BIM4Housing Operations Working Group Meeting 26-10-2022
RICHARD We’ve been quite busy since the last meeting, having a couple of big meetings (one with around a 100 people) with the Fire Chiefs Council on the 23rd January deadline with their proposals for trying to get the various fire authorities to coalesce around a standard set of requirements. At the moment each fire authority has their own agenda and stipulations as to what they need from landlords for the 23rd. So the fire chiefs have actually been trying to get something together for the proposal and hope that it gives a bit more clarity as to what people will actually need to supply. We met with them and Housing Associations (and others) a couple of times.
In tandem with that I’ve been holding one-to-one meetings with a number of Housing Associations and Local Authorities to see what they are looking at doing. I’m just starting to have more group meetings, 4 or 5 people having a chat explaining what they are doing, how it’s working for them, the pitfalls they are coming across - a knowledge share of the different ways people are doing things.
Along with that George has been doing quite a lot of stuff on the embodied carbon which is something we kind of touched on tangentially every now and then but not in any great concentration.
GEORGE We had the sustainability group workstream with Quadro and Omar working on that
last year, but it’s such a big and complex topic that it wasn’t something that we could just do on our own. So, we helped establish something called Zero which is a community of subject matter experts in carbon and that’s grown hugely. So they’ve effectively been our sustainability group. Zero started with 20 people last August and now there are over a thousand in the community. Our focus within Zero is not in the operational carbon, it’s actually on embodied carbon during the construction period. George shares the Zero website on screen.
What we’ve been doing is also using the Templater. One of the fundamental things that needs to be sorted is that we’ve got environmental product declarations, it’s the thing that’s the manufacturers representation of what carbon their products have got in them. RICHARD You’re talking about embodied carbon. Now, there used to be a lot of talk about embedded carbon (carbon within something). With embodied carbon you’re talking about the carbon that’s used in the manufacture of something, the transportation of something, is that correct?
GEORGE Absolutely. it goes through the whole process and defines what information is needed at different stages. Some of you will have come across before the Templater that we built with the BRE. That has got in it an environmental product information set and there are 280 data points that providers have got to provide their information on which is amazingly complex. So therefore we are trying to make that simpler. There’s lots of specialist groups now that are collecting together this information and what we are trying to do is make it simpler.
If Fleur, for example, on one of her projects is wanting to understand what the ESG value should be on it, it’s actually coming from a reliable source of information. If you’re interested in having that reliable information I can plug you into some of the people that we are working with. We’re also relating it back to the 250 asset types that we’ve been developing with Hackt for the Bim4housing data standards.
ALEX OLDMAN Can I just ask what’s the end game for using that environmental information? is it just ESG, getting a measure on the embodied carbon in a building? or are we then going to do some modelling with the information we’ve got to try and work out how to optimise the operational phase of it?
GEORGE The principle thing initially is to look at this from a construction perspective and that is giving people the information they need to make better decisions or alternative decisions as to what product to use, or maybe how is it going to be installed and how is it going to be procured. At the moment, that information is provided far too late for people to make decisions, we’re trying to make it so that people can have the power to make those decisions earlier and therefore select products that are going to provide a lower carbon footprint. I’m not an expert on this, I’m just bringing together people that are. The result of that, though, is that we’ll know what products and materials go into the buildings and the information about e.g. gas consumption, you then end up with the core information that you actually need to be able to know how to reduce the energy utilisation. Also, importantly, the recycling of products and materials that go to make up the building. It’s part of a much bigger initiative.
BRE had a project called Buildings As A Material Bank where they used the Templater to actually identify what information was needed to manage the recycling process because the view is that more and more of the materials and products that go into new buildings need to be reprocessed or recycled from existing ones. But to do that you need to know what was in the original product so that you can determine what and can’t be recycled. it’s something I’m spending quite a lot of my personal time on to get something back that’s then standard libraries that we can all use.
RICHARD Zero is directly relevant to all of us as well. I’ve looked at the website and I didn’t find it totally clear what the aim was. I understand what the overarching aim is but I didn’t really get what the process is, what the steps are. What kind of output can we expect and when?
GEORGE A good point. What we are doing at the moment, rather than it just being a talking shop, there’s quite a lot of effort and resource going in to creating a playbook. The playbook covers all the different activities that we are going to need to follow to improve the overall objective. it will be very granular. i think it’s probably worth setting up a session. I can get some of the leads from that to just come and spend 5 minutes on each of the elements and then people can decide whether they…RICHARD Yeah, obviously a lot is going in within Zero, i think we’d need to bring some of that into Bim4housing for us to actually see it and how to contribute to it more directly with our existing membership.
