SCHOOLS ESTATES SPECIAL WORKSHOP MEETING, 28-08-2025
GEORGE STEVENSON On the international schools side of things Ana, are those international schools here in the UK?
ANA MATIC No, they are international schools abroad. The usually have a link with a UK education provider, for example, or in the case of a couple of recent ones that we’re doing they’re linked to a larger master plan development. So they’re part of a larger master plan which is mostly residential and then there is a school as part of that. Which I suppose it’s normal for UK as well, but that’s the route to those projects currently for us.
GEORGE STEVENSON Are you producing room data sheets and things like that for them?
ANA MATIC We are producing room data sheets. So, we’re producing full kind of C sheets set. We’re also working with furniture suppliers and all of the normal stuff, laboratory specialists. But we’re not doing COBie or in fact we’re not doing any asset data either for them. So, probably the last school that we did asset data for is one of the DfE projects, nearly 2 or 3 years ago. It might just be us, I think education projects have slightly gone quiet for us.
GEORGE STEVENSON I can see that largely if you’re doing FF&E and things like that, arguably you may not need to look at that from a COBie perspective. I would challenge that by the way, I don’t think that’s the case, but I can understand that perception. Because you’re not doing the M&E, who will be doing the M&E under those circumstances? Are you involved in that at all?
ANA MATIC In this case, usually there will be an MEP subcontractor basically. So, the M&E designer really does quite outline design, mostly the key plant rooms, the typical specialist space class room, lab space, that kind of stuff. And then the MEP subcontractor comes onboard to do the full system design.
GEORGE STEVENSON OK, this obviously is a follow up on the meeting that we had at the beginning of the month. And what we’ve been doing, I’ve been speaking with Mo at Morta because what we’re trying to do is do something that’s an example of what good looks like in terms of the way things go. Mo, have you got something to say about our collaboration?
MO SHAHA’A I think effectively what we want to look at doing is setting best practice for how information can be delivered as efficiently as we can. And to then test whether the information that’s been delivered is being put to use. Effectively the thought that we generally have is a lot of these types fo things are duplicated over and over again. And the industry doesn’t nave tangible examples it can point to towards what detailed best practice looks like on the ground. For how to better utilise data that comes out of the different functions. And the idea is to work towards that, to actually showcase how we can maximise the use of what we have so that we reduce the duplication of effort and make it all as efficient as we can.
And then there is a range of ways that that can go. It can be looking at things like asset information that ultimately needs to be delivered and where does it exist across the board of sets of information that’s being created and how do we make that more efficient. It could look like everyone knows that they have to, I realise that this discussion was just ongoing. But like something like COBie, there is a lot of data that’s then duplicated across schools. Can we look at building a joint library across the board so that people have to, not every party has to recreate and put the same information together.
It could take the form of we have information delivery plans in place already, how can we maximise the use of them? BIM? 5 mins 29secs for the range of things that have to be delivered for the Department for Education. But we get really, really granular and into the weeds and have examples and demonstrations of how all of that can work together and how different, both on a process level as well as on a technology level. So how would a Morta work with an ActivePplan and work with a Revit and with an IFC and combine these things together to make things more efficient. I think I think that that's the high level summary.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, exactly, very much a collaboration. And one of the key things that i’m trying to get to is to really properly determine what information is actually going to be used by the school. Rather than what everybody thinks they’re going to need. Matt is on the call from Willmott Dixon at the moment and I think you’re doing a number of schools, aren’t you Matt?
MATT KNOWLES Yeah, we’re pretty much backlogged at the moment with different schemes.
GEORGE STEVENSON One of the things that I think is relevant, I was talking with somebody last week and they were saying …what we’re trying to do is get more contacts within the schools themselves to engage with them to talk about what information they actually need. And one of the things that was raised was paint. Now, we don’t think about paint as being particularly something that’s needed for asset management. But actually the point that the schools team, the caretaker made in this particular case was that 70% of their work is involved in painting, refreshing things. Because in many cases what they’re doing is things like heating and air conditioning and things, they actually let out to a subcontractor to do.
So, although they need the information they’re not actually doing it. Whereas in things like painting, which they have to do quite regularly, what they need is the colour of the paint that’s used in which space and which wall is it being used on. Now, we’ve been delivering schools with various different contractors over the last couple of years and I’ve looked back at the handover information. And actually finding the finishes schedule and relating it back to spaces is a real challenge. And the other thing is that the paint itself is described as a colour, but what the caretaker said they need is the RAL number. Now, how often do the schedules actually include that? So, I think there’s an interesting challenge with that.
