4Housing website is where all of the existing resources are, so please spread the word.
CHAT
[03:53 pm] Brian (Unverified)
Hi Alan. Could you forward the NHS standard door information across please?
[03:54 pm] HUCKSTEPP, Emma (MEDWAY NHS FOUNDATION TRUST) (Unverified)
Alan Oliver (External) could you please forward us the NHS information?
[03:55 pm] Graham H Stewart (External)
can you post a link Jarek Wityk to this document please
[03:56 pm] Talvinder Mehta (External)
i would also like to have a copy of the NHS document, did you say you have updated this for housing, if so can i get a copy of this please?
[03:58 pm] Paul Sheedy (External)
Dear all, for clarity our specialisation is in the area of occupancy, both actual real-time floor by floor and predictive analysis of every floor of a building. We use this to deliver insights on evacuations, with a focus on high rise and other commercial buildings. Currently most buildings do not ever do full evacuations and have no idea who is even in the building. This includes the biggest buildings in London, including one that has 13,000 occupants and only 2 stairways and one that only did an evacuation once after 9/11. Fact. So that is our focus, real-time insights during fire evacuations. Happy to contribute.
[04:00 pm] Pam Tippett (External)
Apologies I got called on site please can I have the recording as I really wanted to join this
[04:01 pm] Jarek Wityk (Guest)
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVNZlu1W8=/?share_link_id=15111676581
[04:02 pm] Jarek Wityk (Guest)
Password: Bu1ld1ngSafety
[04:06 pm] Johnny Furlong (External)
Id do Digital Records and Interoprbility
[04:06 pm] Joe Stott (External)
1 - 2 - 3 (time permitting)
[04:07 pm] Numan Ali (External)
1 and 3
[04:07 pm] Paul Sheedy (External)
Happy to contribute to the business case
[04:08 pm] Talvinder Mehta (External)
i would like to join group 3 interoperability
[04:09 pm] Richard Whittaker (External)
Business case for me please
[04:09 pm] Neill Shirley (External)
Jarek - can you please confirm how to download your report or share a pdf copy please, thanks Neill
[04:10 pm] Farghaly, Karim (External)
Brilliant workstreams George, interested in 1 and 3. My only comment is that I see them as a Venn diagram, and the middle part is semantic interoperability (common language- taxonomy and ontology)
[04:12 pm] Marc BRADFIELD (Unverified)
Business Case (1) and potentially time-permitting Digital Records (2)
[04:13 pm] Adina Poncis (Unverified)
2 and 3 please
Jarek Wityk
Neill you can download the published version from George's post here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/georgestevenson_understanding-what-we-need-to-do-to-satisfy-activity-7197592922106535937-GIIm?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop or you can also access it from here: https://projectdesign.io/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2024-05-18_Understanding-Building-Safety-Regulations_P01.pdf The most up to date version is on MIRO, when we make some significant update we will then publish next PDF
[04:14 pm] Jack Dearlove (External)
George Stevenson I would like to be in the interoperability working group. Happy to chair if there's a need
[04:17 pm] BRIER Andrew (EQUANS UK) (External)
I am interested in the Business Case.
[04:17 pm] Neill Shirley (External)
Many thanks Jarek
[04:18 pm] Andrew Waring (External)
Workstream proposal -- Information specification - Develop Information specification schema for the various AM requirements as a default. Structured, unambiguous, maps into interoperable open standards. (IFC, COBie)
Jack Dearlove
Nice one Andrew. Let's jump into the interoperability working group and work up.
[04:19 pm] Andrew Waring (External)
Happy to contribute.
[04:24 pm] Jack Dearlove (External)
William Borthen would love to explore what you were sharing there in more detail.
like 1
[04:25 pm] sue (Unverified)
I'm interested in Digital Records and Andrew's proposed workstream
like 1
[04:26 pm] Andrew Waring (External)
Regarding Adam's note about replacement and it's impact on ongoing insurance etc, is there a RAG or a codification of data from a replacement point of view to highlight what specification of assets can be deviated upon when replacement is considered and it's impact. Is this a risk assessment that can be developed at the specification level so that the parameter data can be assessed from a risk standpoint.
A parameter of a parameter so to speak.
There are areas of IFC and COBie schema where this kind of data could sit. How that is collated and mapped
[04:27 pm] Adam Sanders (External)
Andrew Waring - keen to contribute to this. I'll join the workstream 2 at least
[04:30 pm] Paul Sheedy (External)
Yes I am now getting the insurance sector to engage.
[04:31 pm] Hodgson, Matt (External)
interesting in supporting workstreams
[04:31 pm] Paul Sheedy (External)
they are waking up that they can have the data on a building that has been digitalised and therefore how well it is being run, running well low premiums, running badly insurance is void.
[04:34 pm] Patrick Wilson (External)
Richard Freer, Apologies, but I will have to drop out of this. I will be in touch, ready to join in on Digital Records.