RICHARD asks if participants are currently working on carbon related issues.
JACK WHITE The team I’m in at the moment which is the Building Safety team, we’re looking at potentially doing something along this to understand impacts and across the wider organisation there are things being put in place to try and understand that as well. This is stuff we’re coming up with ourselves, carbon footprint exercises.
FLEUR BOWEN I have some involvement with our development team, I deal with the handover of new buildings into our operational portfolio. Our primary focus is really on the sustainability of the energy strategies, as a priority preventing overheating, rather than necessarily looking at the embodied carbon in the kit. We are looking, obviously, at our construction methods and trying to make those as sustainable as possible, but at present I don’t think embodied carbon is part of our process though certainly it would be in the not too distant future. I can see considerable value in modelling our ERs with that sort of requirement and looking at a process of justification being required as to why someone would choose a product with a higher embodied carbon, but it’s also measuring that off against performance and reliability because ultimately if it doesn’t work as well and you need 2 of them instead of 1 in a shorter period of time then…it’s trying to find that level of data that would assist in life cycle replacement, from an operational perspective.
RICHARD So really what we and Zero are doing with the playbook, it sounds like everybody is at very early stages. I guess to some extent it’s so complex you don’t even know where to start, do you? If we’ve got a granular playbook that takes it down by stakeholder, duty holder, role, it gives it a coherent path through because you need to know what the first steps are before you do anything.
GEORGE One of the interesting things is develops and construction companies are getting better interest rates if they can demonstrate that they are complying with ESG values. The problem is because the information isn’t very clear in terms of how you arrive at those figures, they can be wildly wrong. People are starting to ask more questions, it’s not just a matter of what is the carbon for that building, but how did you arrive at it, how did you audit that because it can make a big difference in terms of the interest rates that people are providing. In the NEC4 (one of the new contracts), they’re putting clauses in that where the responsibility and liability for providing a product that is sustainable is…it’s often cost, to be frank, but what’s the impact on sustainability?
The fire thing: since we’ve had the last operations group meeting the fire safety side of things has accelerated because I think people have realised that the 23rd January deadline for the Fire safety Act is coming up quickly. What I didn’t realise until a couple of months ago is that it’s nothing to do with the building safety regulator, it’s actually the regulator for the fire safety act comes under the Home Office. It’s actually the individual fire brigades that are the regulators and there are 43 of them. They don’t have a standard set of requirements. So, we’ve got a target of the 23rd of January to provide the information that is needed to satisfy the act, but it’s by no means clear what’s got to be provided.
So we’ve been trying to (after meetings and consulting with the Fire Chief’s Council) when people are commissioning…because what people are doing at the moment trying to hit the deadline is commissioning surveys to produce drawings. But those drawings, depending upon how they do them, they could be just a dead end because they won’t able to be updated to include the information needed for the Building Safety Act.
So what we’re trying to do is say how can we do this in such a way that the simple floor plans that are needed by the fire brigade can be added to to create the information that’s needed, maybe to say what’s the wall construct between two flats. We’ve been doing a pilot with Tower Hamlets. Over the next year we’ll work with them to be able to collate all of the information together regarding their 78 blocks, using some fairly advanced laser scanning. It’s focused on the fire safety at the moment due to the deadline, but they are doing it in such a way that they can then add the information they need later.
KELLY LEE (Orbit 360) We had the first set of our drawings through from off the back of our laser scanning. These plans have now gone to the London Fire Brigade and they are having a look at for us just to see if it incorporates everything that they want. The plans that we’ve created should do everything from the Fie Safety Act and the Buildings Safety Act. Kelly shares ‘Becton Place’ drawings document on screen. That’s going to be the first site plan - we’ve got more information to put in and we’re changing some of the colours around. We’re trying to incorporate on this particular site plan to show the position of all the blocks, the access into the estates, the height of the building.
This is the lower floor, we tried to incorporate where the trucks would get access to. Some of the key colours have got to change and it’s a bit wonky at the moment, we don’t know how that happened so we’ve got to adapt that. We’re going to put in some site levels as well and then we’ve got the key below to give all of the information. So we’ve pretty much covered all of the guidance that’s out there for the information boxes.
