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BIM
Building Information Modelling, otherwise known as ϐ  Richard writes from a position of great personal

BIM for CONSTRUCTION CLIENTS

BIM, brings construction clients a set of powerful insight based on a career as a successful architect
advantages from design to occupation. The in commercial practice and as an early adopter of
government’s five-year notice of its mandate to all BIM. His background in various leadership
its project sponsors to use BIM Level 2 by April 2016
means that leading designers, constructors and
positions where he championed a focus on clients’
needs allows him to understand the drivers and for CONSTRUCTION CLIENTS
product makers are now experienced at working challenges faced by many types of clients, and
with BIM. Many clients, however, are not confident BIM’s ability to enable integration and Richard Saxon
to play an active role in BIM, either not asking for it collaboration. It is difficult to think of someone more
or being passive users for lesser advantage. qualified to write such a book.

Acting as an authorative guide to Clients, this book: We commend this book to clients of all shapes and
• provides understanding of the strategic client sizes: those with large repeat programmes as well
value of BIM and how it changes the client role as those considering the need for a one-off
• shows via case studies how typical clients are construction project, and all those in industry
experiencing using BIM supply chains – particularly those directly able to
• includes guidance on setting up a project on a influence clients’ decisions. Its lessons will enable
BIM-using basis the industry to deliver better value for money for its
• demonstrates how structured information clients by finally delivering on integration and
enhances the briefing, design, construction and collaboration.
operation stages, supporting better decisions Don Ward, Chief Executive, Constructing Excellence
• contains guidance on where BIM is going next. (incorporating the Construction Clients’ Group)

This book is a must-have for public and private

clients of all sorts. Facility and asset managers, ϐ  Richard’s book is a timely aid to clients, whether
advisers, architects, project managers, cost they are using BIM or intend to use BIM. It shares
consultants and contractors will also find this book practice and experience from key industry clients
invaluable, for their own work and to assist their and provides a ‘how to’ guide, which maintains a

Richard Saxon
clients to make successful use of BIM. balanced approach on the effort required and the
benefits that are achievable.

Terry Stocks, Director, UK Head of Public Sector

and Education, Faithful+Gould

BIM for Construction Clients_Cover.indd 1,3 25/01/2016 17:28

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BIM for
Construction
Clients
Driving strategic value through
digital information management

Richard G Saxon CBE

Licensed copy from CIS: sci1, Steel Construction Institute, 31/03/2020, Uncontrolled

BIM for Construction Clients

© rIBA enterprises 2016
Published by NBS, part of rIBA enterprises ltd, the old Post office,
st nicholas street, newcastle upon tyne, ne1 1rH
IsBn 978 1 85946 607 0 PDF 978 1 85946 703 9
stock Code: 85148
the right of richard saxon to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 sections 77 and 78.
All rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright owner.
British library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British library.
Commissioning editor: sarah Busby
Production: Phil Handley
Designed, typeset and Illustrated by HD-design
Cover image: © Dave Parker Photography
Printed and bound by Page Bros ltd, norwich, uK
While every effort has been made to check the accuracy and quality of the information given
in this publication, neither the Author nor the Publisher accept any responsibility for the
subsequent use of this information, for any errors or omissions that it may contain, or for any
misunderstandings arising from it.
NBS is part of rIBA enterprises ltd.
www.ribaenterprises.com
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Contents
About the author iv

Acknowledgements v

Foreword by Terry Stocks vi

Introduction 1 1

Why clients should be using BIM 2 8

How BIM changes the client role 3 18

The developer’s story 4 28

The local authority’s story 5 36

The university’s story 6 44

The contractor–client’s story 7 52

Stage 0: First steps 8 60

Stage 1: Setting out client requirements 9 68

Stage 1: Planning the work 10 76

Stage 1: Appointing the team and completing the initial brief 11 84

Stages 2 and 3: Concept and design development 12 94

Stages 4, 5 and 6: Technical design, construction and handover 13 104

Stage 7: Living and learning 14 112

What comes next for BIM? 15 122

Appendix A: Employer’s Information Requirements Template 132

Appendix B: BIM Execution Plan example 152

Image credits 166

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BIM for Construction Clients

About the author

Richard Saxon is an architect and urban designer with a long history of involvement
in the modernisation of the construction industry. Twenty-seven years as a partner
and director of BDP – the international interdisciplinary practice – climaxed in six
years as its chairman. During this time Richard chaired the reform group The Reading
Construction Forum, which became ‘Be: Collaborating for the Built Environment’
before merging into Constructing Excellence. He also helped to found the British
Council for Offices and became its sixth president. Since 2005 he has advised clients,
practices, businesses and government as ‘Consultancy for the Built Environment’ and
is an RIBA Accredited Client Adviser. He has been vice president of the RIBA and a
director of the Construction Industry Council, championing innovation. Richard sat
on the government BIM Steering Group in 2012–13 as BIM Ambassador for Growth.
He is a member of buildingSMART, the society which defines and develops BIM. The
RICS (Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) invited Richard to become an eminent
fellow in 2013. He is currently chairman of the Joint Contracts Tribunal (JCT), the
consensus contract-writing body, a non-executive director of BLP Insurance and an
associate director of Deploi BIM Strategies. He was made a CBE in 2001 for services
to architecture and construction.
Richard has previously written Atrium Buildings, Development and Design, published
in 1983 with a second edition in 1986. This was followed by The Atrium Comes of
Age in 1993. Both were published in the UK, USA and Japan. ‘Be Valuable: a guide
to creating value in the built environment’ was published by Constructing Excellence
in 2005. ‘Growth through BIM’ was commissioned by BIS and published by the
Construction Industry Council in 2013. All are available, along with many magazine
articles, on www.saxoncbe.com

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Acknowledgements
This book is the result of a push by the RIBA to increase the architectural profession’s service
levels to clients. I thank Steven Cross, Sarah Busby and Elizabeth Webster of RIBA Publishing
for their guidance throughout the project and also thank Terry Stocks for his supportive
foreword. Mark Bew, chair of the BIM Task Group, gave advice freely, as did Nick Nisbet
of AEC3, Kathryn Bourke of Whole Life and David Churcher of Hitherwood Consulting.
Stephen Hamil at NBS helped me to understand the BIM Toolkit as it emerged. Dale Sinclair
of AECOM, author of the RIBA Plan of Work 2013, has been a key contributor of ideas. Paul
Fletcher of Through helped to frame the forward view beyond BIM Level 2. Alistair Kell of
BDP was a ready source of experience and criticism. Kester Robinson of Deploi BIM Strategies
offered useful comment. Don Ward of Constructing Excellence has been very supportive,
together with his Construction Clients’ Group leaders Gren Tipper and Gary O’Brien, and
group member Karen Allford of the Environment Agency. Constructing Excellence co-badges
the book.
My client story sources, James Pellatt of Great Portland Estates, John Lorimer, formerly of
Manchester City Council, Michael Lytrides and Richard Garfield of Imperial College London
and Brian Spencer, Chloe Obi and Sara Chapman of Bouygues, were all vital contributors.
David Miller of David Miller Architects provided both insight and case study material. Ben
Derbyshire of HTA provided his practice’s BIM Execution Plan model. buildingSMART allowed
reproduction of their Employer’s Information Requirements template. The RIBA Client
Adviser working group, chaired by Tom Jacques, provided a context for the book, developing
approaches to advising clients of their whole-life interests in what they undertake. This book
is a companion volume to client adviser group member Peter Ullathorne’s book, Being an
Effective Construction Client, which covers the full spectrum of client concerns.
Photography credits and thanks go to Dave Parker, Morley von Sternberg, Tim Soar,
Hufton+Crow, Martine Hamilton Knight and David Barbour. BIM image credits and thanks are
owed to AHMM, Rob Charlton and Olly Thomas of BIM Technologies, Ryder Architecture, Billy
Choi of Allies and Morrison, Boswell Mitchell Johnson and MG Partnership, David Miller of
David Miller Architects, Plowman Craven, and Alistair Kell and Martin Davies of BDP. Diagrams
were reproduced with permission from the RIBA, the NBS, Constructing Excellence, Mervyn
Richards, AEC3 and the British Standards Institute. Others were adapted by the author from
sources named.
This book could not have been written without the support and patience of my wife, Anne.

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Foreword I have been a client for 25 years. I have

always played an ‘active’ client role, trying
to change the status quo. Many of us in
the construction industry feel that things
by Terry Stocks could be done faster, with lower cost and
better outcomes. The Industry Strategy
for Construction, Construction 2025, has
the industry agreeing with targets of 50%
faster, 33% cheaper over the whole-life
cycle and 50% reduction in carbon, all
achieved within ten years. However, when
you contrast those aspirations with the
national construction industry’s recorded
performance, how confident can we be?
Is BIM the panacea, the answer to all
our problems?

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Foreword Terry Stocks

Over my 25 years I have championed ‘lean’ approaches to delivery, collaborative

contracting, benchmarking, off-site and component manufacture and more.
So will BIM be the answer on its own? I don’t think so. Does it have a critical role
to play in bringing all these components together in a dynamic environment?
Absolutely, yes. The BIM process puts information at the heart of delivery.
It provokes early-stage consideration and statement of required outcomes.
These outcome requirements continue to be a measurable focus throughout
the delivery and operational phases. To maximise the benefits, the client needs
to create the right environment. Changes to their own approaches to delivery
and procurement may be required, as well as in their expectations of their supply
chains to deliver in a collaborative, shared information world.
Richard’s book is a timely aid to clients, whether they are using BIM or intend
to use BIM. It shares practice and experience from key industry clients and
provides a ‘how-to’ guide, which maintains a balanced approach to the
effort required and the benefits that are achievable. My experience in using
BIM has been wholly positive, helping to galvanise delivery teams around
my required outcomes. The effort and change that I have had to make in my
own organisation and delivery team relationships have been rewarded with
significant overall efficiencies. I commend BIM to any client organisation looking
to improve their asset delivery and thank Richard for finding the time to write a
guide that will help us all move towards a BIM world, better informed.
Terry Stocks C.Eng MIStructE MCIOB
Terry has been a public sector client at the Ministry of Justice for 24 years.
He was the Ministry’s Head of Programme and Project Delivery, responsible
for some of the largest building projects within government, before recently
joining Faithful+Gould as Director responsible for the Public Sector. He was
the UK BIM Task Force Director for Delivery and chair of the Cross Government
BIM Stewardship Group. Terry also chaired the UK Cabinet Office New Methods
of Construction Procurement Board, championing new methods of collaborative
contracting across government departments. He is also a non-executive
director of the Buildoffsite organisation. In a recent Building magazine
article he was considered one of the most influential people in construction
within government.

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16
Fig 1.01:

See Chapter 5.
Manchester Central Library
Introduction
Chapter 1
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1
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BIM for Construction Clients

These are tremendous times to be a construction client. The old ways

of the construction industry, which so often disappointed clients by
underperforming and by putting the client under pressure to manage
uncoordinated team members, are being replaced by a 21st-century
approach. Since about 1990 retailers and product manufacturers have
been adopting digital working methods with resultant leaps in speed,
productivity, accuracy, quality and value for customers. Construction as
a sector has lagged badly behind as it was so fragmented and lacked
dominant buyers to pull through change. Now the UK government has
stepped up to play this dominant buyer role and the whole industry is
moving forward quickly. The construction version of what manufacturers
call Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is dubbed BIM (Building
Information Modelling). Don’t worry about the words ‘Building’ and
‘Modelling’, as they only serve to limit the perceived value of the concept.
Concentrate on the middle word, ‘Information’, and the potential of its
transformation from analogue to digital where it becomes structured,
shareable and infinitely reusable.

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Chapter 1 Introduction

What is BIM?
Instead of clients and members of their team exchanging drawings and reports
which are inevitably prone to ambiguity, incompleteness and error, they can now
share a totally trustworthy, multi-dimensional model of the evolving project in a
‘Common Data Environment (CDE)’, a server which manages access, contributions
and changes, and also supports all communications. The structured, shareable
information in BIM allows contributions to be coordinated easily, greatly reducing
the risk of error and defect. The early design process is accelerated, with potential
for better stakeholder engagement through 3D representation and the simulation
of operation. Technical design is supported far better, with suppliers’ contributions
filling in the model’s detail, element by element. Cost management can get closer
to the design process and avoid late ‘value engineering’. Construction sequences
can be rehearsed, logistics optimised and site communications improved, taking
out risk and time. Finally, the as-built version of the model can provide vastly
superior support to occupiers and facility managers, pulling down the cost of
Operation & Maintenance (O&M) whilst raising the performance of the occupier
and the asset.

How did BIM emerge?

BIM is the result of an international, unpaid effort by enthusiasts,1 backed by
vendors of software first used in other industries. It has taken over two decades
to reach its present level of maturity. Whilst underlying principles are agreed and
used worldwide, the recent leap forward has a UK badge. ‘UK BIM’ is defined by
a government-funded Task Group set up to implement that particular element
of the Government Construction Strategy of 2011.2 The Task Group3 developed
the tools it saw as necessary to enable mainstream use of the BIM concept and
set a date five years ahead, 4 April 2016, for all central government clients to
require BIM to be used on their projects. By 3 October 2016 all departments are
to be able to validate BIM information they receive. The expectation was that local
government would follow the central lead and that the private sector would use
the free toolkit for its obvious advantages, once it was available. Both of these
expectations are being fulfilled.