[04:45 pm] Neill Shirley (External)
Hi Richard/George - I'm more than happy to be part of the Interoperability Workstream if you feel EA-RS can 'add value' to the Group, thanks Neill
[04:46 pm] Joe Stott (External)
EIRs are (in my experience) rarely written by clients.. to date i only have experience of one client that was truely engaged with this.
[04:46 pm] Paul Sheedy (External)
John Dearlove exactly the same just happened to us with the NHS, total waste of over 2 years of work.
Jack Dearlove
Sorry to hear that Paul, but a story we would like to change, and or is there a way to provide clients in FM with a human readable version?
[04:49 pm] Paul Sheedy (External)
A large dollop of common sense would resolve most issues....
[04:53 pm] Joe Stott (External)
Well said Graham!.. we need a reset / back to basics..
[04:53 pm] Jack Dearlove (External)
Spot on Graham H Stewart get back to basics and get the clear message out.
[06:00 pm] Deane Sales (External)
Interesting discussions, look forward to the next one, I am as always happy to support and be involved in any of the workstreams
I am yet to see one that clients actually pay attention to, especially when you are including costs for items within EIRs and the client is questioning why you have allowed for this We need to go back to basics
Andy Gordon
I think we need to define what we mean by Clients. Those who commission buildings are not the same as those who operate them, so when dealing with Clients, oftentimes this means the team who commission the work and not the team who manages, which makes any discussion of EIR and AIR moot given the commissioning team in many instances have no interest in this beyond being potentially a project deliverable. Nk though is given to how this data would be operationalised
Joe Stott
Clients probably isn't the right term for these discussions.. Technically i guess we should us "Appointing Party"
William Borthen
I agree, 'Clients' (Appointing Party) are not always the end users of the data. The role of Client
Should be to incorporate the views of all the stakeholders in the EIR, but they often don’t or can’t.
Agreed. The Appointing Party should represent the views and requirements of all stakeholders in the EIR, but often dont. The Appointing Party on a speculative build for example will never know who the occupier will be once it's built, so cant cater for their needs. Given the operational phase of buildings is not that complex, there should be a standard set of requirements (for Asset Managers), that should form the basis of a standard AIR. That way the Asset Manager gets what they need irrespective of the originating Appointing Party. The tech firms can then build solutions around that, to provide actual operational value from BIM.
[06:07 pm] Dave Bradbury (External)
It was a pleasure to meet you all & I look forward to the next meeting
[06:09 pm] DUNDERDALE Vicky (ULHT) (External)
Hi, I am keen to watch this recording but i am unable to as "only org members have access to the meeting recap". Is it possible to change the setting and allow ULH in? Thank you
Andy Gordon
Me too
"there should be a standard set of requirements (for Asset Managers), that should form the basis of a standard AIR. That way the Asset Manager gets what they need irrespective of the originating Appointing Party. The tech firms can then build solutions around that, to provide actual operational value from BIM."
Done right, COBie, assuming the developer has mandated its use, and assuming it includes all the Space, Type nad Component data that asset managers will need answers those questions. The trick, certainly in Housing where I work, is that the traditional Housing & Asset Management systems cant operate to that level of granularity, and how that data is operationalised through Repairs, Compliance and Major Works activities is key
William Borthen
Absolutely, COBie provides a consistent structure/format for interoperability, and as long as the key data points are populated (call that the minimum operational requirements) then that's a good basis for a smooth handover into ops. As you say, the challenge is the granularity and grouping of asset systems within the operational phase, which is not reflected in the Uniclass system. Therefore operators have a choice to work with a clunky taxonomy (Uniclass) and benefit from the data provided in the construction phase, or bin that good data and collect new data to a more suitable level using a different classification system. Solving the problem you highlight Andy Gordon would be a great thing to do. Would love to discuss this more.
[08:48 pm] Andrew Waring (External)
So long as the data is in a structured format, (A taxonomy), I would say you can map to whatever you need to. So long as everything is named consistently and can be referenced into these overlays then you can do anything you want really.
COBie is good for Type, Component, System relationships but only covers maintainable. IFC does this at a wider scale and can cover less contiguous elements.
For defining assets, pr(type) and ss(system) are good with Uniclass. NRM does this effectively with a single code but then interoperability for products between system types is diluted.
at the end of the day, a user can apply any identification overlay they want, but a base identification system needs to be agreed. ISO 22014 (replacing BS8541) is a good start and ties into IFC nicely.
IFC may also just be an exchange schema that can translate to and from anything structured and provided with a translation layer.
[08:50 pm] Graham H Stewart (External)
COBie always gets a bad name but is really really easy given its limited data requirements which can be extending using the Attributes sheet - also the good thing about COBie is it is easily validated using COBieQC2024 which can be mapped to the clients CAFM - all of this is with the understanding that the information manager understands COBie enough to advise the client which most dont