The other thing, I’ve been discussing this with the SFG20 team and what they’re doing at the moment is very interesting. It’s being led by Andy Green from Atkins and what they’re doing is they’re creating a master taxonomy which will include NRM, Uniclass, SFG20, all coordinated. Now, I’ve yet to see what that looks like and I think it’s a great aspiration. It’s one that we’ve been trying to do over the years, but it’s a big job, but what they’re doing is they’re bringing this stuff together. So, we’re hopefully going to be on the pilot for that very shortly, I think it’s being launched in October, but hopefully we’re going to get a prerelease on it, The reason that’s important is that we can then start to see how things are being described. And I’ve got a couple of examples that I’ve prepared that we’ll come on to in a moment.
But I think what we need to do is better understand, I’m not suggesting the DfE’s guidance on all of this stuff isn’t what we should be following because clearly it should. The challenge that I think we’ve got is whether the way things are named or described is suitable for the school. Do they actually understand? I was looking for one the other day and I was on a project and I was looking for the boiler. I couldn’t find anything on the boiler. Now, I think that’s because it was described in the schedules as a heat exchanger. Now, whether the caretaker would know to call it heat exchanger I question. And therefore what we almost need to do is to have maybe some synonyms or something like that in the information that’s being handed over that makes it easier for people to find things.
MO SHANA’A I really like that actually and I realise going back to something different, but information delivery planning and tracking. Although some people know what that means, but you go to a design manager, they'll be like what is that? And then you tell them design deliverable tracker. And they go, I have that, I already have a design deliverable tracker. Or you say a sustainability deliverable tracker, they have that. Commercial deliverable tracker, someone has that. And it is, I think you're actually making a really interesting point where the data may actually exist and there are things in place for whatever it is that they let people do, but the synonyms and making sure that it matches the language that someone is speaking is a whole different challenge.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, exactly. I was speaking to a life cycle expert on it earlier this morning and he was saying that as far as painting is concerned it’s often packaged to say that there’s this number of square metres or linear metres of skirting board to be painted in this particular colour or whatever. But that doesn’t tell you at a room level what’s needed. So, it’s actually put together, as Mo is saying there, for a purpose. It’s probably put together for a cost plan without it actually being formed in a way that we can slice it out to make it easier to understand.
But the other thing is that the likelihood is that it won’t be considered as asset information, so therefore it may well not be modelled, it almost certainly won’t be modelled actually, paint. But what you’ve probably got is a drawing with maybe hatch patterns and things like that, I think that’s the way architects tend to do it. So, it’s something you’ve got to visually interpret, rather than having it in a machine-readable format. Whereas I think what we need is that information to be, which as Mo is saying is being created, but how can we break it out and make it useful? I don’t know. Any ideas on that?
PIERRE VENTER Just very quickly, so standardised, standardised, standardised. The thing about technical terms is that there’s a plain language question, a plain language required for the person in the field. And this is the whole thing with the data is that the two can be in exactly the same place available to two different people in terms of the consumption. The description is absolutely critical because if you can’t easily identify and clearly identify something it fails. The other part was just about consistency and that’s naming and the purpose i.e. the type marks. But your discussion here was about things relating to a room or a space. Now, that ISO 19650, when we talk about containers, in fact there is just a standard.
So, if you were taking walls, you could actually say it’s from the point of entry and you go clockwise around the room. Wall 1 to wall 99 or whatever. And it would be simply a list. So, that’s a technical way that these things could be done with a reference for the paint is then linked. However, my real important part is about the consumption. So when you talk about the skirting boards, the skirting boards in the room they are in the container of the room. And they can then be packaged for the user requirements, so in other words the RAL colour. And that the schedule and the linked data.
So Mo, it’s the idea of Morta and something like Ignite where the connection to the document that says this is what the room looks like, That, you don’t have to model it, the data is attached to that particular object and each of them just becomes a different instance. And I think sometimes we’re actually making it far too difficult instead of just making it simple. We’ve got objects in a room and they are schedulable and everything else that’s required. So they cascade down to Morta quite comfortably, that’s my opinion on it.
GEORGE STEVENSON To make it schedulable the model has got to be created in that way. If the model is created, for example, if it’s a design & build project, which many are, then the model is probably created by the architect to a level and then who then picks it up and does things with it. So, I think the fact is that somebody will create a brand new model, that’s typically what happens. I accept the fact that that may not be the dream, but in practice Pierre that’s what tends to happen, certainly on M&E. M&E almost never, in my experience, they almost never use the designer’s model.
PIERRE VENTER So George, the important part of that phone (Pierre hold’s up a phone on screen), I don’t have to actually model all of the stuff in there, what I do need to do is have the information that’s a requirement. So, skirting boards, yes, check. Skirting board information, yes. Linear meterage can be extracted directly from the perimeter of the room etc. Yes, there will be areas where the skirting board goes around door reveal to door reveal. That’s done, and it’s easy enough to embed that as data attached to the object of the room. So Ana, in terms of your room data sheet, in Revit I’ve got a room, I just drop it in my model. The moments it's put within a room separation line, suddenly it now starts reporting all that information and there’s certain forms in it.