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BIM for Construction Clients

UK BIM is not just the application of computing technology to the existing

working approach of the construction industry – clients, consultants, contractors,
specialists, product makers and all their regulators – it addresses most of the
trenchant criticisms made of the British way of working over decades by a
succession of reports into the industry.4 These reports note that the costs of
construction consistently rise faster than general inflation, whilst those of
manufacturing and distribution continue to fall. They point to a lack of integration
in the team, with major waste and risk arising as its members conflict with each
other, rather than collaborating. They identify the lack of continuity over the asset
life cycle, with O&M, usually a larger cost over time than the original construction
cost, isolated from the design and construction process and comparatively poorly
managed. The failure of most buildings to work as fully as they were designed
to do is evidence. The industry is also not operating sustainably, with tiny profit
margins leading to weak research and innovation, and to a defensive stance rather
than a customer-focused one. The UK BIM Toolkit is designed to support more
successful design, project and asset management, enabling many of these and
other criticisms to be addressed.

What is BIM Level 2?

The mandated 2016 version of UK BIM is described as ‘BIM Level 2’. This term
arises from the idea that BIM has developed through stages and that it will
continue to do so as relevant technologies and the commercial context mature.
Project information management based on 2D CAD and contemporary document
management is termed ‘BIM Level 1’ and has been in use for about 20 years.
Level 1 used quality assurance methods in exchanging information but was
based on 2D CAD drawings and conventional electronic documentation, often
shared on a ‘collaboration tool’ website. The computer facilitated work but did
not ‘understand’ what it was handling. BIM Level 2, however, expects each team
member to work in an ‘object model’ environment, using computer-recognised
objects, both for their 3D geometry and associated data. All contributors work in
their own models that are shared through a web-based server and ‘federated’ by
software to show needed coordination and to support design and client decisions.
Level 2 working leaves all the current commercial and contractual ‘furniture’ in

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Chapter 1 Introduction

place so that there need be no change there at this stage. Draft standards are in
circulation to define best practice.
BIM Level 2 further improves its life-cycle support by including a tool called ‘Soft
Landings’. This was developed for the University of Cambridge in 2004 and adds
consideration of operation and facility management to the initial brief, carrying
this through design, construction and commissioning to early-occupation ‘sea
trials’ to ensure that performance is as intended. A completed ‘Asset Information
Model’ (AIM) will be part of this handover support, converting the project BIM into
O&M terms.

How does BIM benefit clients?

The biggest beneficiary of BIM can and should be the client. Whilst consultants,
constructors and product makers can all benefit by a reduction in their risk and an
increase in their delivered quality, the client benefits in many ways:
• Rich, multi-dimensional concept simulations can engage stakeholders to
define their needs earlier and better.
• Suppliers can pass on reduced risk to clients in the form of lower prices and
faster programmes.
• Clients can expect less management workload as the team can collaborate
far better with trustworthy information.
• Client decision points can be far better supported so that late changes can
be reduced.
• The client’s brief for information required can be held in the process with
compliance checked automatically.
• The completed building can be handed over twice, once as a real artefact and
a second time as its virtual doppelganger, loaded with information on how to
operate and maintain it.
Benefits delivered can be enhanced and costs reduced, both in capital and
operating terms, leading to a jump in value to clients.
However, being a client on a BIM basis is not yet straightforward. Many clients
start by being a ‘passive’ user, leaving it to their supply team to apply BIM as they

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BIM for Construction Clients

see fit. There is a learning curve to being an ‘active’ user, as business change
is required in the client’s approach and methodology. The facilities and asset
management functions need to become better connected to project leadership.
The effort required is minor compared to that facing the supply team, but it is
significant. This book is written to assist clients in taking up BIM, or in moving on
from passive to active engagement. It also steers clients towards procuring more
collaborative teams.

The structure and scope of this book

The next chapter sets out the client’s business case for using BIM and the need
for a strategy on its use. The legal and contractual questions that often arise are
answered. Then there is a chapter on the active client role in a BIM project and the
differences from conventional practice. Aligning client internal processes with the
BIM project process is discussed, as are the differing aspirations and capabilities of
client types.
Case study chapters follow, from varied types of BIM-using clients in the public
and private sectors: a developer, a local authority, a university and a contractor–
client. The voices of the passive and active client are heard, setting out their
experience and view.
The book then takes clients through a generic project, following the eight-
stage RIBA Plan of Work 20135 which is written to support BIM use. The full UK
BIM Toolkit developed by and for the BIM Task Group between 2012 and 2015
is demonstrated6 and the client actions are set out in chapters on each stage to
inform the setting up of a project. Clients will see how to prepare, set up and
execute the project to optimise returns from BIM usage.
Finally, as the concept of UK BIM is still evolving, the likely next steps, towards
what is now called ‘Digital Built Britain’,7 are explored.
Clients are the drivers of their own projects; they have to pull though the
performance they require from all suppliers. They can be advised and supported
and can delegate, but the tone and tempo is set by the client. BIM is a powerful
new tool for clients to get more value from the project process and to realise
better buildings in use. It is hoped that this book will enable many more clients to
use BIM confidently and successfully. ¢
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Chapter 1 Introduction

Notes
1
The buildingSMART story. The International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI) was formed
in 1994. This society of BIM enthusiasts began creating the Industrial Foundation Classes
(IFC) format, a way in which the elements of buildings can be described in software so that
otherwise incompatible computing platforms can recognise each other’s content. The society
was renamed buildingSMART International in 2005 and continues to develop IFC and related
concepts. Open BIM is defined as IFC based. buildingSMART International is regarded as the
owner of the modern BIM concept and has member chapters in most advanced countries.
2
Government Construction Strategy 2011 and Construction Industry Strategy 2013. The UK
government published its strategy for construction in 2011, following a report called the
Low Carbon Study, which aimed to show what was needed to achieve public policy goals.
Amongst other policies set out was the goal of buying all government projects on a BIM basis
by 2016. In 2013 the government approach was widened into a shared Construction Industry
Strategy, which set targets for performance improvement by 2025, relying significantly on
BIM for achieving them.
3
BIM Task Group www.bimtaskgroup.org. The full set of coordinated BIM Level 2 documents
can be accessed at www.bimlevel2.org
4
Latham, Egan and Wolstenholme Reports. The Latham Report of 1994 came at a time of
deep recession in construction and was commissioned by the Conservative government to
address the major dysfunctions of the industry. It called for a collaborative approach, better
payment practices and better dispute resolution. The 1997 Construction Act introduced many
of the recommendations as law. The Labour government revisited the issues in the Egan
Report of 1998. It put clients in the driving seat to achieve project success and introduced the
concept of ‘lean thinking’, drawn from the motor industry. Use of contractor-led integrated
teams became public policy. The Wolstenholme Report came after renewed recession in 2009
and asked the industry not to waste a good crisis. Implementation of cultural change called
for by Latham and Egan needed to be accelerated.
5
The RIBA Plan of Work 2013 (see Chapter 8).
6
The UK BIM Toolkit 2015 (see Chapter 10) and http://www.thenbs.com/bimtoolkit/
7
Digital Built Britain 2015 (see Chapter 15) and www.digital-built-britain.com

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Chapter 2
Why clients
should be
using BIM

Fig 2.01:
Mayfield School, Redbridge
See Chapter 7.
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9
Chapter 2 Why Clients should be using BIM
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BIM for Construction Clients

There are many reasons why clients are – or are not – taking up BIM.
Some have been instructed to do so: central government spending
departments were given five years’ notice of a deadline to put all their
projects on a BIM basis by April 2016. As of mid-2015, several local
governments have taken up the idea in order to be early adopters. Some
universities have done the same. A handful of commercial developers are
actively using BIM to some degree. There are also many contractors using
BIM without client requirement to do so, instructing consultants they hire
to do the same. Similarly, there are many consultants using BIM for their
own advantage; their clients may even be unaware that it is being used
on their work. Over 2,000 BIM projects were thought to be in progress in
2015, valued at over £10bn, excluding the giant Crossrail and HS2 schemes
which are BIM flagships.
The client case for using BIM is that it can create more value. It can
improve the product and service purchased, and it can decrease its cost,
improving client competitiveness. There is as yet no benchmarked list of
benefits and costs: it is too early to identify all the effects, and commercial
confidentiality cloaks the numbers. The business case has to be outlined
qualitatively. It is clearly still persuasive to some leading clients:

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Chapter 2 Why clients should be using BIM

100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
93% said that BIM
improved quality and
functionality of the design.

92% said that BIM analytics and

simulation capabilities produced
a better-reasoned design.

90% said that BIM reduces

design error and omissions
substantially, reducing risk.

87% saw increased site

labour productivity and use
of off-site fabrication.

83% saw fewer unplanned
changes or rework.

78% found that BIM increased

their ability to control project scope
through the design stages.
Success factors
78% saw improved seen by the majority
achievement of project included improved
milestones. communication and
collaboration, use
73% said that BIM increased their and of BIM support in
their stakeholders’ engagement with, and project meetings, early
understanding of, the proposed design solution. contractor involvement
and use of a BIM
66% said that BIM improves accuracy of cost Execution Plan.
estimates and ability to control costs.

65% were able to compress the schedule,

accelerating completion by 5–10%.

45% saw cost reduction of 5–10%;

more is expected in 5 years.

Fig 2.02: Client survey shows payback from BIM surveys of US and UK owners (clients) by Dodge Data
and Analytics in 2014 and 20151

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BIM for Construction Clients

Active or Passive BIM?

The most important factor affecting client perception of the value of BIM is
what kind of client they are. BIM can deliver most value to clients who build
regularly and hold and manage their estate: central and local government
bodies, infrastructure and utility businesses, health authorities, universities, some
developers, some corporate businesses, and some retailers. These clients should
approach BIM ‘actively’ and master the necessary skills. Clients without a long-
term interest in their buildings – merchant developers who build to sell on, or
with infrequent or one-off projects – may still find value but are more likely to use
it ‘passively’. The distinction between active and passive use is as follows: Active
BIM is where the client takes the lead, defines their requirements in BIM terms
and appoints suppliers with full instructions; Passive BIM is where a client shows
interest in using BIM, probably when it has been offered to them, but declines to
engage with the setting of terms, leaving the supply side to use it as they see fit.
Passive BIM clients are still likely to gain benefits but on a lesser scale. Examples of
each style of engagement follow in the case study chapters.

What are the benefits?

The benefits that can flow to clients from use of BIM can be set down as they
would occur through the course of a project:
• At Business Case stage, the savings and certainties arising from its use can
make projects viable that would otherwise be too expensive, slow or risky;
BIM makes projects much more predictable in outcome; funders and insurers
can see BIM as evidence of due diligence.
• At Preparation stage, BIM tools greatly improve the definition of tasks to be
allocated and the workflow to be followed, promote the inclusion of Facility
Management issues in the brief, allow the simple adoption of client-preferred
standards or design elements, and provide the appointed team with a digital
scan of the site or asset to be worked on.
• At Concept stage, BIM supports stronger stakeholder engagement with
visualisation and simulation to enable lay eyes – both users and town planners

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Chapter 2 Why clients should be using BIM

– to judge the suitability of options offered; early cost and time estimates can
be made with greater accuracy; client decisions will be supported with the
fuller data requested to suit internal needs so that a firm concept choice can
be made.
• At Design Development stage, the buildability of the proposal can be
demonstrated, the cost and carbon content optimised, and a fully coordinated
design can emerge without any risk of clashes between professional
contributions and with less duplicated effort. Efficient use of volume can result
in better net-to-gross numbers. Cost fixed at ‘Decision to Build’ will have
less contingency in it to cover risk. Detailed information to support the client
decision will be automatically validated for consistency and completeness.
The chance of later client mind-changes will have been minimised.
• At Technical Design stage, when the specialist suppliers do their detailed
designs for fabrication, clashes will again be eliminated and off-site
manufacture promoted by the availability of data to drive machine tools.
Selected products will add all their performance data to the model.
• At Site Assembly stage, speed and safety will be enhanced by the
constructors’ use of field BIM tools to rehearse work sequences, brief workers
and answer their request for information; requests back to the professional
team will be minimised. Delivery logistics will be smoother and waste will be
reduced as all delivered components will fit. Use of robots to do dangerous
and intricate work will be encouraged by the data available. Commissioning
will be facilitated by the wealth of information to hand about every element.
• At Handover stage, the absence of defects will be a major by-product of
using BIM; as-built documents will be immediately available in the form of a
model including images of hidden volumes. All the associated O&M data will
be presented in a format which will load easily into facilities management
(FM) software, saving months of toil. Clients will be able to hold a digital
model of the as-built facility as the basis for managed O&M. Claims from
the constructors for extra costs are not to be expected as clients will be far
less likely to have had late changes of mind, nor will teams have suffered
information problems.

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• At Occupation stage the constructors and designers will stay on the job until
the building is through its ‘sea trials’ and delivering the intended performance.
FM costs will show a marked fall as information is immediately to hand to
support planned and reactive maintenance. Finishes, systems and equipment
will last longer. Space planning and other asset management functions will
benefit from the database which can be in the same terms as your corporate
performance and asset data, allowing useful analytics. Feedback will be more
easily captured for use in future projects.
This picture may sound utopian but it is not. The BIM process, fully implemented,
produces complete and trustworthy information – a single source of truth. The
ambiguity, inconsistency and incompleteness of conventional information is what
produced the adversarial work style that we have all suffered so far. ‘Perfect’
information can generate better collaboration across the team, changing the
culture of the industry. It also facilitates better client practice by seeking clear and
more detailed instructions early, and supporting internal decisions better. Projects
speed up and time is money.