This is what will go into the boxes so that’s just the estate plan. Obviously we’ve got block section plans that shows the positioning. We’ve tried to make it 3-D so it looks more realistic. We’ve got compartmentation lines in there. For this site where we’ve done the full BIM scanning intrusive works we’re going to pull together our utopia, get that signed off by London fire brigade and then that is how we’ll mirror in each of the premises information boxes as we go along with the BIM project. In the short term we’ve got an internal person drawing up the CAD plans so we’ll have all those in the boxes by the January deadline. But then over the next 12 months as we scan all the buildings we’ll produce these to replace these so they’re in more detail, but the benefit of it is the fact that we can go in here at any point and update anything and replace them.
We have bounced the idea of doing them on A2 but printing them off on waterproof paper and being able to fold them, if bigger we can make them more detailed. We’ve got 23 in scope buildings but what came out of our pilot was we’re going to do the estate now because what we’ve found on Beckton Place particularly was a lot of the services joined together with some of the low rise blocks as well so we thought it was important where we’ve got the lower rise on the estate we’ll do the whole estate because the other bit around the fire safeties act is understanding how the trucks will get into the estate, so we’re gonna do full estates now.
It’s averaging £50,000 per in-scope building. We went out to a large estate that had one in-scope built on a platform so we have to do the whole of the estate which is 10 of the blocks, some are really low and some are close to 18 meters and it was much cheaper than £50,000 per block, so when you’re doing it in a large capacity costs are coming down. It’s £1.5 million to do all of these.
GEORGE With the carbon side of things, those models can be presumably used to overlay additional information that may be about how the construction is done etc. KELLY Yeah, we’ve built into our suite of documents for BIM all of the energy efficiency stuff, savings, waste products, net zero carbon. We’ve got an environmental team that are working with us to build that up as well so we can actually work with them to be able to look at sustainability and that will really come when we’ve found out that particularly thee blocks need some work doing to them, we’ll work with that team to deliver from a sustainability POV, we wouldn’t have done that without these models.
JACK we’ve done something fairly similar but are doing it internally, we’ve not quite done the same on the part of the 3D models to go in. Jack shares a floor plan on screen. Ours is just floor plans and a bit more basic. Rather than having a key with symbols on it it’s…We’re hiring a laser scanner, we’ve got a revit technician internally. We’ve done 20-odd buildings now and have about 80 in-scope. In terms of working towards our safety case we’re gathering what drawings we have for our existing buildings from development form planning portals etc. We’ll be marking up on those to create an interim until we’ve done that, but hopefully by early 2024 we’ll have done all our buildings in that way.
BRETT HIBBITT We haven’t got any in-scope buildings at present], we’re merging with another association so we will have. Basically I’m sitting here waiting for the transition to come so all of this is really interesting so I’ve got a bit of a benchmark to see what everybody else is doing. So at present we don’t have to supply and drawings, we have to comply with the other parts of the fire safety measures applicable below 18 meters.
LUKE HAZELWOOD I’ve actually changed roles recently and I’ve moved to a contract manager so i haven’t been looking at this stuff for a little while. i know for example we have our information that went into our premises information boxes that were basic fire plans, but i don't know where we are with the fire safety stuff yet.
GEORGE Shares his screen with ‘Tower hamlets compilation’ displayed. Tower Hamlets have got 78 blocks in their portfolio and they don’t have a huge budget so what they’re doing is they’re doing progressively what Kelly was just showing earlier in doing laser scans of certain buildings, that will take them probably a year to do. What they want to do is have something in place asap so they’ve at least got something underway. So we’ve done something quite simple, we’ve taken a spreadsheet of just their properties so we’ve got there at the basic level, and we’re going to add into this the UPRNs for the flats themselves. We’ve pulled them into Active Plan, that’s actually been generated from the spreadsheet.
Because we integrate with google maps we can then have them there, so you can navigate through the individual properties, again from the spreadsheet (nothing else) this has all been created. The attributes that are in this field have all come directly from the spreadsheet and you can then connect directly through to google maps. It’s a really low cost way of getting something underway and can be done in a couple of days. we’ve also started to gather information on the high risk blocks. This is an 18-storey block that has quite a lot of work that is being done to it. This is an example of the key documents they can put in and can register against them. If they got standard plans they can put those in as well. It’s a matter of collecting all the information they’ve already got about the building so they’ve got it in one place to be able to do that and also more technical information.