GEORGE STEVENSON Can I just challenge that though. I’m no expert on this, we’ve obviously got you and Justin and certainly Ana on this. My understanding is that the way Revit works, for example, is if you’ve got a wall the wall will generally be put in and it’s not broken up into the rooms. It can be, but the speed of actually producing the outputs, and the outputs really a drawing, often people won’t do that. Justin, am I wrong on that?
JUSTIN GILLARD No, you’re not wrong. I’m just preparing a little demo because I’ve joined a little bit late, my previous meeting went over. But I can give a practical demonstration if you give me 5 minutes of a skirting board and a wall finish and also Revit as the authoring tool, in this case. How you can bread a wall of multiple layers into parts and those parts can then be scheduled. So, it would be possible and it has been possible in the past with hospital projects to handle this. I’ll create a little demo and I’ll show you what my side of it is and it just becomes part of the bigger picture.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, the only thing I would say, Justin, on this, I recognise very well that it can be done. What I’m saying though is that where you’ve got schools that are being delivered on a budget where the architect is probably on very constructed fees, therefore who would do it?
JUSTIN GILLARD That’s an interesting point. I used to do a lot of Revit training and part of the training material I created had something very rare and that is skirting boards because it’s something completely overlooked. People will actually model the architrave around a door, but obviously the skirting boards are a significant part of the building from a cost point of view. So I did used to show people how to do it, it’s very straightforward. I think it’s just one of those level of detail or development things that doesn’t necessarily get thought of. But it is relevant, especially on the scale of the school.
ANA MATIC Can I answer a different question really which is that scheduling things out of Revit, before you can schedule anything you need to be sure that you’ve modelled it for the purpose of scheduling. So, normally the development of the school design will be so focused on getting the right areas, getting the right adjacencies, getting the right equipment. First the fixed equipment and then the loose equipment into the places, making sure that a fire strategy works, all of that stuff. While you’re doing all of that you’re not necessarily modelling to schedule. You’re modelling to schedule things like doors and windows and things that are elements that are required to be scheduled with certainty.
But the rest of the stuff, you’re not modelling to schedule, you’re modelling to resolve the design. And this is what George was saying. There is then another piece of work required for you to then utilise those models pragmatically and practically to schedule for other purposes. Whether that’s maintenance, whether that’s future wayfinding for hospitals. Anything that you might require in operation might not have been modelled in such a way that it’s useful for you to do operation later. There is another piece of work required which an architect can do or a well trained professional who understands the building can do it. But that piece of work needs to be done with the school or with somebody onboard who knows how the future facility is going to be maintained.
And usually there is no money for that piece of work. As ever, my comment always comes back to procurement. The whole soft landing process or all of those processes don’t necessarily understand how much work is required for everything that we have to be made useful for other purposes. Often QSs could initiate this process by clarifying how they’re going to look at a building, but sadly nowadays QSs are still really just working off of schedules. They’re not really looking at models and not being able to advise us in a proper way. So, it’s not lack of skill usually, it’s whether it’s a purposeful development while you're working on the models.
PIERRE VENTER The term placeholder. If I’ve got a room object and I have my room data sheet is a separate library model of all of the different rooms for that type of school. In that room I know that there are X number of components and they can be listed in a field saying components. So there’s no object in the actual room. This is just the checklist that actually goes along and says you need 10 tables, 4 seats, whatever the particular thing is. And that means that is your checklist to the operator who is putting the desks in. This is your validation saying you need 10 and you’ve only got 8. Now, it’s not a schedule, but it is a schedule list that says have you got the following things.
So that’s your input if you were doing a services room, have you got the following items. And it allows that. So from what Mo has in terms of the Morta would be here are the items that you require. So in a way George this goes back to the original medical thing that we looked at earlier in the year, where the actual room was preprepared with all of the components and basically you just take it and drop it in the model. MY part behind this is what I call the performance spec is that the information required for the performance is also embedded in the same list. Either as a linked fields i.e. a URL outside, so Mo, this is the kind of idea that it’s all in one place. The physical document, having the picture of the room data sheet and all of the components, can be stored elsewhere.
But it means that anybody going to ask the quality and the data integrity can actually see that information on demand. So, that’s the important part of me. But Ana, mainly it’s about having an object that you could drop in as a placeholder which is a table. It’s just symbolic in most cases. But n fact it has 3D geometry and therefore can have all of the information linking to whatever and just gets swapped out with the particular objective.