Does it cost more?

Some clients are agreeing to pay more for design and construction with BIM in
return for some of these advantages. This situation is understandable at the start
of the BIM era as consultants and constructors are on a learning curve and are
investing in staff and systems. Those firms that are through their learning curve
are, however, seeing their costs fall away. Smaller teams can produce more work
in less time. Risk is reduced so that contingencies can be cut back. Rework is
substantially cut back. The government stance is that fees and tenders should not
need to rise to use BIM. Indeed, the early adopter projects were seeking 15–20%
savings in total cost compared to benchmarks. They achieved them, partly due to BIM.
Some of the benefits in the package do come at extra cost. The Soft Landings
service is additional to the previous standard offering and is paid for by reduced
operating costs. Simulations and displays beyond what would normally arise
can be bought as extras. Client health and safety responsibilities will be more
comprehensively supported and evidenced. Any corporate social responsibility

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Chapter 2 Why clients should be using BIM

policies which call for low carbon, low waste or more socially conscious working
conditions will be better supported by BIM. The decision support information
which can be provided is beyond previous levels required but pays back fast in
avoided iteration. In general, modern product manufacture is seeing a swing of
costs from making into research and design. Overall costs fall while perceived
value rises. Design and management costs for creating buildings and infrastructure
will not fall as fast as construction and operation costs, as service content will
deepen if value is to be maximised.
Whilst Active BIM clients can expect the full scope of BIM performance returns,
Passive BIM clients will still get some of them. If the lead consultant or contractor
sets information management standards to suit the supply team, then trustworthy
information will result and site efficiency will increase. Some capital cost and time
is likely to be saved and build quality will rise. There will not, however, be much
more support for client decisions nor will there be digital O&M information.
The small or occasional client is the least likely to be convinced to use Active
BIM. But some of these have good reason to make the effort. The Royal Opera
House redevelopment was in the occasional category and would have greatly
benefitted during its life cycle. Museums are in this category too. Work to existing
infrastructure or buildings, including historic ones, is just as viable. BIM tools can
capture the asset into a digital model economically and in accurate detail by using
laser scanning or computerised photography. Every item along a road or railway
track can be scanned rapidly into an inventory.
An Active BIM client will face start-up costs. These are likely to be:
• Setting up of internal systems, including training staff. Clients do not need to
be able to ‘author’ BIM models but they do need to read them with one of
the available softwares and to use the BIM standard for data exchange known
as COBie.2 Internal project processes will probably need reviews to optimise
them for BIM use (see Chapter 3).
• Cost of additional advice at business case and preparation stages, to define
and prepare the project to use BIM, and to appoint a competent team.

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BIM for Construction Clients

• Re-proportioned fees during the work, to recognise the front-loaded effort

required. Far less consultant work is needed later in the project.
• Soft Landings briefing and handover service is extra per project.
• Setting up estate management systems on the basis of an AIM for each asset.
This might happen project by project.
• Possibly buying Integrated Project Insurance3 to facilitate collaboration within
the team, recovering savings from the team’s reduced premiums. This is an
emerging concept and will be discussed further in Chapter 15.

Are there legal and security issues?

A concern to some clients is that they believe there are legal and insurance issues
which arise from using BIM and which could be minefields. Some contractors are
being advised, for example, that they should not use the consultants’ models but
create their own, to avoid liability issues. This is a position based on ignorance and
is evidence of inexperience. These misperceptions arise from legal and insurance
practitioners getting ahead of themselves before the publication of the terms of
UK BIM Level 2. Future use of shared models could mean changed arrangements
to manage liability but that is not where we are. BIM Level 2 is defined as one
based on separate models from each profession or trade author, with conventional
audit trails and liability patterns. The insurance industry has accepted that the
Level 2 commercial arrangements are conventional. The CIC Protocol document4
was produced to allow BIM requirements to be added to otherwise unchanged
appointments and contracts. Contractors, in the above example, are specifically
allowed to use consultants’ models, just as they would a set of drawings.
Security is an issue for users of BIM as whilst it enables easier communication
within the team, it can also allow access to inappropriate people. There are
cyberspace, physical and intellectual property risks. A new Code of Practice5 has
been prepared to guide clients and suppliers to minimise problems. An example
of the issues addressed is reluctance amongst professional, trade and product
designers to exchange BIM models as that may enable easier appropriation of
proprietary design concepts. ¢

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Notes
1
Dodge Data and Analytics: Smart Market Report 2014
and Business Value of BIM Report 2015.
2
COBie. BS 1192-4. 2015 (see Chapter 14).
3
Integrated Project Insurance (see Chapter 15).
4
CIC Protocol (see Chapter 12).
5
PAS 1192-5. 2015, Security-minded BIM.

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Chapter 3
How BIM
changes the
client role

Fig 3.01:
The Leadenhall Building, City of London, 2014.
85% offsite fabricated, thanks to BIM.
Client, British Land; Architect, RSHP;
Contractor, Laing O’Rourke.
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When clients use the full BIM Toolkit they will be getting two buildings
for the price (or less) of one: the real building and its digital doppelganger.
The two are important acquisitions and clients need to ask what they want
from each of them. Clients are also potentially shifting their stance from
concentrating on the capital project alone to considering the whole-life
value of the built asset. These changes in approach require readiness in the
client organisation. Readiness comprises having a strategy for using BIM,
a process modified to support it and people trained to work the revised
process. This book will discuss the BIM readiness strategy as if clients
were planning to use Active BIM where they play their full role. Any less
advanced target can be approached by choosing from the actions below.

Clients have several elements to consider in their strategy:

• The choice between passive and active use of BIM, including any plan to
migrate from passive to active over time.
• If active, the remodelling of their decision process to get the most from BIM.
• The information needs of the organisation, to support project decisions and
to support O&M in the completed building.
• The technological infrastructure needed.
• The client’s people and the investment needed in them.
• Procurement process adjustments required.

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AS
SE
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31
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Fig 3.02: The BIM process can be plotted against the RIBA Plan of Work 2013 (see Chapter 8)

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BIM for Construction Clients

What do clients want BIM to do?

There is a fable about a CEO saying to his IT man: ‘I want technology to make
us unbeatable. What can it do for us?’ The IT man responds: ‘It can do anything
you want. What do you want it to do?’ This is a dialogue of the deaf as the CEO
does not understand the potential of the technology and the IT man does not
understand the strategy of the business. The same could be said of BIM: for clients
to know how BIM can serve them, it is surely essential to know what they want
it to do. In the USA, BIM practice takes that approach: clients should decide how
they will use BIM and for what purposes. In the UK, it was decided to leave the
consultants and constructors to wrestle with how to use BIM, asking clients simply
what information they want, in content and in format. This is still a challenge, but
one closer to the normal process of briefmaking.
These two types of information requirement – content and format – need to
be developed during the initial briefing stage. Content needs are those in the
employer’s requirements for the building but dubbed ‘Plain Language Questions’
(PLQs) in PAS 1192-2, the core code of practice. The questions are the ones to
which you need answers to support your decisions to accept and proceed at the
four stage-end decision points (Fig 3.02):
• Has the brief been fully captured?
• Is the concept the right one?
• Is the developed design ready to go to build?
• Is the completed building satisfactory, with required O&M data available?
Each of these master questions breaks down into many more where clients need
to be satisfied that the information presented covers all the aspects and is within
the brief. The design and build team will then ensure that the content entered into
the BIM enables these questions to be demonstrably answered.
The requirements for information format are new and are termed the Employer’s
Information Requirements (or EIRs).1 Because all parties will be sharing information
electronically, the client needs to set out all parties’ duties and terms. Client
advisers or the appointed architect’s Information Manager will assist. Clients will
be setting down such things as guidance documents to be followed, software

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Chapter 3 How BIM changes the client role

formats to use, model management conventions, the level of detail required

at stage end submissions, file size constraints and exchange formats, and also
providing the site survey origin point for setting out the model, the health and
safety, security and training expectations. See Chapter 10 for more detail.

Process remodelling
Use of the BIM Toolkit should provide support information at each decision point
in the process. If you build regularly you will have a process in place to progress
each project through gateways. BIM has a recommended process map too,
calling for client go/no-go decisions at four key stages (fig 3.02). The learning
coming from UK government pilot projects is that many clients’ internal processes
do not easily interface with project processes. The client also cannot easily take
the project decisions, as the design team does not necessarily provide ‘decision
support’ information suited to the internal client process: design information is
not all that is needed. The results of both misalignments are costly changes of
mind as the internal process catches up with the project. It is useful to map the
internal process, superimpose the model BIM project process and align the two.
This reveals how internal processes may need to adjust to be ready to take timely
project decisions. UK BIM also incorporates the concept of Soft Landings, adding
facility management needs into the brief and keeping contractor and consultants
on site for a period after occupation to ensure that the building is running as
specified. That process needs to be incorporated as well. A new British Standard,
BS 8536, now defines best practice.2
Process alignment also reveals what information is needed from the team to
support each decision point, the answers to the so-called PLQs. The team will use
that knowledge to structure the data available at each stage. The ideal source of
final handover requirements is the information that is needed to manage property
assets. A fundamental need for the team is to understand how assets perform
for the client organisation. What is the future asset management strategy? What
are the whole-life value and cost profiles? These underlie a credible business case.
The AIM3 should be the eventual target for project information, and the source of
feedback and wisdom about what proves useful to feed into the next project.

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BIM for Construction Clients

Technology infrastructure
As for the technological infrastructure which may be needed to run projects on
BIM, this is evolving fast. The client’s office probably has networked computers
suitable for administrative work and good broadband connections. It will need
software to read the information sent and to add management functions. But
now that organisations can run many applications online without owning the
software, and link to all the players through a Common Data Environment (CDE)
leased for the project, the office may be as well equipped as it needs to be.
Conferencing tools and projection of simulated designs for group experience may
require specially equipped rooms. The supply team, consultants and contractors
have much more taxing hardware needs but these too are reducing as online
services improve.

Investing in people
Readying the client team to use BIM is a major issue, however. There is probably
an enthusiast for BIM in the office and clients do need a BIM champion to focus
the management of change. The design–build team will have an information
manager running the information interaction between the client internal team
and the supply side, as well as coordinating all suppliers’ information flows. But
clients will need an opposite number to them and a management-level sponsor
for the changes needed in project processes and decision-making. Financial
support will be needed in the transition to an operation which can then fund itself
from savings. The internal project management team will also need to document
and validate the processes deemed suitable. The team, including facility and
asset managers, will need educating in the relevant body of knowledge, and
training in use of particular processes. Some clients are employing BIM consultants
to act as mentors through the transition. Just remember that clients do not need
to be able to author BIM documents, only to read the outputs and process them
for internal needs.

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Chapter 3 How BIM changes the client role

Updating procurement
The procurement process will have to evolve to include the BIM factor. Unless it
is planned to use Passive BIM, clients should not begin buying projects with BIM
services until internal changes are in place. That internal work will have produced
an updated Project Execution Plan including:
• Team selection documentation
• Contract requirements
• BIM deliverables required, including the model Employer’s Information
Requirements and the questions (PLQs) which need answering at each stage.
In addition to the normal criteria that the organisation uses to shortlist
consultants and contractors, it will be seeking evidence of collaborative working
and competence in BIM use. It will set minimum requirements for proposed
personnel and their experience and the organisation’s use of aspects of BIM. A
scoring approach has been developed by the Construction Project Information
Committee.4 The quality of the proposed BIM Information Manager, from either
the lead consultant or the contractor, will be particularly important. One vital new
factor is how well the members of the team can work together in a collaborative
BIM environment. Not everyone can collaborate well with others and ‘plug-and-
play’ technically. Does the team come as a ready-made, experienced group?
Just choosing the best of each profession does not guarantee success as a team.
At this stage in the progress of BIM it is recommended to seek the professional
team as a group put forward by the architect, or for design–build procurement to
choose a contractor with their own established design team.
The preferred form of professional appointments and building contract can stay as
they usually are for the use of BIM Level 2. Government users are moving towards
more collaborative forms of contract but this is not essential to success. The CIC
BIM Protocol5 is the straightforward way to add BIM requirements to a standard
contract. Tasks for allocation to all can be derived from the Digital Plan of Work6
which has comprehensive listings of deliverables from each player, including the
Level of Definition7 of the information required at each stage. Fuller detail on all
these follows in Chapters 9, 10 and 11 on Stage 1 of the project process.

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Seeking support
Clients should seek to learn from each other as far as possible. Groups such as the
Constructing Excellence Construction Clients’ Group8, the Construction Industry
Council’s BIM Regions9, and the BIM4Clients Network10 are very useful. Sector
groups like AUDE (university clients), BCO and BCSC for commercial clients and
Infrastructure UK for infrastructure clients may have BIM groups within them.

