How BIM Will Change Processes and Behaviours in Reality: A Research Project

Ashley Beighton MCIOB
BIM Process Leader
The Clarkson Alliance Limited

The Clarkson Alliance (as lead partner), Kier (as software partner) and Worthing Homes (as host project partner) are currently undertaking a Technology Strategy Board funded research project “to establish the changes in dynamics and behaviours across the construction supply chain to unlock new, more efficient and collaborative ways of working with Building Information Modelling (BIM)”.

The core objective of the project is to understand the changes in process and behaviours needed to work in a Level 2 BIM environment i.e. where a range of authoring tools – Autodesk Revit, Microsoft Excel, etc – are being used by the project team to import data to, and export data from, a single, federated BIM model held on a central ‘middleware’ platform, in this case Kier’s BimXtra software.

The Technology Strategy Board first awarded us the grant in October last year and it was only confirmed last month, once a suitable host project had been found. The project has been provided by Worthing Homes and is a Sheltered Housing scheme called the Meadow Road project. Since then work has quickly progressed, the initial focus being on compiling a BIM Protocol based on the CIC template and a set of Employer’s Information Requirements (EIR) based on the requirements of PAS 1192-2:2013.

A significant early change in the usual dynamics and behaviours has been a move away from a single stage design and build tender to a two stage tender. In a design and build contract clients often seek to transfer the design risk to the winning bidder, however with powerful visualisation and clash detection tools such as Autodesk Navisworks design issues can be quickly and easily identified and resolved. This means there’s far less inherent design risk in a BIM project and hence little point in paying the contractor a risk premium to transfer it.

A further important change has been an early focus on the Asset Information Model (the information needed to efficiently and effectively operate and maintain the finished building), with the client’s requirements then being written into the EIR. Here we’ve so far steered away from COBie and instead focused on building an Asset Information Model that will provide the client with the following outputs on handover:

• A Health and Safety File containing ‘passive’ project data
• A federated model in IFC file format containing ‘passive’ system data
• A spreadsheet containing ‘active’ system data

The passive data will effectively form the record set for the project, with the active data feeding directly into the client’s planned preventative maintenance system.

The next step is to issue the EIR out with the usual Employer’s Requirements and to support the bidders (and their consultants and contractors) through the tendering process, in particular with their pre-contract award BIM Execution Plans and associated capability assessments.

We are already gathering insight into how BIM can change the tender process and how client’s needs should be incorporated into the Asset Information Model. We will be actively sharing our findings as we uncover more changes in process and behaviours in future updates as we develop further understanding of how BIM works in a live project environment.

Contributor: Ashley Beighton is BIM Process Leader for The Clarkson Alliance Limited, a firm of consultant project managers and information managers based in Oxford and London. To find out more about the information management services that TCA provide see our website dedicated to BIM - BIM fusion http://bimfusion.co.uk/