ANA MATIC But keep in mind that those objects are most of the time used to design the building, not to schedule for operation later on. While the buildings are being designed all objects, and not just the building but the fixed FF eneda loose FF eneda ??? 26 mins 4 secs, the sanitary where the hoists, anything that makes the room work, is mostly placed into the model to enable the design to be coordinated. They’re not necessarily at that point placed into the model to either be scheduled for cost or to be scheduled for future maintenance.
Which is why I’m saying at the end then somebody needs to look at all of that and check it and translate it and fix it so that it can be used for scheduling and for operation. Most of it can be used, it’s just that somebody needs to do a little bit of thinking about it and a little bit of clearing out and a little bit of kind of collating stuff. For example, skirtings will be missed out because skirtings are not modelled usually, unless you have to model them. So, you could have a linear object that just schedules the skirting, absolutely possible.
But somebody needs to first say we want the skirtings to be scheduled and we want them to be scheduled like this, the door fittings under the whatever blah blah. Once that’s described and agreed, then the architecture team or FF&E team or whoever can do a simple mark up of all of the rooms and bring that into the schedule. You don’t even need to model the actual skirtings. But somebody has to think about it a little bit and usually no one is paid to do that. So there is a gap.
GEORGE STEVENSON Remember that what we’re trying to do here is we’re looking at the asset management side of things. Andrew Simpson works for Bowmer and Kirkland and what he’s doing at the moment is in a very practical sense delivering these schemes and he’s also worked in schools. So, one of the things i’d just like to ask Andrew, in terms of that process am I right that the fees are quite tight for the designers to actually do this modelling?
ANDREW SIMPSON Yeah, we always have challenges and kickbacks from the architects, MEPs, everyone just always warned about I'm going to have time to do this. They want information, they want it really quickly and they have to fix things. It's very much a time constraint, but a cost or budget constraint issue as well for designers and consultants.
GEORGE STEVENSON One of the interesting things, we were looking at a project last week and we got taps. Taps are quite important for FMs and they often aren’t modelled. They’d be there as probably an ironmongery schedule. And one of the interesting things. (shares screen). I just did this this morning. What we’re trying to do is make it more easy for people to find things. And therefore here, we’re trying to use Uniclass where possible to define things. But it’s likely that if somebody has got a family, would you have different families for all of those different types of taps?
PIERRE VENTER It’s a product George, so there would be different ones. But what it is here is there’s two other codes, EF and SS. So the taps are actually a system and you start with the system, that’s the best way. So in other words what are the systems? There’s a door system, a window system, a floor system. Then you can extrapolate that into the actual entities that make up that system: the frame, the door, the ironmongery etc. And it’s a system of building up this information in an incremental way.
GEORGE STEVENSON Can we concentrate on this which is taps. I know if sounds a bit maybe petty, but I’m told that painting and taps and things like these, these are very practical things that they’re interested in. In many cases they’re not interested in the door system, for example. What they’re interested in is the things that they are maintaining. Now clearly they need to do inspections of doors and they need to hold the information about that from a fire perspective. But will probably get somebody in to go and do door inspections. Whereas on a daily basis they’ll probably have leaking taps. Now, one of the things that I’m questioning at the moment, and I’ve fed this back to the guys that are putting together this master taxonomy.
For example, would you go for a mixer tap? Or would you go for a thermostatic mixer tap? Or would you pick a washbasin thermostatic? Now, as you’ve said Pierre, the whole point about the specification is really driving you towards buying a product. And those are the sorts of options that you’ve got. Now, if that’s the level of detail, you’ve just talked about systems Pierre, often models aren’t created using systems.
PIERRE VENTER We’ve got elements, components and assembles. And there’s the part of the documentation flow. We start with an element, we make a whole bunch of elements to go into a component, we take components and put them together into an assembly. Within Revit the assembly is self documenting, we’ve actually got the ability to go right the way down to the detail if we choose to.
GEORGE STEVENSON If we choose, but Mo’s made a point earlier, could we get some example schedules of what is actually coming out of the models to be able to do this? Because at the moment, for example here we’ve got within NBS you can have comparisons, but they’re not comparing the same values. Which actually makes it quite difficult, that one for example, you’ve got no information on its length or height, whereas on the others you do. Therefore there should be some degree of rigour with that. You see there for example, these have all got values for this information here, but nothing is coming through from these. So how do you do that comparison?
PIERRE VENTER So George, there is one of the things that NBS actually should be doing is saying listen, we need this to be fully populated. Go back to the supplier and just say provide the following information, thank you very much, and it’s updated. This incremental filling of the box makes a lot of sense in my opinion.
GEORGE STEVENSON I agree it makes sense, but people aren’t doing it.
PIERRE VENTER Well, how we incentivise it, that’s obviously part of our potential remit is to say if you do those the cascade down on the procurement side is dramatically improved because you’re not hunting for information anymore.