A tailored task
There is no single approach that will suit all clients. A specific plan will be needed
to meet the organisation’s needs, in consultation with advisers. Clients may
not feel ready for all the aspects of good practice at the start of a project but
remember that buildings take a good amount of time to complete and that
ambitions and ability may grow during the work. It is possible to retrofit some
requirements to the plan at handover, by adding more data to the deliverables. It
is not as economic as asking for everything at the start but it is perfectly possible.
All this paints a picture of major effort by the client who wants the best from
BIM. It is modest compared to that required by consultants, contractors and
product makers but it is a one-off effort. It is a shift from an analogue process
to a digital one, bringing more precision and rigour, and lower total costs in the
outcome. Those who have a BIM project under their belt find the next one simpler.
Designers, who have much more to change, report investment recovery after
three projects, with major savings after that point. ¢

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Notes
1
Employer’s Information Requirements (EIRs) (see Chapter 9).
2
Soft Landings and BS 8536: 2015 (see Chapter 14).
3
Asset Information Model (AIM) (see Chapter 14).
4
Construction Project Information Committee (CPIC) (see Chapter 11).
5
Construction Industry Council (CIC) Protocol (see Chapter 11).
6
Digital Plan of Work (see Chapter 10).
7
Level of Definition (see Chapter 10).
8
Constructing Excellence Constructing Clients Group www.ccg.constructingexcellence.org.uk
9
BIM Regions www.bimtaskgroup.org/bim-regions-champions/
10
BIM4Clients and other BIM4 communities www.bimtaskgroup.org

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Chapter 4
The
developer’s
story

Fig 4.01:
240 Blackfriars Road, London,
from across the Thames.
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One of the first commercial buildings in London to have used BIM was
240 Blackfriars Road, developed by Great Portland Estates (GPE). This
reflective, faceted tower by architects Allford Hall Monahan Morris was
completed in 2014 and much discussed, both as a piece of architecture and
for its novel process. Its client, GPE’s Head of Projects, was James Pellatt,
who first saw BIM being used in 2004 by a Mechanical and Electrical
(M&E) specialist contractor to model an installation at the More London
development, but as ‘lonely BIM’, unconnected to the rest of the team.
In 2006 he was in New York and saw the construction of the new Yankee
Stadium, managed by his then company, Tishman Speyer, which was a
member of buildingSMART and a pioneer of BIM. He was convinced to try
it in the UK, having long experience of the difficulty of coordinating the
designs of the various professions. The catalyst to making the effort was
the 2011 Government Construction Strategy from Paul Morrell, its Chief
Construction Adviser. The government mandate made it likely that BIM
would be taken up widely and GPE was convinced to try it.
In 2011 the state of the depressed UK construction industry was a race to the
bottom. Some clients were seeking lowest possible price and total risk transfer by
single-stage tendering. This drove out innovation and collaboration. GPE wanted
a quality product and knew that collaboration was needed to harness consultants
and trade contractors together. Neither can now fully design a building alone, in
their view. Speed to market also favours early contractor involvement and two-
stage contracting or construction management. GPE began the use of BIM during
what is now RIBA Stage 3, after planning permission and ‘when the jelly had
stopped wobbling’.
There was initial reluctance from the professions to commit to BIM at 240
Blackfriars Road. A parallel working approach was therefore taken, with 2D CAD
drawings as the contractual vehicle but with a model alongside. Extra effort was
required but was funded in the budget by expecting savings in contingencies
and builders’ work detailing. A BIM consultant, BIM Technologies, was hired to
act as Information Manager and coach. The trade contractors were also paid
to model to the standards of the moment (this was before the publication of

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Chapter 4 The developer’s story

Fig 4.03: Structural node at crown

Fig 4.02: Geometry of glazed skin Fig 4.04: Precise skin panels

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BIM for Construction Clients

PAS 1192-2). GPE has been able to confirm that it saved £2.00 for every £1.00
invested, as risk allowances were negotiated out of the contract and savings
were made during the project. In addition, the client estimates that perhaps three
months were saved in avoiding potential delays on site. The building was also
geometrically challenging and the act of modelling meant that the complex crown
of the building could efficiently hold both plant and a stunning occupied space.
Coordination meetings became collaborative as trade contractors could see the
clash problems on screen and solve them without confrontation. The chillers were
installed early as a result of 4D construction study, saving temporary steelwork.
The advantage from planning work better was avoided delay. Time is money in
the hand for a developer.
Quick letting is also crucial to viability. A building with strong visual appeal lets
faster and BIM ensures quality in the fit and finish of elements, plus supporting
unusual geometry. The quality argument helped to convince the architects to
make the effort to use BIM. Quality also extends into the tenant experience. Once
the initial pleasure of occupying a striking building fades, the potential irritations
of living in a sub-optimal place can undermine the developer’s reputation. BIM’s
ability to support better facility management is important here. Whilst COBie was
asked for in the 240 Blackfriars Road brief, it was not used. GPE’s approach to FM
as a landlord needed to develop further to take full advantage.
240 Blackfriars Road finished on time and budget at the start of the economic
recovery, was let before completion and was chosen by one of the main publishers
to the construction industry as its base. They now use the unique volume in the
building crown as their signature space (see cover image).
GPE began with those parts of BIM that it could master. It did not try to
undertake full BIM Level 2 as the government describes it. The response of
the professionals used has been instructive. The M&E engineers now become
more significant and the structural engineers have to satisfy them as well as the
architect. The quantity surveyors were initially aghast at the idea of tendering
on the basis of the federated model, feeling that it would expose all the areas
of incompleteness where claims could arise. This is now the opposite of the
profession’s view, as the model helps to avoid claimable inconsistencies.

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Chapter 4 The developer’s story

Fig 4.05: Servicing

distribution diagram

Fig 4.06: Reconciling rooftop

plant and structure

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GPE has gone on to develop all six of its current London projects in BIM. On
one of them it was decided to model all the apartments in the development to
a high level of geometric definition, as the demands of the local authority and
market combined to produce a very complex mix of layouts. In many apartments
it became clear that the ceiling voids would not accommodate one of the
air-conditioning units required, a discovery that would have been disastrously
expensive to solve if it had happened on site.
The lessons from 240 Blackfriars Road have been learned to some degree but
it is clear that the learning curve is long and slow. GPE still does not start using
BIM before Stage 3 and it uses a BIM facilitator firm to support the team rather
than hoping that the architect or contractor can act as Information Manager.
In Pellatt’s view, too much is at stake to have people learn such crucial skills on
the project. GPE does use established BIM players again, but would rather teach
chosen designers to use it than go to process-led firms for design. It has found
it very useful to brief site teams on the next work to be done by using YouTube
videos where the 4D model and video of the site are intercut to show the build
process intended. GPE is confident of on-time completion of complex work and
of avoiding surprises. Its FM approach has developed, with plant and equipment
asset registers produced a year before completion to allow tendering for the
building management FM role and to support commissioning and Soft Landings.
Tenants have been offered FM content to support their role as occupiers but none
have so far shown interest.
One of the six second-generation GPE projects is a refurbishment in London’s
Tech City. Scanning has been used to create the BIM and the vogue for exposed
surfaces means that understanding the bare structural surface is worthwhile.
Scanning will continue to be used to monitor the work.
James Pellatt is pleased that the government will persist with BIM Level 2 and
will march onwards to Level 3. This will keep up the pressure on everyone in the
industry and enable clients like GPE to ask for more. ¢

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Fig 4.07: Construction sequence image

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Chapter 5
The local
authority’s
story

Fig 5.01:
Manchester Central Library
36reconstruction, 2014.
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BIM for Construction Clients

When the remodelling of Manchester’s Town Hall complex won the

Supreme Award from Construction News in 2015, it was because ‘it had
it all’. The project to remodel the listed Central Library and Town Hall
extension for modern needs was one of great difficulty and uncertainty.
These iconic structures were 80 years old, functionally obsolete and laced
with asbestos, yet protected to Grade II. The outcome is transformative.
The circular library building changed from 30% customer-facing space to
70%, with full accessibility. Visitor numbers have doubled. The whole job
showed exemplary health and safety practice, 98% of waste recycled and
a 41% reduction in CO2 emissions. The new spaces are a dramatic rebirth of
the much-loved buildings. It was all achieved on time and below budget,
and the catalyst for all this was a pioneering use of BIM.

Key to the project was the City of Manchester’s Capital Programme Director, John
Lorimer. A visiting professor at BIM-focused Salford University, Lorimer was awake
to the potential of BIM in 2004. When the head of Ryder – the competition-
winning architect for the library part of the project – asked Lorimer whether they
could use BIM, he immediately said yes. That was in 2010. Ryder comes from
Tyneside, another hub of BIM pioneering, with Northumberland University and the
practice together running the BIM Academy. Newcastle is also the home of the
RIBA’s commercial arm NBS, later to write the BIM Toolkit (see Chapter 10).
Manchester prides itself on its innovative and public-spirited approach. As a
construction client, the city wants to understand and manage risk, rather than
avoiding doing so, as is the practice of so many others. Their ‘Building Schools for
the Future’ (BSF) programme was undertaken with the city retaining construction
risk. Far more risk lies in the delivery of services to the citizens, and in managing
the reputation of Manchester internationally, in their view.
The BIM appointment was ‘on a handshake’, with no formal agreement as
would now be recommended. Manchester City Council and Ryder were keen
to involve the whole professional team. The key to making this exercise work

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Chapter 5 The local authority’s story

Original
1 Great Hall
2 Archive
3 Librarian’s Office
4 Open Library
5 Portico
6 Shakespeare Hall
7 Plant Room
8 Theatre Reception/Cafe
9 Theatre
10 Stage
11 Green Room
12 Book Stacks
13 Store
14 Main Office
15 Meeting Room
16 Van Dock
17 Public Lift
18 Goods/Staff Lift

New
1 Great Hall
2 Open Library
3 Meeting Room
4 Retained Book Stacks
5 Portico
6 Shakespeare Hall
7 Plant Room
8 Interpretation/Exhibition Space
9 Exhibition Space
10 Archive Open Access Space
11 Archive Storage
12 Conservation Studio
13 Plant Room
14 Van Dock
15 Riser Shaft
16 Goods/Staff Lift

Fig 5.02: Old and new sections show radical remodelling

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before all the current guidance existed was the keenness of the staff of all the
firms involved to make BIM effective. Everyone worked 100%. The team for the
Town Hall part of the project, led by Ian Simpson Architects (as it then was), also
adopted BIM when it saw the progress on the Library.
The first hurdle was to demonstrate to Historic England (as it then was) that
the remodelling could be done sympathetically. A laser survey of the building
produced the initial model and allowed proposals to be shown in 3D (fig. 5.01).
The insertion of a new core on the perimeter was the largest challenge. English
Heritage was persuaded by the manner in which all angles could be studied
and all options compared. The programme was planned to allow an unhurried
consideration of historic issues, accelerating once they were cleared.
The BIM-minded contractor Laing O’Rourke was brought in early on an NEC3
contract and a single project office set up for all contributors. Up to 120 people
were housed together in council space. This approach had worked well for
Manchester’s BSF programme. The City of Manchester and Salford University set
up a jointly funded research programme to study the project in progress and to
capture learning. The government’s BIM Task Group, on which John Lorimer sat,
took advantage of the learning to frame its new tools. The concept of Employer’s
Information Requirements did not properly exist, nor the full allocation of back-to-
back tasks across the team which is now supported by the BIM Toolkit Plan
of Work.
Time and cost savings were substantial as the project progressed. Clash
detection, the most basic advantage of BIM, paid off in the complex geometry
of the Library. 4D studies allowed some temporary works to be avoided and the
contractor believes that nine months was taken out of the project by the ability
to rehearse work sequences. Savings found were shared between the client and
the team on a ‘pain-gain’ basis and this allowed £1.2m to be ploughed back into
quality enhancements by the client; £200k more was retained as savings
on completion.

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Chapter 5 The local authority’s story

Fig 5.03: Conserved reading room Fig 5.04: Oculus provides view from new hall to reading room

Fig 5.05: New exhibition hall below

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Construction News recognised that the Manchester City Council and Laing
O’Rourke team achieved the result due to strong vision from the city and close
collaboration and transparent partnership from the range of organisations
involved. Manchester Chamber of Commerce describes the project as helping
to ‘establish Manchester as one of the global leaders in the application of this
technology’.
John Lorimer’s learning from the project, carried forward into his current role at
the BIM Academy, has several messages for clients:
• Are there age or generation barriers to converting people into BIM users?
Some older people are eager but many are unable to rethink their way of
working. Younger people need to be promoted to leadership in BIM projects.
• Clients should not think of every project as a stand-alone issue. Teams need
continuity and supply chains have to mature in order to take full advantage
of BIM.
• FM needs to be brought together with the design and build processes much
earlier so that the FM data requirements can be surfaced and influence the
model content.
• Clients need to be prepared to pitch in and help sort out issues arising from
the team’s attempts to use BIM. There is reduced risk in the project as a
whole, but in these early days the learning curve is there and collective.
• Clients should encourage their professional teams to educate them about
BIM. Contractors and consultants can be too deferential to have a robust
conversation. Equally, projects are not about BIM, they are about client need.
Dialogue needs to be open. ¢

Fig 5.06: New core from conserved structural arcade

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Chapter 6
The
university’s
story

Fig 6.01:
Imperial College London,
Biomedical Engineering Hub
44on the White City Campus.
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Universities are strongly suited to being BIM-enabled clients. They have

estates that are in constant change and are in a period of major growth
worldwide. Not only do they need well-run projects, but they have a need
for good asset and facility management. Their intellectual abilities and the
pressure from students and donors to be leaders push them into taking up
challenges such as sustainability and digital practice.
Penn State University was the pacesetter in the USA. Their 2009 guide to
clients using BIM (note 1) was one of the first attempts to set down best
practice. Whilst the UK approach subsequently diverged from that in the
USA, the guide remains useful. Ohio State, Xavier University in Cincinnati
and USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles have all had successful
BIM projects, with Ohio State having now modelled over 40% of its
campus to aid FM. The pioneer in the UK is Birmingham City University
(BCU). It is developing a new campus alongside the city’s Millennium Park
and has already completed two buildings using BIM at the client’s request.
The first, the Parkside Building (2013) by Associated Architects, aimed to
produce both an economical building and an electronic asset to support
the building’s ongoing operation. Contractor Willmott Dixon appointed
BIM consultancy Excitech as BIM Manager. It developed an approach to
cover field implementation and handover. On completion, the model
geometry and facility management information was loaded into BCU’s
SharePoint database. Products used were also barcoded.

