Contractual Workstream - 'What good looks like' brainstorm-20220321

George: The incompleteness of the M&E design is significant, from a coordination perspective, largely because of the procurement process which actually adds a lot of unnecessary penetrations.

It would be excellent if by the time we get to gateway two design was complete ready for stage 4 design and there is still the correct amount of design time at the front end.

George: re the change management process, they are putting off the selection of products and materials for later, because they perceive that it is transferring risk onto the supply chain. If products are selected earlier, we can simplify (and consequently) de-risk the process. Compartmentation is one of the biggest issues, but we’re probably only looking at 50 or 60 types of assets. We should concentrate on those and have the right parametric information so that when a product is changed later on the impact of the penetration is more limited.

PREPERATION OF EMPLOYER’S REQUIREMENTS

SCHEDULE ONE Design submission procedure.

Paul: It’s important the manufacturer foresees any kind of problems that will come later on in the process and to register it.

George: It’s important that we try and address the process of identifying what is actually causing the risk and therefore being able to evidence the fact it’s being dealt with. The Housing Association property mutual process potentially has a method of addressing this. It looks at things that go wrong and it’s either the materials, the workmanship or the design. What the building performance group did was focus on doing those so that there was far more clarity in terms of that work. By having rigorous plant of work inspections, it meant that the incidence of failure reduced hugely and that’s why the property mutual worked.

The pre-construction process is crucially important. The latest trend is to shift it to the left, which means that focus has shifted away from what we are doing on site to what we are doing before we get to the site.

George: What we can do about the red lines?/red list idea? Is to take that back to the duty holder group, people who have currently got that responsibility, and get them to feed that back into their development colleagues, because at the moment the development colleagues are going to be driven by the normal sort of commercial things that are causing the problem. They can come back at it through the health & safety and liability side of things rather than the commercial.

There ae more and more questions about embedded carbon.

The interrelationship between different assets is important, you know what goes to make up a compartment and also the standards that they need to adhere to.

George’s strategy: 3 or 4 years ago started talking to People in development teams – those who are interested are outnumbered by those who are not interested. Through them I started meeting asset managers and property managers, eventually focusing on the duty holders because they are the ones who will be legally carrying the can; therefore, they are sensible people looking at it from a practical/self-preservation perspective.

The duty holders should be able to say to the development people that this is the quality of information/evidence/digital records that I need before I’m willing to sign that off now.

Regarding the HSE and treatments, for those treatments to work we need eg this type of asset to be installed to this level of quality with this information.

George has been talking to the constructors and manufacturers in BIM4housing and they’ve told me about essential characteristics. These are built into the product standards that most factories comply with to provide their information to sell their products. But getting to what those essential characteristics are is difficult because they are locked up in standards. There are declarations of performance and something called EAD which is for products that don’t have a declaration of performance. We’ve looked at what are the values in the declaration of performance – remarkably there is no master library of what these characteristics are.

Paul talks about the compatibility of different parts of an asset eg fire curtain, and how there are nuances regarding the compatibility.

What we haven’t done very well with BIM is map the information requirements for the end users.

Richard: we need a proper marketing strategy to get this stuff out there...where are those messages going and how are they going to get there?

George: we could feed it back through the supply chain sustainability school.

Martin: should use caution about marketing and getting the message out re tier 1s and possible collusion...to not make a set of demands, as if holding hostage.

WHAT TO DO NEXT? Martin: We’re thinking about a downstream set of conditions, advice guidance eg this is what you're going to need before you get ready to engage. This is the digital journey. This is what you need before you can get to gateway two. If you take standard and fair contracts and try and offset this risk it isn’t going to go down well with the agency or the insurance industry because it’s limited...

Then, we can do a piece of work re this is what we’re going to need from the supply chain downstream in terms of the digital journey and the information that’s going to needed to fed into getting through gateway 2.

George: We have to look at the process of products and materials they submitted and how is design agreed with the client and get the client to recognise that for us to be able to deliver the quality that they are expecting. Then some changes need to be taken earlier in the in the process. We need to address those things and modify contracts to these standard contracts is not the way of doing that...we have to be more collaborative in the process.

Martin: offsetting risks through modifications to contracts is no substitute for engagement and resolving the risks and identifying them.

The Building safety bill is about profound change and what we haven’t got is a roadmap. We’ve got a picture of the future. What we need to do is work out how we've changed the procurement process and to evolve the procurement process to support a better construction sector.