GEORGE STEVENSON Therefore how do we…I’m agreeing with you, we ought to be pushing that back up to say this information is something that we need. Again, rather than try to boil the ocean, what I want to try and do is focus on the asset information. So for example, a lot of those specification details are of no interest at all to the asset manager because they are really there to persuade an architect or a designer, or maybe somebody doing procurement, to buy that product.
ANDREW SIMPSON Is it not more the NRM side of things we should be looking at? From an asset management point of view.
GEORGE STEVENSON That may well be the case. I don’t know enough about all of the different classification standards to make that call. But that’s exactly the type of input that I think we need here. What Mo and I are trying to do is to get together that experience and that knowledge to be able to define what’s needed. But also use a terminology that makes sense to the asset team.
ANDREW SIMPSON Because in non DfE jobs and the commercial jobs you see NRM 1 and 3 used quite a bit in SSG 20 as well, a lot more as well.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, absolutely. SFG 20 is basically tracking work activities. And to be fair, that's true of NRM as well. It's not actually tying back to a thing. It's tying back to the work that needs to be done to a thing.
ANDREW SIMPSON And it’s also how to maintain the thing, NRM 3.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yes, and part of the work that is being done that I think we’re going to get some exposure to is relating those things together. But I can assure you I’ve spent years on this, it’s not easy.
ANA MATIC George, I really like the way that you’re looking at things where you’re saying let’s understand what’s really important to the caretaker in the school. Bug stuff, MEP big stuff, nowadays usually gets taken care of by a specialist company. So, in a way possibly less important. Day to day stuff, door closers, taps, paint, things that fall off, that kind of stuff. And I would suggest that almost every school will be done in such a way that there is only so many types of taps, you rally do live in batches. So, there will be the tap for the joint toilet, there’ll be the tap for the individual toilets and there will be a tap for the sinks, or something like that.
All you need is a crib sheet that says these 5, almost like a tap type schedule, which just tells you where they are, now they work, what size they are and where to phone up if you need to replace them or whatever. So, precisely that level of thinking needs to be done with the caretaker there and then once somebody’s done it it’s easy to source that information. So again, it’s like a care package that needs to happen. Revit is not a problem, a type of software is not a problem where we keep this information. Really the information just needs to be slightly pragmatically packaged for people. And it’s that kind of moment of care that needs to happen.
GEORGE STEVENSON Absolutely. The other thing, just coming back on wha Pierre was saying earlier, one of the things that I find frustrating is that in principle where possible, designers do tend to design thinking about systems. What then happens, it goes to the contractor and then it gets broken into work packages. And the work packages may or may not align to systems.
ANA MATIC Well, they don’t, they don’t usually. You package work according to procurement, you don’t package work to align with systems.
GEORGE STEVENSON Exactly. So the information that is collected in the O&Ms, for example, will come back related to work packages and won’t be aligned with the systems. So, that’s part of the thing, I don’t know whether you’d agree with that Andrew? I think that’s a bridge that we probably should be working to.
BASIT IBITOYE I like the way the conversation has been moving so far, and I think that it's still actually to be able to schedule some of these components like walls, even down to skirting stops all these things. Because it's something we've been experimenting on our side as well as a company in Parametrix. So, I think for it to make sense, I would have to do like a little demonstration. So if there are any opinions or any additions you could make, it's going to help us optimise our work through as well. (shares screen). So, we’re talking about how we can work across estates, like in schools. I know we are talking in regards to a school project, but this is just like a demo. So, you could basically schedule the entire estate, something like this.
And let's say we're going down to looking for information regarding rooms components and this and that. So basically I could show you certain information regarding…it's easy for you to sort through and look for the information that you seek. Let me see a certain unit down to the certain room you're looking for. Let's say a living room right here. It basically gives you a schedule of everything, other components that belongs to this home at the moment. So you could select this as well, so it shows you it is getting everything the information you need this, this, this. And aside from that we still have…it connects you to other places where you could basically go sort out for the information.
Like the asset specific stuff regarding the agreement that you've had with the facility managers on the certain information they need regarding the skirting board or floors, walls, doors in terms of areas, this, this, this, this data. So it's just like a brief workflow on what we've been doing in the background. And as well as classification of Uniclass systems, down to MEPs, all this everything holistically, you can schedule as much information as you need and make it machine-readable for card FM systems and also the Golden Thread of information.
GEORGE STEVENSON Thank you for that, I think what you’ve done is excellent. The only thing I would say is you’re building that model for the purposes, exactly as Ana was saying earlier, for what you need to get out of it. What I’m trying to do at the moment is look at how we can work with the workflow as it is at the moment where people are creating this stuff largely not for scheduling.