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Chapter 6 The university’s story

Fig 6.02: ICL lab remodelling, fabric/services integration

Imperial College
Imperial College London (ICL), a science-based, world-leading institution, is a
good example of an early adopter of the current BIM tools. It started its journey
into BIM use in 2014 and has two projects in progress as learning experiences.
One is a relocation of laboratory facilities within an existing building to be
refurbished, whilst the other is a new Biomedical Engineering building, a major
new-build project at the university’s new 25-acre campus in White City. The
Estates Leadership is determined to base the Imperial approach on the proper
organisation of Estates Management information, and thus of well-considered
Employer’s Information Requirements. The university has established procedures
for project delivery and decided to review these with consultancy help in order to
establish requirements. BIM Technologies was appointed after a selection process
based on terms of reference devised by ICL’s BIM Strategy Group. The Group
attended seminars and liaised with fellow clients in Constructing Excellence, the
best practice organisation.

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Fig 6.03: Biomedical Engineering Hub, typical floor plan

ICL has technical specialists who are responsible for:

• Engineering, Health and Safety (at construction, maintenance and
occupation levels)
• Sustainability
• Facilities Management
• IT
• Accessibility
• Fire and Security.
Each must review projects at their gateway stages, in addition to user and project
management reviews. Setting the questions which the BIM approach must
answer to support these reviews is a key undertaking, as is aligning the client’s
internal decision-making process with the decision points at project stage-ends.
Information flows have been mapped and pruned of redundancies. Stage-end
reports are currently on paper but will increasingly be supplemented with the
model environment.

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Chapter 6 The university’s story

Fig 6.04: Biomedical Engineering Hub,

architectural and structural models

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ICL intends to standardise the softwares used on its projects, for ease of
interoperability between professions and for desired features. A viewing
software is used to allow ICL officers to see the several profession models alone
and together. COBie will be used for data transfer to FM software, rather than
proprietary Autodesk methods.
ICL has an Approved Suppliers List for delivery of its capital projects (up to £10m
in value). The firms involved have been briefed on the planned uptake of BIM Level
2, as they have on all the other plans for updating its estate’s project management
approach and delivery procedures. It is expected that the adoption of a BIM
Level 2 approach will form part of the estate’s team project management policy
framework, which includes:
• stakeholder-focused briefing
• whole-life-based value decisions
• emphasis on thorough feasibility studies
• use of single- or two-stage contract procurement with novation of design
teams to the contractor
• use of the NEC3 form of contract
• risk management processes as part of each contract
• assurance of compliance with ICL standards
• handover of completed assets with detailed record documentation to ensure
the efficient operation and maintenance of assets.
Client responsibilities under the 2015 Construction (Design and Management)
Regulations (CDM) are also currently under review, to ensure that ICL is taking a
leadership role in driving the highest standards of health and safety on its projects.
Following stress-testing on the trial projects and the further development of
its project processes, ICL expects to roll out BIM Level 2 on all its capital projects,
integrated with its FM practices and procedures. The Ministry of Justice concept of
briefing for standard spaces by using a library of room data models also appeals
to ICL. This could support the use of preferred laboratory layouts, model staff
and student accommodation and common rooms. ICL does not seek a standard

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Chapter 6 The university’s story

look but wants to meet performance standards. The estate’s team sees itself as
providing the college with world-class assets and facilities to enable it to further
enhance its status as a world-class university.
The laboratory relocation project is based on a laser-scanned surface survey of
both internal and external areas, with additional laser scanning of the services void
where this was possible, backed up with invasive checks on concealed services in
the space intended. Superficial survey is insufficient for this project, where there is
a highly complex services installation.
The design team members for the new Biomedical Engineering building led by
architects Allies and Morrison are all experienced users of BIM, and their skills
and knowledge will ensure the learning goals of the project are well covered.
The project is a 13-storey block plus one basement with a triangular plan to fit
the site geometry. Laboratories lie either side of a spinal corridor with plant in
the point of the triangle and the core in the widest part. Solar shading forms the
elevation’s character, with irregular vertical fins. The rational structure, services
and cladding concepts will be amenable to off-site fabrication facilitated by BIM.
The construction phase will start in 2016. ¢

Notes
1
BIM Planning Guide for Facility Owners, Version 2, June 2013
BIM Project Execution Planning Guide, Version 2, July 2010
Both downloadable at www.bim.psu.edu

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Chapter 7
The contractor–
client’s story

Fig 7.01:
Mayfield School, Redbridge: briefed,
52designed and built in 17 months.
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BIM for Construction Clients

Contractor Bouygues UK has had a varied experience as a client for its

own developments, as proxy client for projects where it is selected as
the design–build contractor to lead from the start and as a conventional
contractor for projects designed by consultants. This experience is
particularly crystallised in the Mayfield School project.
Bouygues UK, which is wholly owned by Bouygues Bâtiment
International, a subsidiary of Bouygues Construction, has been
operating in the UK since 1997 and has a strong UK presence. After early
experiments with BIM from 2009, it started to use elements of BIM
Level 2 from 2012, quickly establishing a robust set of BIM management
documents consisting of a BIM Protocol (based primarily on PAS 1192-2
and PAS 1192-3), a modelling ‘golden rules’ documents, BIM Project
Execution Plan and BIM Competency Assessment tools, to mention a
few. It has now implemented BIM on over 30 projects, with eight of
these schemes having reached practical completion by 2015. On the vast
majority of these projects, Bouygues UK is the design–build contractor,
employing the consultant team on the client’s behalf. Bouygues UK
recognises that BIM is part of a collaborative way of working, underpinned
by technology, process and people. It also recognises the UK government’s
open BIM philosophy and in doing so promotes the utilisation of IFC and
COBie. Consultants are required to use Bouygues UK’s extensive array of
software applications and to follow its planned process (in alignment with
PAS 1192-2). To be prepared for the UK government deadline of April 2016,
all publically funded projects over £5m are being executed in BIM Level 2,
irrespective of whether the client has requested it. Prospective clients are
introduced to BIM so that they can make use of its features even if they
are not ready to play the full ‘active’ client role.
The Mayfield School project is for the London Borough of Redbridge.

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Chapter 7 The contractor–client’s story

Fig 7.02: The school is built from timber panels, insulated and clad in a rainscreen

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BIM for Construction Clients

Bouygues UK was one of five contractors asked to bid for new buildings to be
added to an existing campus, including changes to several existing buildings
to take it from an 8- to a 12-form entry secondary school. The timetable was
very tight to meet the start of the academic year 2014–15 but the bid process
became protracted, leaving only 17 months to design and build. Use of an existing
planning permission for location and massing was presumed essential to meet the
programme but had many limitations.
Once Bouygues UK had been awarded the project, a new strategy emerged
to use BIM to meet the many challenges. David Miller Architects, experienced
BIM practitioners, were brought in. Laser scanning was used to capture into BIM
the site survey and the details of the retained buildings, including those to be
integrated with the new stock. It was decided to construct the new buildings
in cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels, a lightweight, low-carbon technology
which would avoid piling in the soft ground. With BIM, CLT can be quickly
ordered, fabricated and delivered and the saved time was used to reopen the
school’s brief and revise the planning permission. The original brief had involved
limited engagement with the school staff and was inhibited by expected budget
limitations. Better 3D spatial arrangements were rapidly trialled with the school,
resulting in new preferences for location and layout and a new gym building to
unlock the centre of the site. Revised planning permission was duly obtained in
only seven weeks by a team working in parallel with the production information
team. Procurement of the building began immediately after financial close
was achieved.
The building was laid out to use the panel module of the chosen CLT
manufacturer and the model was used to define each panel, complete with
services’ openings. The structural and services consultants and contractors needed
to meet the production programme to avoid later site alterations. The CLT panels
were cut by numerically controlled tools instructed to follow the architect’s digital
model. They were ‘right first time’. The panels were then delivered in order of
erection so that they could be handled just once, a logistics feat modelled with the
BIM. The superstructure took only 12 weeks to be erected (fig. 7.05).

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Fig 7.03: New classroom

Fig 7.04: Timber staircase

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BIM for Construction Clients

Fig 7.05: CLT panels being erected

Fit-out of the interior began on the lower floors before enclosure of the top.
The furniture, fixtures and equipment requirement have been developed with the
school’s staff, using simulations of views, layouts, materials and colours, creating a
strong sense of ownership of the finished buildings.
The Mayfield School has won several awards as a piece of architecture and for its
exploitation of BIM capabilities. Key points are:
• BIM allowed the user client to understand and contribute to the proposals
and to make confident decisions.
• Laser survey captured existing conditions rapidly and accurately into BIM.
• BIM supported off-site construction of the CLT structure, a safer and greener
choice. BREEAM Excellent status was achieved, with the sequestered carbon
in the structure equivalent to ten years’ operating emissions.
• Nine months were saved from the programme that would have been needed
with conventional design and construction, three before construction and six
on site.
• An as-built model of the building was offered to the school, along with O&M
data arising from the model. Neither were required by the user but showed
the local authority what it could have in future.

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Chapter 7 The contractor–client’s story

The London Borough of Redbridge senior construction project manager, Steven

McConachy, said:
The Mayfield School project was delivered on time and within its budget
of £18.2 million. It is excellent value for money, especially considering the
recent uplift in the market. It is to an excellent quality of workmanship which
surpassed the expectations of the client team and the end user. The building’s
design is rational, durable and above all maintainable which will ensure that
the Mayfield School will continue to provide teaching excellence within
the borough.
The current government school programme expects to rely on increasingly
standard building solutions. The Mayfield experience shows that bespoke
solutions can be competitive and more satisfactory, given the power of BIM.
Bouygues UK continues to widen its use of BIM and to streamline its process to
capture the learning from completed projects. ¢

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Chapter 8
Stage 0:
First steps

Fig 8.01:
Victoria Station, Manchester,
remodelled under a sweeping roof
using BIM, 2015.
60Client, Network Rail; Architect, BDP.
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Chapters 8 to 14 walk the client through the actions necessary to gain full
advantage from the use of BIM Level 2. If any of these steps seem out of
reach now that is not a reason to hold back. Benefits will still be gained by
partial BIM usage, but less than all those available.

Plan the work; work to the plan

Successful use of BIM requires the client to make a detailed plan for the project
and to be clear about their needs for information at each stage. The best basis
for planning a project is the RIBA Plan of Work 2013 (fig. 8.02). The Plan of Work
goes back to 1963 as the basis of design team organisation. The 2013 revision is
suited to BIM and extends its guidance across the full project team, including the
client, and to stages both before and after the conventional project duration to
form a life-cycle plan. The eight stages are:
0: Pre-project: the making of the business case.
1: Preparation: appointing the team and reaching an agreed brief.
2: Concept: choosing the initial design approach.
3: Developed design, to the point of commitment to build.
4: Technical design for fabrication by consultants and/or constructors.
5: Construction itself, including commissioning of systems.
6: Handover and close out of the construction work.
7: Operation and maintenance, feedback and eventual end-of-life.
The RIBA Plan of Work Toolbox is available online, can be customised to fit project
choices and is supported by good workbooks. BIM practice effectiveness involves
moving through the stages very deliberately, with decisions made to move on to
the next stage on the basis of information asked for at the start. Avoidance of
costly change once the project reaches Stage 4 is based on all stakeholders
having a clear understanding that their requirements are being met at each
stage end.

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Chapter 8 Stage 0: First steps

In use Strategic definition

77 0
0
Handover and close-out 66 1 Preparation and brief
1

Construction 55 2 Concept design

2
44 33
Technical design Developed design

8 STAGES

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Core objectives Principal activities of the team

Procurement Variable depending on client choice

Programme Variable depending on client choice

Planning Variable depending on client choice

Key support tasks Including use of BIM, sustainability, health & safety

Information Exchanges As selected for BIM Execution Plan

Fig 8.02: RIBA Plan of Work 2013 works with BIM

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The strategic brief

This guide does not repeat the principles of good briefmaking other than to
relate them to the additional steps required to employ BIM. Business case-making
involves setting out the client organisation’s need for a project to add or remodel
an asset, based on evidence that the asset will create value which will justify
the investment: the Value Proposition. Capital project costs usually represent
less than half of whole-life costs and a fraction of the staff costs and business
value delivered from the facility over its life cycle (fig. 8.03). The case will require
identification of core requirements, assembled into a strategic brief. Learning from
previous projects and external parallels will be valuable. Studies will be needed to
show that the proposed project is broadly capable of meeting stakeholder needs,
of winning public approval and that it can be built and operated for a fundable
and affordable budget in the required timescale. A list of required ‘deliverables’
will be set to support the client decision. Advisers will almost certainly be needed
to prepare this feasibility study.1
Where BIM comes in is when studies are considering the proposed asset life
cycle and its critical cost and time targets. The decision to use BIM can be driven
by a search for viability, requiring lower capital or operating costs than would
result from benchmarks drawn from conventional practice. The UK government
used several tools, including BIM, to drive down costs by 20% in the period from
2011 to 2015. The chief source of savings at this stage of BIM maturity came
from reduced risk and time requirements. BIM projects have a reduced likelihood
of disruption from information issues and claims. They can also move faster than
conventional ones, cutting overheads for all team members. Faster construction
methods, such as off-site fabrication, are supported by BIM. Time may indeed be
the critical factor that pushes the business case towards BIM use.
The need for better asset information may be important too. Operating costs
can be driven down and asset performance driven up by the provision of the
detailed information which flows from fully deployed BIM. Clients should consider
what information they need at organisational level to operate their built assets
and corporate real estate. This should lead to an asset information brief for the
project. A draft standard, PAS 1192-3,2 suggests how such information should be
organised. Structured, shareable information is at the heart of the concept of BIM.