It’s a matter really of just communicating with the rest of the team to pull together the information. Thus has been successful to get them to think on a more incremental way. Here we’ve got spaces and we’ve got some 360 photos of those spaces so they can actually use that to for example go in to tag the assets that are in there. The surveyors, these generate the point cloud as you’re walking through, it works at 7 times the speed of doing laser scans normally so it becomes possible to do a complete building in a day. Then the floor plans that have been produced from that, they just come through as CAD plans which in our case we import them into Active Plan, so that’s now the Active Plan that provides containers for the information to be held against.
This has been really helpful because it’s enabling the council to see how they can engage other parts of the organisations to get involved, maybe even get tenants to take 360 photos (I suggest). It’s a way of really building a community of people who can go and tag each of these 360 photos with the information and it goes and and builds a database of asset information. The last thing, this is an example of what we’ve done with PRP, taking the safety case information, the models that they’ve created for that. It’s a matter of going from nothing to, when you’ve got the information that’s maybe been collected for other purposes, you’ve then got something you can build on. The information in this case you can go into an individual asset and then to be able to say that that door is actually that type of door.
Our principle idea is to make it so that you can come at it from both ends. When you’ve got the funds to be able to do the job properly you create those detailed models, that’s coming at it from one end, the other is just pulling together…what I’ve just shown you there, I think we’re probably going to have an asset information model for the estate within a few weeks, all be it at a very basic level but at least you’ve got a container to put the information into.
LUKE i think from what i know at the moment that’s the issue that we’ve got in our company is that none of our IT systems at the moment have containers for the information so that’s where they were the last i remember. I think that’s probably quite a common issue across the industry.
KELLY we’re just in the middle of procuring a common data environment so all of that information will drop into a system like what George has shown, because it’s not going to sit in our main assets system it will API into a main assets system so they’ll both talk to each other so we’ll have that one source of the truth but will have that common data environment so that we can keep everything updated. We’ve now employed a revit person so his responsibility is ensuring that that’s up-to-date, but it gives us the benefit that surveyors, anybody that goes out on site will be able to electronically update information for us to assess and decide if changes need making so it’s kind of a whole encompassing system that we’re going to be working with. At the end of it we’ll have all 23 estates in there and then the idea is potentially we’ll be looking to roll it out to our complex buildings and other ones in the future so we’ll eventually get some level of modelling scanning data for a lot of our bigger complex buildings.
GEORGE What I’ve discovered is that there’s lots of different activities that go on where people collect information for a different purpose. Multivista and people like that are doing scans for either driven by architects or landlords, but it might be just to look at the re-cladding side of things. So they do part of the job or the scope of what they do may mean they’re also doing some internal scans, but it’s driven by a particular project which might be a remediation project or decarbonisation etc. Somebody else might be doing something as a condition survey for decent homes.
I’ve discovered over the years of dealing with HAs and councils is often those different groups are collecting the information for their won purpose, but you end up then with silos of information that are not joined up and are often conflicting. Our purpose is to engage with those various different data sets and pull them together and federate them. Some people on the call are implementing Microsoft dynamics within their organisation, but it might be years before they’re ready to put in all the asset information as well so we’re providing that as an interim way of getting there.
KELLY We’ve already seen the benefit of it. We have a roof leak on one of these blocks and within 10 minutes we were able to pull off a drawing to show the detailed roof information and then a snapshot slice of the building pinpointing where the water is coming into those flats. We could then see where that was leading and the breeches from the roof and linking that in with the services, so understanding the internal rainwater pipes etc. Those plans have gone off to a contractor to assess in more detail, but we would have been working blind if we didn’t have that, it’s saved so much time and money already.
GEORGE The work we’ve been doing with Paul White (the ventilation expert), Paul’s been working with us on the fire side of things and one of the challenges there…there was a perception that the AOV needed to be checked every quarter because that’s what SFG20 tells you to do, whereas actually form a fire safety POV…
PAUL WHITE in theory any active systems if you’re checking for faults you should be checking everyday, but the issue with most of these systems is they’re passive so if you don’t trigger an alarm you’ll never see a fault. The point is if you look at BS9999 there’s a much more comprehensive set of instructions which is probably OTT, but it’s similar to you test your fire alarms every week, why aren’t you simulating your alarm into the smoke control system and seeing if that works.