GORDON PRINGLE It was just to emphasise that aspect about work packages not having correlated to systems. We are distributors for automatically louvered glazing panels for smoke evacuation. They need control systems which are in the lobby areas which have control wiring to the systems. The control wiring needs to be built into the building fabric, it’s not necessarily that we’re appointed as a full structured subcontractor because we’re selling components to do that process. But you kind of want to use the resource that’s on the site to cable that data together. The coordination of that is never really thought through. So, there are numerous systems, they’re not that numerous, but there’s numbers of systems that are on sites that you do not necessarily want them to engage different…
You don’t want to have short term controls contractors coming onsite, you want to use the controls contractors that’s already there to get them up to speed with how to use those components and do the inter field wiring that can be done weeks and weeks ahead of you putting the glazed unit in and putting in the control panels on the walls. You just have to have the termination points in the right areas. But that requires coordination and some structure. But sometimes that was the windows might be in the louver, they might be in he glazing work package.
The controls might not be in any package because it’s a separate control system to a BMS system and the BMS guys don’t want anything to do with it. And the cabling, who’s doing toe cabling? So that whole coordination of systems and OK, they might be specialist systems, is very interesting from a coordination point of view and a scheduling point of view because it kind of falls by the wayside. And often we had situations where builders were saying we’ve got nothing in the cost plan for this. We’ve got to do it, but we’ve got nothing in the cost plan for it which is a bit of an issue because they’ve got to find the money from somewhere.
And there’s other aspects that we do that very much sit in that system. So again, the monitoring of equipment that we do in our closed sealed systems, heating and cooling systems, that data needs to go somewhere. And that has not been thought through because somebody is looking at a specific object as a dumb object rather than delivering data, which actually is the full purpose of the flipping object. A hinge is a hinge, it’s not reporting data. A monitor is reporting system data that’s critical to the performance of the heating and cooling system.
GEORGE STEVENSON I think that system of systems bit is really important. Andrew, I like what you’ve put in the chat. How straightforward is it for us to look at the DfE’s guidance and then interpret it back into this format that we need? My recollection from the work that was done, the room data sheets information is quite explicit. Is that something that we could get maybe you and Matt from Willmott Dixon and Eleanor from…yhe other thing as part of that process, could we actually get a common consensus of what the information requirements are and then how they’re being interpreted? Because I think one of the points that you made, and certainly others have made, is that the different technical advisors are having slightly different interpretations of what the DfE require. And it would be good to maybe get some of the, I don’t know who you deal with, do you deal with Mace and Turner and Townsend and Motts…
ANDREW SIMPSON Yeah, Mace, non DfE with Turner Townsend, Atkins Realis, Arcadis, of the top of my head.
GEORGE STEVENSON Maybe we could pick up afterwards just to see who those contacts are. Because I think they would be interested in this process, if we can get them engaged.
ANDREW SIMPSON They've also got type? 48 mins , they’re another one on the other side of the fence, their stuff suffer time wise as well, hugely. They’re spinning so many plates. Yes, all the time about the process is hindering them because there isn't 4P for doing accepting rejecting information and what have you and it’s another challenge, but that’s another story. So producing reports to give our consultants an idea if they're going to go into contract and some tiers will do a full on report like Mace and yet there’s some who do nothing. But that’s gone off on a tangent, that’s another challenge.
GEORGE STEVENSON OK, so if we can therefore look at the information sets that the DfE are asking you to work to, the specification. And the other sides of how we then engage with the end clients. You were going to ask around some of the schools.
ANDREW SIMPSON Yeah, I’ve had no joy unfortunately because the contacts I had were down in the technical colleges and to be honest they’re just not bothered. So Im hoping to speak to two of the design managers if they have anyone they would mind me getting in touch with. Because at the minute we’ve only got four active DfE projects in our region.
GEORGE STEVENSON Justin, I promised you the opportunity to do a quick one, but bearing in mind the fact this is really about to try and do this, as I was saying to Basit, not as an additional exercise.
JUSTIN GILLARD So, I’ve set this up on the fly literally as you’ve been talking. If you can see my screen. it’s just more of a practical demonstration of what’s being discussed. So there’s just two walls here and a perspective view. There it is in plan. So, what I’ve done is I’ve prepared some different schedules to analysis what we’ve actually got there. So, if I go actually back to the view. This is a perspective view on the left, this is a plan view of the same thing, if I select that wall there you see there on the right. There’s a few things how we’ve dealt with things around the project. This here is an acoustic panel which is schedulable, so is this. Moving on from that, here is a skirting board.