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OPERATION & MAINTENANCE BUSINESS COSTS

DESIGN

CONSTRUCTION OUTCOMES

PROCESS PUSH

USER PULL

Fig 8.03: Understanding value: The ratios between capital and whole-life costs, and between
design investment and outcome value, are instructive. © Constructing Excellence.

Whole-life considerations
BIM reduces the management gap between capital projects and operational
assets. Conventional practice separates the accounts of those who develop
from those who occupy or operate a facility. Capital targets are often achieved
by pushing costs forward into the operational stage, without much awareness
of the impact. Performance is often degraded below the specified level by
substituting chosen products with poorer ones without that impact being noticed.
BIM supports the integration of life-cycle information in several ways. Cost and
performance data are attached to each element of the design, allowing the impact
of proposed substitutions to be identified and managed. Facility management
needs are identified in the brief and design and delivered by a process called Soft
Landings. This ensures that specification is not dumbed-down unknowingly and
that the building is commissioned and de-bugged fully, with operators trained
to use the building and the immediately available O&M information base which
comes from fully implemented BIM.

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The costs and benefits of considering whole-life value are becoming easier to
study. Cost consultants now have a BIM-compatible suite of guidance documents3
which structure information across the life cycle and which can enable ‘what-if’
exercises for a variety of scenarios. Optimising a proposed asset can be done by
looking at a four-sided process:
1 Optimise the performance of the asset to deliver required outcomes.
2 Minimise the operating cost consistent with 1.
3 Minimise the capital cost to deliver 1 and 2.
4 Consider the best way to hold the asset.4

Procurement paths
The decision to require BIM use as part of the business case implies an outline
decision on how the project will be procured from the construction industry.
Whilst BIM Level 2 does not need an unconventional procurement approach,
experience suggests that the traditional pattern of ‘design–bid–build’ does not
exploit the BIM method fully. The traditional procurement path is that where the
client employs a design team and cost advisers to take the project to a detailed
stage, seeks competitive tenders from contractors on firm information and then
appoints the winner to build the design. BIM benefits from an ‘integrated team’,
where client, consultants and constructors work together from an early stage. This
is so that the design can take advantage of input from constructors and that the
managed information flow can be fully used by all.
Advisers will help the client to decide which variant of procurement to use to
meet project goals. Choices beyond the ‘traditional’ range through forms of
two-stage procurement where the contractor joins the client’s design team after
concept design but earlier than would be traditional, taking the lead once design
and cost are final, to design–build where a contractor is appointed to form and
lead the team from the start. There is also what the USA calls ‘Integrated Project
Delivery’, where the client leads a single team of consultants and a construction
manager from the start. This is quite common practice in the USA but rarely used
yet in the UK.5 Each variant has different attributes from the point of view of client

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risk exposure and design control. All variants can be operated under standard
forms of contract and insurance.
The close of Stage 0 is an information exchange between the Business Case
team and the decision-makers within the client body. In a pattern which will
recur at the end of each stage of the Plan of Work, the information ‘deliverables’
provide the basis for the client’s decision to move on or not. If the decision is
positive, it is to proceed with a project as defined by the Strategic Brief, using BIM
in principle, and on a preferred procurement path. ¢

Notes
1
The concept of the Client Adviser has been defined progressively more clearly since 1994 when it
appeared in the Latham Review (see Chapter 1, Note 4). Advisers are non-executive consultants,
probably on briefing, cost and programme aspects, who help the client to make their business
case for a project, to determine the procurement path and then support the setting up of the
project team. Depending on the procurement path, they may continue to support the client
through the project. The RIBA runs a directory of accredited Client Advisers.
2
PAS 1192-3. See Chapter 14.
3
The RICS has published revised guidance to its members on costing new building projects,
refurbishments and whole-life operation and maintenance. Known as New Rules of
Measurement (NRM) 1, 2 and 3, the guides open up whole-life costing as an everyday technique.
The database to support whole-life cost benchmarking is advancing as a result. NRM’s element
classification structure is now reconciled with architectural classification through Uniclass 2015,
supporting automated costing applications, the ‘fifth dimension’ of BIM.
4
This formula for optimising investment in a project is one devised by EC Harris (now Arcadis),
the built asset consultants. The final point, considering how best to hold the asset, covers the
options to own, rent, build, sell and leaseback or to obtain the facility as a service including
finance and operational management. The choice will be driven by the client’s resources and
financial structure.
5
Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) was defined for use with BIM by the American Institute of
Architects (AIA) in 2008. It is essentially the US ‘Construction Manager’ or ‘Owner Builder’
procurement path where the client retains the project risk and appoints design consultants and
a fee-based construction manager at Stage 1. Specialist contractors can be called in to work with
the consultants earlier than in two-stage forms of procurement and the collaboration workstyle
is supported. It has the advantages of greater speed and flexibility for the client, but requires a
confident client to lead it. IPD does not have a tailored insurance product to suit it in the UK,
nor is there a standard form of agreement to structure a collaborative team.
Both are in development for future forms of BIM working (see Chapter 15). Nevertheless, it has
been used in the UK, notably by Heathrow Airport from Terminal 5 onwards. T5 was one of the
first projects to use BIM at what became defined as Level 2 in 2008.

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Chapter 9
Stage 1:
Setting out client
requirements

Fig 9.01:
St John Bosco Arts College, Liverpool, 2014.
BIM helped to bring cost per square metre 15%
below benchmark allowing more space.
Client, Liverpool City Council / Neptune / Sigma
68Inpartnerships; Architect, BDP.
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Stage 1 is where most of the new client activities are needed to set up a
project on a BIM basis. This stage essentially consists of appointing the
appropriate team and forming the initial project brief so that concept
design work can begin. Depending on the procurement path selected, the
client can either develop the brief with advisers and then use it to select
the team, or appoint the team to help develop the brief. This account will
be based on developing the brief before team selection.

The term ‘brief’ used to mean the Employer’s Requirements for the function, form,
economy and timescale of the project. Now that requirements for information
structure and management have become a major part of the brief, the term used
is Employer’s Information Requirements (EIRs). These can either stand separately
from the design brief or be combined. Combination is more logical and will be
normal once the BIM process is fully integrated with typical procedure.
Three chapters in this book are devoted to Stage 1. After the preparation of
the Employer’s Information Requirements comes the planning and allocation of
tasks, followed by team appointments. In normal practice these steps are taken
in parallel, ending with the appointment of the team and the development and
agreement of the initial brief.

Employer’s Information Requirements

Figure 9.02 shows the flow of elements which make up the Employer’s
Information Requirements. The writers of the emerging standards do not avoid
jargon, so translation is necessary. The diagram splits elements left and right into
Product aspects and Process aspects. Product means the requirement for the
physical asset. Process means the requirement for information content and flow.
The high-level client needs are dubbed Organisation Information Requirements
(OIRs) and cover, on the product side, the business case for the project and
what success will look like. On the Process side comes all the support that the
organisation will need to make decisions, especially those not related to the design
but to the internal process of the organisation. The Ministry of Justice studied its
internal process to align it with the BIM project process and covered 12 metres
of wall space with the ensuing chart. On its pilot BIM projects it was then able

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PRODUCT PROCESS

ORGANISATION
BRIEF FOR THE NON-DESIGN DECISION
INFORMATION REQUIREMENTS
REQUIRED FACILITY REQUIREMENTS
(OIR)

ASSET INFORMATION
FM BRIEF TO BS 8536 REQUIREMENTS (AIR) PAS 1192-3 GUIDANCE

PROJECT EXECUTION
PLAIN LANGUAGE EMPLOYERS PLAN, PROGRAMME,
QUESTIONS INFORMATION SECURITY POLICY,
REQUIREMENTS TRAINING POLICY, ETC.
(EIR) To PAS 1192-2,3 & 5.

BIM EXECUTION PLAN

Fig 9.02: Inputs to Employer’s Information Requirements (EIR)

to receive the necessary support information at each decision point and to make
timely decisions that stuck.
The next layer of development is formation of the Asset Information
Requirements (AIRs). If the asset is to be retained and managed, the occupiers,
facility managers and asset managers will need relevant information which can be
loaded into their management systems. On the Product side, they will need the
as-built description of the asset and support in picking up the responsibility for
operation. On the Process side, they will want structured information to enable
analysis and decision support. The Product requirements are met by requesting
facility information to meet BS 8536: 2015, the new standard on defining Facility
Management requirements and Soft Landings service to deliver quality assurance,
support and training. On the Process side, the asset information needs structure,
which can be based on PAS 1192-3 on Asset Information Modelling. This standard

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is the sibling of the core BIM standard, PAS 1192-2, and shows how asset
information can be structured and managed to provide a continuously up-to-date
resource for the owner.
Then we come to the project’s Employer’s Information Requirements. These
combine the relevant requirements from the OIRs and AIRs with further inputs.
On the Product side comes the brief for the physical building, whilst on the Process
side come the requirements for information management. The information
management needs will cover:
• Collaborative working requirements, setting out how team members are
expected to interact.
• Information Exchange points in the project plan and the maturity at which
information should be at each exchange to answer the client’s questions.
• Model management processes and the role of the Information Manager.
• Software formats required (if any), exchange formats and file size limits.
• Training and health and safety needs.
• Security requirements for information.
• Guidance documents which are to be used.
• How team selection will be made, tenders assessed and competencies judged.
The buildingSMART template for Employer’s Information Requirements creation is
provided as Appendix A.
This is a formidable and novel set of statements for a client to prepare and
will almost certainly involve advisers. The client has the choice of retaining the
advisers who supported Stage 0, appointing Stage 1 advisers with BIM expertise
or appointing key members of the project team to prepare their own instructions.
This last approach is perfectly reasonable but precludes the client from selecting
the team based on response to the Employer’s Information Requirements. In a
two-stage approach clients can appoint, say, the architect, information manager,
project manager and cost consultant on a time basis to develop the Employer’s
Information Requirements and their BIM Execution Plan in response, then
negotiate their full appointments based on the defined task (see also Chapter 11).

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Looking at the Employer’s Information Requirements list in more detail:

Collaborative working arrangements

BIM works best with a team that is motivated to collaborate. The word ‘team’
covers the client, consultants, main contractor and key specialists, whether
appointed all together or built up progressively. Whilst at BIM Level 2 all the
members of the team carry the separate responsibilities which are conventional
today, they need to interact more than has been conventional and to support
each other, both in getting used to BIM and in meeting project challenges. Clients
should call for a collaborative approach and consider motivational devices such
as partnering charters, collaborative forms of contract and incentives for beating
targets. The Ministry of Justice used framework appointments to hold teams
together over several projects and employed the partnering contract PPC2000 for
its BIM work.

Information exchange point requirements

Figure 3.02 (page 21) shows the cycle of project stages and the principal exchange
points. The BIM process increases the precision at the end of each work stage.
Client decisions to proceed or not are based on information exchanged between
team and client. The team delivers a parcel of information which has been defined
for that stage. The client then has what it needs to support its decision.
Client ‘questions to be answered’ guide the team on how the information in the
BIM needs to be set up. UK BIM practice keeps away from asking the client what
they want the BIM to do for them. It focuses on what the client needs to know,
leaving it to the team to configure the model outputs to provide that information.
The BIM Standard PAS 1192-2 refers to the information clients need by the term
‘Plain Language Questions’ (PLQs). This term in itself does not have obvious
meaning but it was an attempt to simplify for lay consumption. The client’s
product brief (functionality, image, exchange value, environmental, social and
cultural value, resource and time parameters) will be met by the emerging design
when the team provides information that demonstrates compliance. The PLQs
are calls for evidence that the design is compliant, followed by lists of deliverables
which would demonstrate that compliance.