GEORGE The other thing we’re using extensively now is 360 photos. Sedexo are using 400 pound cameras to just go into each space (in particular on hospitals and also student accommodation) and they take a 360 photo which is then tied back to the space and they can then go and tag the…they can have subject matter experts who don’t need to visit the site go through and identify what assets are in there also any hazards e.g. an issue with fire stopping. It’s a matter of doing things for several different purposes and then glueing it together.
JACK i appreciate all the things people are saying at the moment but i would really like to hear more from the people who are doing it (Kelly), not just seeing the outputs but in terms of when you’re specifying the work done, what are the lessons learned and successes. More a dive into what you’re learning has been.
RICHARD that’s what I’m doing in the one-to-one meetings, you’ll be getting an invite. let me explain, I’m doing one-to-one meetings and then getting 4 or 5 people together in a small group who’ve all taken different approaches and to do exactly what you’re saying. To say what’s worked and what hasn’t, what bit is there a learning curve on - people are a bit more open and likely to chat in a smaller group. In larger groups people are less open but with just a few people together we get that kind of feedback from everybody, which is what I’m doing now.
JACK What’s the expectation for this meeting then, what are we doing here? GEORGE i absolutely agree with you, this meeting should be about positioning what’s happening and I think you did that, also explaining what’s happening on the sustainability front which obviously is most people’s purview at the moment. But then it’s also a matter of, the sessions that Richard’s doing (which will not be recorded to help feel more relaxed).
KELLY I see where you’re coming from, Jack, but I think the difficulty is there’s a very small handful of people that are really far forward so that learning is probably not there yet so we’re still wrapping up our first project which we’ve gone really big on. That was the point of building up our procurement documents ready to go out to procurement so we have got lessons learned, but I think there’s very limited people that are where we are - many are not quite there yet. It will come with time and it’s just going to take that time to be able to get that. i do think that’s a shared value and definitely we have to have those discussions but it’s going to be a very small group of people who have got to where we are so far.
JACK Yeah, I get that, I guess I’m putting myself in the position of if I hadn’t got there I would like to know what mistakes had been made so i just didn’t go ahead and make them when I get to starting it, that’s all. I don’t think it’s only the people who are down the line that want to hear lessons learned. RICHARD That’s absolutely true, but once I’ve completed a cycle of these meetings the result of that can be presented, the findings and the sharings, without them necessarily being attributed with anyone specifically. Now, in that circumstance people are going to be more open. Very much like the old black box, the anonymous reporting of critical issues.
JACK For me, I would like to know when something is spoken about I’d like to be able to say ‘what did you specify in terms of data requirements? How did you do that?. I don’t necessarily just want to be presented with that. RICHARD Absolutely, I’m not saying that’s all you’re going to get, it’s one of the things you’re going to get. The reason I’m doing these small meetings is because after 20-25 individual meetings virtually every single person said to me they thought it was a good idea to have a small, quiet, semi-intimate chat with 4 or 5 of them, so I’m doing what they want.
GEORGE What Richard is saying is…for example, Ihsan I think is from Guinness and it might be that Guinness are not quite in a position yet to be able to show things. So what Richard is doing is trying to engage with people on a 1-2-1 basis to find out where they are on the journey and then what he’s done with the group he’s meeting tomorrow (Bex, Clare Williams and Jentu), they’re going to explain to each other what they are doing. Clearly, if we’re more organised (and remember that we are all volunteers so we’re just trying to do the best we can) I think they can then determine if they’re happy to share that maybe with the wider group, so we can then organise for the next session…if people think this is a worthwhile thing to do with the deadlines coming up, then we can do that.
For example within Clarion, Ed Costa’s work, he’s doing a slightly different thing to what you’re doing. JACK He works on the safety case, rather than the golden thread. GEORGE He told me that he’s focused on producing the plans for the premises information box. He told me there’s a team of CAD technicians that are doing floor plans. JACK They are working up on some parts of things, the CAD team.
GEORGE We've been doing quite a lot of this show-and-tell stuff which you might not have been able to see but it’s being recorded so you can catch up on it. From the operations side (which isn’t particularly what we’ve been talking about for most of this session) is there anything you want to cover in terms of what we should be doing on the asset management side of things?