So, that skirting board will either follow the length of the walls, if I adjust the length of the wall so does the skirting board change. But I can independently if I wish adjust the skirting boards length as well independently. But as far as actually taking care of skirting boards and paint. There you can see that skirting board here is actually in Revit, it’s the wall sweep. So, if I delete that you’ll see that it will delete itself from the schedule. If I get both of those skirting boards there and delete them, off they go from the schedule. But you can see that their length is actually quoted here. So, if I was to change the length of that wall, like I showed you earlier, then the length will change here. If I do that it will go back again, you see these lengths changing.
So you can apply cost as well. So it would be possible to carry out a calculation that says for this length multiplied by the cost and it will give you how much it costs, either for the skirting board itself or for the paint. So that’s one way of doing it. Another way of doing it is Revit does have a paint tool. So up here it says paint. I can select the materials, so wood sheathing, and I can put that on that wall there and take it off as well. So that again, that can be wall material take off here, you can see I’ve got this painted wall here. So the area and the cost is applicable. The other thing I wanted to show you as well is this. Here is a Revit wall, if I isolate it you’ll see it like there in 3D.
GEORGE STEVENSON So if it was painted up to one colour or one finish up to say 1.5 metres and then the rest would be a different one, how would you deal with that? Would you have to create two?
JUSTIN GILLARD I can demonstrate. When I select this wall here, it actually says painted wall, Now, if I go into its structure which is here, what I’ve done is I’ve added a seventh layer of the wall that you can’t see there, it’s on the left. And it says finish wall paint and the thickness is one millimetre of wall paint. So, what you can do in Revit, this wall has some paint on it basically in a 3D way. What you can do is go here to this thing called the parts tool and create parts like that. And now if I go to this part schedule you can now see each part of that wall, if I move that over you can see the width of the schedule. You’ll see that each component part of that wall is scheduled.
So the first row is the wall paint. It tells you the length and the height of that painted area which I’ll show you how to adjust that. I’ll also be able to add the cost of that paint in, it will be addable or calculatable. So yeah, you’ve got the length and width of the painted aspect to the wall. Now, if I go back to the wall which is broken into parts, it’s possible for me to actually select a part of the wall and divide parts. It should let me, I will be able to drag that piece of paint along the wall, as per your suggestion. So the paint becomes a separate piece, basically, once you break a wall into parts you can then drag that part of the wall.
GEORGE STEVENSON Is that the sort of thing that somebody could do in bulk using ,Dynamo or something like that?
JUSTIN GILLARD Yeah, sure. So that part of the wall there, if I divide parts…and you can take bits out. I need a bit more practice because it’s been a while. But trust me, you an do it. You can basically take parts of the wall and you can drag them along. You can take bits of it away. So, a common time that I’ve had this is on balconies of apartment blocks where only the feature bricks go around the column that’s in the corner of the balcony. So people, architects are gonna like how do you run a wall this thick? How do you only run basically the facing bricks around the column? Well, it’s this process. You break the wall into parts and you drag the part which is the facing brick around and it will do it.
GEORGE STEVENSON Thank you for that. Ana, from a practical point of view where you’re on a 2% deal or something like that.
ANA MATIC The issue with this is that again, doing it in a nice isolated one room kind of test is easy. Once you have 400 hundred rooms that you’re dealing with which have fixed furniture, which have columns that are obviously splitting the walls, which also have partition walls which are splitting other walls in different ways, it gets very, very complicated. And all I’m saying is, without opening a project to show you it’s probably difficult to describe. But what I’m trying to say is the reason why this gets lost in the forrest of other tasks that we’re doing is not because we don’t want to do it, it’s because we’re usually trying to get other types of information out of those models.
So we might not be modelling in such a way that you can easily schedule every skirting, every piece of different fabric on the floor, on the wall because not all of them might be modelled. Some of them might be mark ups on drawings. And such is life because by the time you get to doing the room layouts you’ve actually done all sorts of other packages that don’t necessarily care about skirtings or different finishes and walls and stuff like that. So, every package will want you to model slightly differently, to make the information correct for that package. And some packages will conflict themselves in order to get the correct information out.
People think that it’s basically laziness, it really isn’t. Design develops in a kind of iterative way and often you’ll be doing one package and that will destroy your opportunity to do the next package correct. Because you’re coordinating many, many different people and they’re inputting information at different times. So, it’s not lack of knowledge in Revit, it’s not lack of wanting to do stuff, it’s how information develops over time. Which is why again we come to the same point which is at the end somebody needs to do a tidy up sort of moment. And usually there is really no money or somebody on the project to do that.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yes, part of the process which I think most of you know that we’re advocating is using 360 photographs as the final as-built. And therefore as has been said, if we’ve got schedules that detail what that wall should have then we don’t need to model it. So therefore you can actually relate it to them. So, that’s part of the methodology that I think we ought to be considering. Has anybody got any projects? Ana, is there something that one of your jobs that we could perhaps look at as an exemplar?