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CLIENT SHARED AREA WORK IN PROGRESS

APPROVED
NON-VERIFIED DESIGN
verified design
DATA used in-house
shared with
only professional
project team
teams

INFORMATION
EXCHANGES AUTHORISED
1,2,3,6

PUBLISHED DOCS ARCHIVE

Project history
VERIFIED

COORDINATED &
for regulatory
validated output
requirements
for tender or
and knowledge
construction
management

Fig 9.03: Assuring information quality involves moving it from place to place through a controlled process to
BS1192: 2007

Model management processes

PAS 1192-2 sets out the reference method for managing information in the
models produced by each profession to ensure quality and integrity (fig. 9.03).
The client can simply call for the observance of PAS 1192-2 protocols. The new
step is the requirement for someone to act as Information Manager to the project.
This new role is ideally played by the Lead Consultant or Lead Designer, or by the
Main Contractor. The role can move from consultant to contractor at Stage 4
when the contractor is better placed to manage the information flows. The
Information Manager (IM) acts as a team resource to support everyone’s use of
BIM. He or she will set out the information rules for the project and police them,
assisting members to comply. The IM will also provide what is called a ‘Common

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Data Environment’ (CDE). This is a server or web-based site that holds all the
project material and allows sharing and authorship in a controlled way. There
are several competing proprietary services which can act as the Common Data
Environment for the project.

The information rules for the project

The IM will set out team rules that suit the client’s Employer’s Information
Requirements. The client may require use of particular software (though
the government does not, preferring to call for Open BIM, based on the IFC
convention (see Chapter 1, Note 1). There will probably be rules on exchange
formats for data and on acceptable file sizes.
The team will need several rules on model data structures for its own convenience.
Security best practice will be set out as well. The benefits of shared information
must not be extended inadvertently to those outside the team. Model content
also needs to limit the inclusion of open information about neighbours or
infrastructure affecting the site. Security measures to be included in the design
should also be closely held. PAS 1192-5:2015 has been published to guide BIM
users on best security practice.

Other requirements
The Employer’s Information Requirements will set out client requirements for
health and safety practice, training of staff, use of local labour or any other aspect
where suppliers will be expected to comply. The guidance documents which the
client will expect suppliers to use will also be set out. The whole BIM Toolkit will be
on this list, along with other relevant codes. Finally, if the Employer’s Information
Requirements are produced before the team – or some of its members – is
selected, they will contain the proposed method of selection and of tender
assessment. How supplier BIM competencies will be judged should be set down
(see Chapter 12).
With the Employer’s Information Requirements drafted, the client can move on
to planning the project and allocating roles, and then call for supplier proposals
or formalise appointments already started. ¢

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Fig 10.01:
Stage 1:
Planning
the work

76The BIM Toolkit from NBS.

Chapter 10
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Using the BIM Toolkit

After beginning the preparation of the Employer’s Information
Requirements, the next task is to plan the work to be commissioned from
the team and thus be ready to appoint them. The planning task is now
aided greatly by the arrival in 2015 of the NBS BIM Toolkit.1 This online
tool provides a guide and record for clients and the team to map out the
tasks at each of the eight stages of the RIBA Plan of Work. It is sometimes
referred to as the Digital Plan of Work, as it offers an interactive tool
to inform all team members, including the client, in planning their
contributions to the project. The Toolkit is provided free until at least 2020,
funded by product suppliers whose models are offered for the team to use
at the later stages.

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Chapter 10 Stage 1: Planning the work

The NBS BIM Toolkit starts by asking the client to record the facts of the project
and then offers a stage-by-stage format to record the roles to be played, the tasks
to be undertaken and the deliverables expected. Prompts are given, with 21 tasks
suggested for Stage 0, 49 for Stage 1 and 50 for Stage 2. Additional roles, tasks
and deliverables can be entered as necessary for the nature of the project. Only
a few of the tasks are labelled for the client to undertake. The rest are for the
appointed consultants, or before them, the advisers supporting Stages 0 and 1.
The novel thing about describing deliverables in BIM is that they have to be
annotated with the ‘Level of Definition’ expected. This concept has two aspects,
Level of Detail (LOD) and Level of Information (LOI). The LOD is the level of
geometric development, equivalent to the old drawing scale conventions. As
project stages previously advanced, the scale of drawings increased, enabling and
requiring a greater level of detail to be shown. In BIM all models are effectively ‘full
size’ and there needs to be a convention as to what level of detail is appropriate
to support the client’s decisions at each end-of-stage information exchange.
This new convention also tackles a former problem where designers often
overdesigned for a stage and had to rework drawings as later inputs rendered
them outdated. The LOD convention stops that overdesign by describing how
far the model should go at each stage. For example, at Stage 2 a door will only
be shown as a generic object, an opening in a wall with a swing radius. The door
will become a doorset – frame and door together – gradually being modelled
in more detail and then at Stage 5 will become a specified product with all its
manufactured geometry shown.
The LOI concept is similar but relates to the associated data attached to an object
in the model. For a doorset, this will build up stage by stage with performance
specification (e.g. fire performance or acoustic performance) being succeeded by
the data attached to the selected manufacturer’s product. That data eventually
transfers, at Stage 6, into the Facility Management database to help the building
owner operate and maintain the doorset.

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The two aspects of Level of Definition march forward roughly in step. But
separating the two allows for those situations where one goes ahead of the
other. For example, the client may have a list of preferred products or a library of
standard spaces already modelled. These will be imported into the project model
at a level of detail or information ahead of the rest of the model. Also, some
workflow patterns require different levels of definition between professions at a
particular stage.
One feature of the Toolkit is that elements of the design can all be allocated
a classification number which is standard for that element, e.g. the doorset
in question (Sc_25_30_20_25). This is ‘Uniclass 2015’, a reconciliation of the
different codes used across the professions. This reconciled classification concept
allows machines to read the data, permits scheduling of like parts and supports
benchmarking between projects. Costing can operate more rapidly and accurately
than before.
Depending on the procurement path selected, the responsibility matrix for
information production will be planned only as far ahead as practicable. Where
the contractor is not joining the team until or after Stage 3, for example, plans for
Stages 2 and 3 will be made but later stages will await the contractor’s input as
they may wish to use specialist contractor design services differently to the initial
view of the consultants.

The BIM Execution Plan

Suppliers bidding to be the team for the client’s project are expected to respond
to the invitation to propose by submitting a BIM Execution Plan (abbreviated as
BEP or BXP). This submission provides evidence to the client that the proposer is
able to meet the Employer’s Information Requirements and has the competencies
required for the project. Consultants, contractors or a combined team put forward
a draft or pre-contract version of the BEP which is then fleshed out in discussion to
meet all the requirements of the client. A typical BEP is included as Appendix B.

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Contents of the pre-contract BEP would normally include:

• Statements to show how each of the clauses of PAS 1192-2, the master
standard for BIM practice, can be satisfied.
• Evidence of the capabilities of supply chain members, where a contractor or
consultant is employing others.
• Goals for information sharing.
• Understanding of the milestone dates.
• A delivery strategy for each stage of the project to show how the model(s) will
meet the Employer’s Information Requirements, answer the PLQs and be both
complete and accountable.
The client may choose to negotiate with the leading contender in a competition or
may be working up the formal appointment of the team that has supported them
up to this point. Those negotiations will clarify that the team fully understands the
project and that the client fully understands their proposal. A post-contract BEP is
then prepared, to be attached to the appointment as part of the CIC Protocol (see
Chapter 11). The final BEP would contain a blend of information from the client’s
project execution plan and the supplier’s submission:
• The list of the team and their roles.
• Information describing the project.
• The Employer’s Information Requirements (EIRs).
• The proposed management of information, with roles, personnel, updated
milestones and strategy.
• Survey information and other material about any existing assets involved.
• Approval and authorisation processes.
• The project implementation programme and Master Information Delivery
Programme.
• The responsibility matrix for all models, with the LOD required at each
work stage.

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• The information delivery plans of each specialist in the supply chain, dubbed
their Task Information Delivery Plans.
• Plans for the use of COBie, which can be deployed from the start to carry
briefing information and then accumulate the asset information required.
• The methods and procedures proposed including any volume strategy (where
disciplines are allocated horizontal and vertical volumes in the emerging
design to accommodate their elements, thereby simplifying clash-avoidance),
the geometric origin point for all models, the file and layer naming
conventions and metadata requirements, annotations and attribute data
required, the software and exchange formats proposed.
The BEP will be useful not only to those involved at the start but for those who
enter the project later, typically the main contractor, specialist contractors and
product suppliers. They will need to agree with the BEP or modify it if that is
acceptable. The consultants’ models created in Stages 2 and 3 are progressively
replaced by specialists’ models of their contribution and by product makers’ object
models to form the Stage 5 construction model. Each contributor needs to follow
the BEP precisely, under the guidance of the Information Manager, with the client
agreeing to any digression from the performance and information requirements,
say in order to stay within the capital budget. ¢

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Key performance indicators

In planning any work, it is sensible to monitor progress and check that targets are
being achieved. Key performance indicators are yardsticks that allow lessons to
be learned about points of difficulty, raising future performance. Example metrics
that could be used on a BIM project include:
• Milestone date achievement for information delivery and project progress.
• Improvements to health and safety targets, on site and in maintenance.
• Sustainability outcomes in relation to targets.
• Reduction in requests for information (RFIs) once the project goes to site.
• Reduction in the number of change orders generated.
• Reduction in site waste quantities.
• Reduction in defects at handover.
• Value increase to the client, from capital and operating cost reduction,
earlier completion or other reasons.

Note
1
The NBS BIM Toolkit is available via the NBS website: http://www.thenbs.com/bimtoolkit/

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Chapter 11
Stage 1:
Appointing
the team and
completing the
initial brief

Fig 11.01:
Point-cloud from scanned survey
of Copperas Hill former Sorting
84Office, Liverpool.
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Options for team formation

The team to be formed for the project will vary depending on the selected
approach to procurement. The client will have decided at Stage 0 whether
to go for one of three broad options:
1 Traditional procurement, where the professional team is selected to
create the design and the contractor is chosen later to build it.
2 Design–Build, where the contractor is chosen at the start with their
choice or a client-agreed choice of design team.
3 Novation, where a Traditional start is followed by a conversion to
Design–Build to complete the design and construct it.

There are many variants on these options and choices of contractual form, but
all can deliver BIM-based projects at Level 2. The option to use Integrated Project
Delivery (IPD), the preferred approach for BIM use in the USA, is unlikely to be
selected in the UK at its present level of maturity (see Chapter 8, Note 5).
Depending on the choice of procurement path and the sophistication of the
project, the client can also choose to form the team in one of two ways:
1 From the start: the client chooses professionals to support Stage 0 and Stage 1,
where they help write the terms for their later appointment for the project
as a whole and for the expansion of the team. This approach is suitable for
Traditional and Novation options.
2 Stage-by-stage: the client selects advisers for Stage 0 and for preparing the
Stage 1 Initial Brief, the Project Execution Plan and the Employer’s Information
Requirements. These advisers support the selection of the team to deliver
the project from Stage 2 onwards. This approach suits Design–Build or more
ambitious concepts such as Design–Build–Operate or Design–Build–Finance–
Operate (also known as the Private Finance Initiative, PFI or PF2). It is also
suitable for Traditional or Novation routes where the project requires
design competition.

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The Project Execution Plan

Whichever route is chosen, the client needs to set down information about the
project to inform prospective suppliers of professional and construction services.
This can be called a Project Execution Plan or Project Quality Plan. The contents of
this document would typically include:
• A description of the intended project and a summary of the brief.
• A directory of the people involved, initially those on the client side.
• An organisational chart of the client body.
• A table of roles to be played in the project team.
• The ‘contractual tree’ envisaged. This shows how each party will be
responsible to their employer, right through or before and after Novation.
• A matrix of design responsibilities for all parties at each stage of the project.
• The intended programme for the project.
• The technology strategy to be used, in this case specifying BIM Level 2.
• The communications strategy: meetings, query handling, information formats.
• Common standards to be used, including the BIM Standards.
• The Employer’s Information Requirements, as prepared in Chapter 9, which
will cover some of the points in this list.
• Change control procedures, to be followed at least from Stage 3 when
change becomes more costly.

Finding BIM-experienced team members

The construction professions and trades are well aware of the need to be able
to offer BIM-based services from 2016 if they are to win government work, and
increasingly that need is present in other sectors as well. Surveys suggest that a
majority of firms are already using BIM level 2.1 However, these surveys are self-
assessed and are not rigorous. Most of those answering ‘yes’ to BIM usage are on
the learning curve, some of them low down on it. Being able to model in 3D is not

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the same as being able to use BIM. Facility in BIM develops over several projects
anyway, with at least three projects needed to become familiar with the methods
required and to reap productivity gains.
To help with finding credible partners to form a BIM-using team, it is worth
taking two approaches.
1 Firstly, the project leader could use the questionnaires developed by CPIC,
the Construction Project Information Committee run by the construction
professions. These pro formas2 put rigorous questions to prospective designers
and suppliers to identify the ones who are established users from those with
limited capability. The sort of questions put include:
• Ability to collaborate electronically.
• Understanding of 12 areas of BIM advantage to practice, with evidence of
their use.
• Project experience, with three examples.
• Capability questions to identify needs for training and support. Training
plans may well be necessary to raise capabilities to the required level.
IT capability is also assessed, with subjects covered including:
• Policies on information production and distribution, including formats used
and limits on reuse by others in the team.
• Drawing and CAD management practice, including the proportion of work
in the firm done in BIM.
• Document numbering systems used.
• Experience with web-based collaboration tools.
• Professional Indemnity Insurance limitations on collaboration, if any.
• Policies on project email distribution.
• Policies on staff use of the internet.
• IT infrastructure description.

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• Operating systems and software applications used.