ALEX There’s a question I wanted to bring up just as a discussion point, rather than any particular viewpoint that I’ve got, which is BIM for housing associations have recently released their version 2 of their tool kit which will get a lot of downloads. It was interesting to note it doesn’t appear to have suggestions for holding coordinates or location information. In retrospect of everything we’ve seen on the meeting so far today regarding floor plans, layouts, visualisation, in my mind location information, spatial information is absolutely critical to what we’re doing e.g. for the provision of that information for floor plans for the building information boxes for emergency services. Also for the idea to be ask for or to use this information in multiple ways - effectively we are digging the same whole several times to get different sets of information. Location information seems to be the critical key that can hold everything together. Do others have views about this?
GEORGE Obviously the location of things is critical. Now whether it needs to be for everything an XYZ coordinate level or whether it’s just tied back to the space, I think there can be a discussion on that. I think it’s also not just about the individual assets, it’s also information about spaces and document spaces etc. The location of information is critical. How are things going with CX?
ALEX CX has got location information in it now allowing us to record a link to space. We’ve got a 4 level hierarchy that we’re using and we’re introducing the spatial positioning as well, so currently we’ve got level room and then location within the room and then we have parameter core positions. So we’ve got 4 identifiers which can be roughly mapped to a space in BIM speak. And we’ve got that information for asbestos materials as well as appliances, equipment and components. We’ve got a field that will allow us to record the information of the XYZ coordinates, we actually need to go more than just XYZ because we want to hold volume information as well, to be held as what we call attributes of the system, so there will be a way to record and generate models.
We’ve got some visual representation of things as well, recently produced a diagnostics tool for repairs reporting which customers can plug into their website so whenever a resident reports a problem with their building, a repair request, they can go through a wizard which includes a visualisation of the spaces that they want to report for. A the moment that’s really generic, but the plan is to hold specific information so they would see their own floor plans, a rendered form for their rooms to make it more personal. I want to build it all up so we can incorporate a whole lot of handed over information for new building construction (COBie data sets) but equally enhance that for e.g. multiple attributes that you are seeing at Active Plan. We’ve finished the migration from Keystone now, that’s to say all the software functionality that was in Keystone is now in the new platform. We’re now neck-deep in implementation.
BEX GIBSON In the interest of sharing what progress we’re making at Livewest, it’s become very apparent that the date we’ve got is dispersed around the organisation in various different locations. We did talk to a few external consultants about delivering a digital solution for the building safety case and linking it to, ideally, an information model and all of that great best practice stuff. But what became clearly apparent early on is that the structure of our data internally was the first hurdle to cross in delivering a single source of truth kind of building safety case approach. Our IT team, they’ve started a property information project where they are assessing all the information we have in all the different locations so we can start bringing that all together.
I know we’re keen to deliver this ‘dashboard’ style safety case internally, so that’s kind of a side project. We have downloaded the BIM for housing associations tool kit and we’re going through that because what we want to do is make what we have resilient. You know, if we all have a standardised approach to the data that we manage and the data we expect contracts to provide on completion, it makes everything work just that little bit more smoothly - that’s the point of these groups. I don’t have anything solid, I haven’t got a plan…
Just going through that BIM for housing association tool kit to work out what’s best for us because we don’t want to over…we want it to be useable, more data that you actually don’t use is just as pants as having no data. We’ve got to have that fine balance of what do we need to deliver the expectations, in my case the building safety case but I’m very much the champion o information and BIM within the organisation. It’s about getting the right information. We probably hold a lot more information than we need to manage our assets but perhaps it will be useful in the future, but it doesn’t need to be in that. GEORGE it’s making sure the information you need can be presented as a subset for a particular activity.
BEX Yeah and that’s what they’ve done in the initial information requirements document that the project management team for this project have done. They went through every department in the organisation, worked out what information they have, what they need, where they find it. That process has been elongated quite substantially because there’s a lot of things everywhere and it’s working out how best to manage that going forward so that we can not just deliver what I need )in terms of legislation) but other departments can use that same process and the same data structure - it just works. It’s an organisational change which has come from the top, it’s a change in work culture to feed down into what we’re talking about which is the nuts and bolts of what we need in terms of BIM etc.