ANA MATIC Yeah, I’ll have to get permission from the client, but I was just thinking there is a school project that we’ve been working on for quite a long time. And it got designed to quite a lot of detail, then went back to planning. So, I can probably safely show you the previous design to a certain level of detail, to just show you the complexity of models, of what’s involved. If it’s of interest how things are scheduled, how things are created. With a view to then try and decipher which of that information could be possibly useful later on. Are you thinking something more that’s already been handed over?
GEORGE STEVENSON Ideally we do want something that’s been handed over, but I think possibly. I know that Matt from Willmott Dixon has to drop off but he’s going to be listening to the recording.
ANA MATIC I was going to say can we not get a contractor? Somebody who is onsite at the moment.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, or even that’s finished a building. So, I think probably the request goes out to Matt and Andrew.
PIERRE VENTER Ana, I think with all of the people that are here, part of the thing is identifying those simple little things that can actually be done and could become a standard or better practice. And this thing was in Saudi Arabia, I had the problem of an overcount of columns as an example. The concrete was double measuring going through the two geometries. All it was was a very simple thing, just give the offset to the top bang, we brought it down to zero difference as a gap analysis.
And this is part of the sanity that I think sometimes we end up over modelling and hence I use the term placeholder, so there’s something that says I’m here. It's properly classified, I would get into a whole discussion about that. But from that early classification, as you put it in it runs right the way through the procurement train. Yes, there are packages that would cause issues etc. However, they can be two streams of the same data consumable in different ways, but they are linked together to that object so the data structure is correct.
ANA MATIC What are your placeholders? Are they tags, physically what are they in the models?
PIERRE VENTER Firstly I have one on the screen at the moment which is basically a mass that says i’m a piece of casework.
ANA MATIC So, it’s a three-dimensional mass.
PIERRE VENTER But it has a symbol on the ground so you can use it for layouts. It is instant space, so it gets bigger and smaller longer and reports as it goes. And every single one of these things is tagged to the extent that you have an ordinary tag, a detailed tag and a full tag. The full one manages all of the data that’s missing. So George, it comes back to what is the data that we require in the models? And it’s actually self administering. But the detail one gives us a lot more information that would help people, specifically about identifying that object. Not just the tag mark, but in fact the actual detail about it. What category does it belong to? Sub-categories etc.
GEORGE STEVENSON So, do we feel that this is making progress? Has it been a useful conversation this morning?
ANA MATIC Yeah, really useful.
GEORGE STEVENSON I think the next step, we’ll arrange a followup meeting in a few weeks time. We’ll also try and speak to some contacts. If you’ve got anybody that as we’ve said already that we could talk to in the schools, that would be very useful. But then we can go from there. Andy, on the FCS side, if you’ve got anybody that you’re potentially talking to on the fire protection side, that would be an interesting conversation to have. Really to understand what’s important from their perspective,
ANDY CUMBERPATCH Is this relative to schools though, George? Or any works?
GEORGE STEVENSON No, this particular group, what we’re trying to do is to do something soup to nuts on schools. But then we can then apply I think a lot of that thinking to healthcare and a lot of the other areas. Because it’s also a matter of compartmentation is obviously relevant to all types of buildings and I know that’s something you’re heavily involved with. So being able to look at the methodologies that you would bring in, for example, how Jo would do a compartmentation analysis of an existing building. I think that type of methodology would be important to cover.
ANDY CUMBERPATCH Yeah, I could certainly try and get some more information, I’ll get someone to pop on the call.
CHAT
Mo Shana'a (External)… I think ideally what we'd have is examples of all these schedules for all the users. We’d have examples of how they were modelled (what happens in Revit vs outside) etc. Ideally it becomes a detailed demonstrator of how all this can be delivered & used
Matt Knowles (External)… appologies im not going to be able to make it back into the call. ill review the recording and send over any standout comments on email george
Modupe Sobowale (External)… Scope of components needed from the beginning.
Mo Shana'a (External)… I think Disciplines break down into
- Systems
2. Packages (which is not a subset of systems)
Pierre Venter (External)… Mo Shana'a Lets have a look at schedules that would be useful to establish a POC. Rooms/Spaces, Systems, Ss/EF/Pr. And how the assembly of documentation, procurement and building process. Inputs/Process/Output.
Andrew Simpson (Unverified)… Sorry if this has already been covered coming late to the discussion, the DEIR documentation is always the focus for DfE projects in terms of deliverables and maintainable data/information to placed within the model. So other items not within this document won't be a focus for consultants. Due to costs/budgets. Sorry if this is going off on a tangent.
Mo Shana'a (External)… Apologies all, I'll have to jump off but really enjoying being part of these. I think hopefully soon we can start working on setting up a public demonstrator together
Andy Cumberpatch (External)… I agree, its all about getting a better practice