KELLY LEE We’ve done very similar to what Bex has done, I want to champion the benefits of that, we’re trying to move it forward. We’re hoping to bring dynamics in in the future and we’ve got an opportunity now as a business to be able to define how we want to hold our information, basically because by looking at the assets set I can see that it doesn’t work: it works for one set of people but not for the wider organisation. So we’ve been working with Chris Lees to look at the UK data standards. The project that we did on Beckton, because it was a pilot we have actually modelled current data structure (so it’s useable from that POV) but we’ve also put it into the UK data standards as well, so we’ve actually got the whole concept modelled out on how it would look with spatial information, how we can hold that data to that level so we know where everything is…
That’s so critical for me because operationally I used to manage all of the M&E equipment and it was so infuriating - I knew what we had but I didn’t know where it was! So trying to get replacements, cost savings by doing it in this way. The next step is to get our organisation to buy-in to that’s the change we need to make. Next month we’ve got 90 critical people from around the business and we’re spending 2 days presenting to them this project. Chris will come in and present the full concept of the UK data standards because we’re very aware that our asset information is one small part of the data standards and what we want to do is adopt the whole concept. We’re trying to showcase this and will be using fire doors as an example because that’s the one we went down to that intricate level.
We’ve actually modelled out all of the UK data standards onto the fire door in the 3D model to show them ‘this is what our current systems hold, this is what COBie holds, but actually this is what we can hold’. And we went on a journey for 8 months defining the low level requirements, the attribute levels - we are nowhere near because obviously it needs a group collaborative approach to it. We’ve gone on a journey not just from fire safety and structural safety, we’ve done it for the whole asset, we 've looked at everything. We’re recording those sessions and will have a version we can present out to everybody, so we can give you a copy. And we’re recording Chris as well so he’s got a promotional video for the UK data standards. Getting everybody on the same page, cost saving, better for contractors. By the end of November we should have some videos we can share with you.
GEORGE You’ve both been involved in the golden thread initiative projects that we’ve been working with, but one of the interesting things is (like your fire door) if you ask the subject matter exerts what information we need to know about a fire door the response generally has been ‘it depends’. And that’s critical because it depends on what wall it’s going into, it depends on this and that, so there’s a whole range of different information sets that need to be hidden from people unless ‘it depends’ kicks in, so that’s the approach we’ve been taking with this. Under certain circumstances you need 3 bits of information that nobody else needs, but unless you’ve got them then you’re not able to address it. Simply looking at it from the POV of what information can you put in attributes on a revit model is too simplistic because you need to have those different views by function.
JACK I was just going to back up what’s been said and your point as well, Richard, actually, deleting and starting everything from scratch. We didn’t go around asking where we had information, we sat down and worked out what information we felt was necessary and from that working out which…we kind of have data in 3 sources, it’s either geometric on a 3D model, database or documents. And so working out, right, where do we want that information? Di we want to be able to filter across the stock? If we do we want it in the database, if we don’t documents fine and people can find it if they need it. A bit like both Bex and Kelly saying in terms of thinking about it, trying to understand the data, defining it (what areas you’ll want), how you’ll use it.
RICHARD So categorising your data not so much on how it’s utilised but on the methodology of actually finding it, or do you need to find it. JACK Yes, I guess trying to take everything into consideration. A lot of this is grey areas. OK, we store it as a document, that takes someone 3 minutes to find let’s say, whereas if it’s in the database it takes 30 seconds and if you’re doing that across a whole load it’s a real pain. So, you want to get it right but at the same time you don’t want to over populate and make things hard to find. There’s a lot of difficulty there. If we’re trying to look at buildings holistically we’re looking to put things as part of systems so that’s the external wall system that is made up of the cladding, glues, the windows etc.
All the elements of a system, and it’s setting out all the definitions for that: what do we consider the external wall system to be? A door, a floor level - thinking about locations, the spaces etc and just defining it so when it goes to a contractor to fill out the information we can simply pass that across. We can have all these good systems, but if we’re not ensuring that good quality of data through having definitions etc then it doesn’t really matter. We might have a great place to store it and find it but if the data’s still rubbish then.
ADDENDUM
CHAT
Dave Williams
we are being asked more questions on the energy efficiency of our stock for sure and there are new measures coming into play for NROSH reporting and as George said, preferential interest rates based on epc ratings.
Bex Gibson
That looks great! Are you able to please share these pdfs? (redacted if necessary)
Ihsan Hoque
basically we're using Gerda to do our floor plans for our SIB's
Dave Williams
I would be interested in people sharing how they are approaching storing and sharing Golden Thread information.
Bex Gibson
We're doing 2d plans and elevations to feed into 23 Jan reqs
We also have a huge project internally to work out what information we have and the best way to manage these in order to deliver the Building Safety Case. I'm happy to chat about this if it's useful
Ihsan Hoque
we have the plans for our PIB's and we've used Gerda's service to do this. Basic 2D drawings