• Information transport capabilities, to receive or send.
• Disaster recovery systems and procedures.
• Archiving systems and procedures.
• Security systems employed.
2 The other tactic for finding capable team members is to ask the prospective
lead designer or contractor to nominate firms with whom they know they
can work, technically and personally. Whilst it has been common for clients
to build teams from the best submissions and interview performers in each
discipline, this does not necessarily make for a successful BIM-based team at
this point in the development of BIM. Firms that can already plug-and-play
together will outperform a scratch crew on the process side.
Clients can therefore either select members with the lead designer or
contractor on the panel, or they can ask the leaders to nominate and even
employ the other disciplines. US practice is for the architect to employ the
engineers, reinforcing their responsibility to produce an integrated solution
and coordinated information. This parallels the contractor’s employment
of the specialist contractors and suppliers, some of whom will have design
responsibilities. The multi-discipline practice is common in the USA for this
reason but can also be found in the UK as a source of connected disciplines.
There are often several specialist consultants needed to cover detailed aspects
of the project and, again, the design-related ones – for example town
planning, landscape design and interior design – can be sourced through the
architect, with BIM ability as part of the criteria used. The Project Manager
and Cost Consultant, if needed, are usually employed by the client directly
and often retained by the client if and when design contributors are novated
to the contractor. This practice may evolve as BIM use matures, as all team
members need to work within the Common Data Environment.

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Appointing the team using the CIC Protocol

When the government BIM policy was announced in 2011 there was early
awareness that development was needed in the basic contractual and insurance
arrangements used. Initially, there was concern that new contracts and insurance
methods would be needed but after much consultation the insurers and contract
writers agreed that BIM Level 2 could in fact be defined by its lack of need for new
commercial arrangements. There was, however, a need to append BIM-based
requirements to the appointment contracts of all the professionals engaged.
The Construction Industry Council (CIC), which represents the professions in the
industry, drafted the CIC Protocol in February 2013 and it is available for free
download on the CIC website.3 Clients who do not use the CIC Protocol risk
exposing themselves and their consultants to risk which they could avoid.
The virtues of the CIC Protocol include the better information of each appointed
firm of their responsibility for action and the deliverables expected. Traditionally,
professions do what they usually do, adjusting as necessary for each project.
For BIM-based working it pays to be explicit from the start. The Protocol sets the
common standards to be used, the way of working and defines the rights of all to
use each other’s models. It is the client’s responsibility to put the Protocol in place.
The Protocol defines the ‘Permitted Purpose’ for the models, protecting the
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of contributors. IPR remains with the authors of
each model. If that is not what the client wants, a different protocol is needed,
but in general practice it is in the client’s interest to allow the authors to keep
IPR, as well as liability for their work. The employer is given a licence to use the
models for the permitted purpose and to grant sub-licences to team members
to use each other’s models. They cannot amend or reproduce another’s model
without consent. No liability attaches to authors for any use of their material
outside the licence. Lack of awareness or understanding of the CIC Protocol was
still widespread in 2015, especially amongst contractors and their legal advisers.
Contractors are licenced to use the consultants’ models without collecting
unfamiliar risks.4
There is an electronic data exchange agreement in the CIC Protocol. This
importantly includes that no team member warrants the integrity of data provided.

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The risk here is uninsurable and needs to be managed by the Information

Manager. The Common Data Environment is in itself a way to manage the risk of
data corruption.
The CIC Protocol quotes from the agreed BIM Execution Plan, tabling the models
to be produced by each team member and the Level of Definition of the geometry
and data in each model at the stage-end information exchanges. This is evidence
of the thorough project planning required to set up a BIM project. The result is
rapid progress with fewer queries and reworkings. The table can be updated at
each stage review to meet emerging needs.
The project Information Manager (IM) is a new role required for BIM working,
as noted in Chapter 9. The CIC Protocol calls on the employer to appoint one,
either from the architect, contractor or an outside specialist. The best arrangement
is for the IM to be part of the architect’s firm up to Stage 4 when the contractor
becomes the focus of information flow. They should then take up the role. If the
contractor leads from the start, then they should be IM from the start. The role of
IM is described as:
• Supplying the Common Data Environment for the project to support
collaborative working, information exchange and project team management.
• Managing the process and procedures for information exchange.
• Assisting in the preparation of information for the exchange points in the
programme.
• Initiating the project information plan and the asset information plan at
handover, updating the Model Production and Delivery Table as necessary.
The role has no design responsibility but supports the design management
function which ensures that all contributors are doing what they have been
tasked with doing.
The Employer’s Information Requirements (see Chapter 9), BIM Execution Plan
and its Model Production and Delivery Table must be completed before the
agreements are finalised so that all parties know what is expected of them.
The appointed Information Manager should agree and issue them.

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The CIC Protocol also provides clients with confidence that the professional
indemnity insurance market is content to cover firms acting in a BIM Level 2
context as if they were practising in the pre-BIM way, subject only to the provisions
in the CIC Protocol defining liabilities.

Fee agreements
As noted in Chapter 2, the fees required to deliver BIM Level 2 need not be higher
than those for conventional practice where experienced firms are employed and
no external BIM consultant is added. Additional services may be required, for
example Soft Landings. The shape of the fee flow may differ however, with Stages
2 and 3 more intensive than before and Stages 4 and 5 less so. Lower construction
and operating costs should follow from a well-resourced planning and design
period.

Completing the Initial Brief

Stage 1 is completed when the appointed team prepares the Initial Brief and
submits it to the client as the first formal Information Exchange. The Initial Brief
builds on the Stage 0 Strategic Brief but adds the team’s understanding of the
requirements. If not provided by the client earlier, a full survey will be needed to
provide a digital basis for siting the project. This will now usually be created by
scanning the site or building to be modified to create a ‘point cloud’ (fig. 11-01),
a mass of coordinates which will then be translated into the first BIM model in the
project. The agreed ‘origin’ for the building models will be located on this model,
with a 3D Ordnance Survey reference. Any existing building or infrastructure asset
to be part of the project will similarly be surveyed into a 3D model.
The Initial Brief should involve first team interactions (if they are new to the
project) with stakeholders inside and outside the client body, including facility and
asset managers, and will enable the client to check before approving progress
to the next stage that the project still meets the Business Case criteria. The team
report will answer the Stage 1 PLQs to provide the evidence for this decision. ¢

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Chapter 11 Stage 1: Appointing the team and completing the initial brief

Notes
1
NBS National BIM Report.
2
www.cpic.co.uk
3
www.cic.org.uk
4
See Chapter 7 of The BIM Management Handbook, published by RIBA Publishing 2015.
Written by Professor David Mosey, it covers the contractual implications of BIM.

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Chapter 12
Stages 2 and 3:
Concept
and design
development

Fig 12.01:
Liverpool John Moores University
will occupy the remodelled
Copperas Hill Sorting Office.
94BIM visualisation by Architect BDP.
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The principles of UK BIM practice are to plan thoroughly at Stages 0 and 1

for the whole project and then follow the plan through each stage, adjusting
as necessary. The chapters on the executive stages, from Stage 2 onwards,
are therefore designed to help with that earlier planning by opening up the
content for what needs to be asked. Inevitably, there will be repetition of
earlier content, but that should help learning.

The Concept and Design Development stages cover the period during which the
agreed client brief is turned into an accepted design committed to be built. It is a
hands-on period for the client when the ‘value proposition’ for the project is created.
Where ‘value’ is defined as ‘benefit minus cost’, the design defines both sides of the
equation. Early contractor input to ensure buildability is advisable to minimise risk
and optimise economy. It is also when public approval for the project is obtained,
involving any compromises required for permission to be granted. BIM can play a
powerful role in these stages.

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Two stages or four?

The two stages are often carried out in four steps:
Stage 2A: development of project strategies and concept options and selection of
the preferred option.
Stage 2B: progressing of the preferred concept and final brief to sign-off.
Stage 3A: development of architectural, structural, services and fabric design,
ideally with contractor input, to the point of planning application.
Stage 3B: completion of the permitted design sufficient to obtain client sign-off to
construct at a set budget and timescale.
These four steps each merit a full Information Exchange in BIM terms, to allow the
client to make informed decisions. That should be part of the Project Execution
Plan and the team’s BIM Execution Plan.

CGIs are not BIM

Concept design work is dramatically empowered by BIM. Not only can analytical
tools rapidly reveal the performance of options for the organising, siting and
massing of a concept but the potential internal and external appearance can be
simulated in context and experienced by stakeholders as still or moving images.
Visualisation was an early reason for using computers, as they greatly reduced
the time and cost of creating what used to be called ‘artists’ impressions’ and
are now termed CGIs (computer-generated images). Clients should, however, be
aware that the apparent completeness and polish of visualisations at Stage 2 is
an illusion. The underlying BIM is actually at a very primitive Level of Definition,
with block-like massing, simple internal volumes and ‘place-holders’ representing
constructional elements. The architect will use a rendering program to overlay
potential appearance onto the model so that clients, users and planners can get a
feel for the character that is possible in the context of the site. Applications, some
from the world of computer gaming, can give very realistic impressions of moving
through the concept and can be made to react quickly to stakeholder responses

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until there is general approval. These early renderings are often requested by
clients to communicate with users, funders and planners but should not be
confused with the underlying technical BIM model. The skill of the architect will
make these impressions consonant with the facts of the underlying BIM, but all
remains to be proved in the rest of Stages 2 and 3.

Going for planning at Stage 2

This risk should particularly be borne in mind when considering planning
permission. Because of the front-loading of work in a BIM-enabled project,
clients may seek to reduce the uncertainties in the project before committing to
the cost of the whole of Stages 2 and 3, or even to the appointment of all the
necessary consultants, including the consultant contractor. Planning may be the
biggest uncertainty and the apparent realism of early concept visualisations may
tempt clients to seek permission at Stage 2 rather than the more normal Stage 3.
Planners may be prepared to consider such an application, subject to later detail.
The risk lies in the potential for the design to develop somewhat differently once
it passes through Stage 3. Engineering realities may increase bulk; cost realities
may reduce the scheme. Preferred materials may not be possible. Later buildability
advice may alter many aspects. The risk of reapplication will be there. There are
instances outside the UK where a competition-winning design was then subject
to considerable revision as to content but with the client insisting that the winning
outside appearance should not change. Such nonsense is an extreme example,
but the purpose of Stage 2 is to test the stakeholders’ views and select a line to
take. The apparent completeness of the images used should not blind clients to
the real state of progress.
BIM-supported planning applications are, however, powerful tools. The
authorities can be shown ‘verified views’, images in context which are guaranteed
to be realistic. Models can be made, often by 3D printing from the BIM, to provide
the committee with solid evidence. They can also see simulations of performance
against BREEAM1 or other environmental targets. The model can be primed to
answer the planners’ PLQs if these have been explored at an early stage.

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BENEFIT OF COST OF
CHANGES CHANGES

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

RIBA PLAN OF WORK PRoject stages

Fig 12.02: Benefit versus cost of changes during a project

Project strategies
The client brief for the building should contain goals for performance in areas such
as sustainability and operation and maintenance. The design team will need to
offer strategies for meeting these goals, along with other strategies for technical
requirements like fire safety and acoustics. As part of the production of options,
the team will want to illustrate the effects of taking alternative project strategies.
One of the good uses of BIM is to be able to analyse strategies for their virtues
and constraints. For example, some options may use deep-plan approaches to
minimise external wall area and outside noise effects and maximise net-to-gross
floor area. Others may use shallow planforms to gather daylight and fresh air.
Quick analysis is possible with computing tools to show the performance of
options against the goals of the brief and the project strategies.

Satisfying stakeholders
Good BIM practice is to front-load consideration of stakeholder needs so that
changes after the end of Stage 3 can be eliminated if possible. The graph (fig.
12.02) shows the benefits of making changes to improve the scheme decrease

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whilst the costs of change increase as a project progresses. After a certain point
changes cannot be cost-justified. Changes from the client side tend to flow from
late awareness amongst one or more stakeholders of the implications of what is
being offered by the design. This late awareness can be the result of personnel
changes amongst user groups, say the arrival of a new professor in an academic
department. This is a recognised risk in university projects. More usually, the
call for change can arise because stakeholders have not really understood the
design or how it works for them. With the ability of BIM-powered presentation
and simulation of performance, it is easier to be sure that needs are being met
and incorporated in design. One example is the use of room data. In hospitals
it is normal for the complex user brief to be partly expressed in terms of what
is expected in each of the often thousands of rooms required. Room data was
previously logged on drawing sheets with elevations of each wall of a room
indicating the equipment expected and the space around it. With BIM those data
sheets become models, volumes of served space with their furniture, fixtures and
equipment. This principle can be used anywhere. The Ministry of Justice is briefing
for court complexes now with a series of ‘pre-design’ room models of the courts
required with all their contents and performances tagged on. Users can ‘visit’
and approve these room models as a summation of their brief for that space. The
whole building design becomes more legible to them and later change is less likely.

Standardisation
The room model is one example of useful standardisation. Many clients have
standard requirements, for example those of a supermarket chain in laying out a
store. These standards can be stored as BIM element models ready to be imported
into the Stage 2 work. Schools and universities are less likely to use standard
solutions but do have largely standard needs. Element models could be created for
a series of projects using preferred dimensions, layouts and specifications.
A project strategy to use standardisation can be a great economy of effort and time
over a programme of buildings. The final buildings need not look identical or even
have similar massing: that can be site-specific. But procurement and construction

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can be speeded up and economised. This can also extend to using off-site
constructed elements: student housing has greatly exploited off-site construction
of room units for some time. Powered by BIM, this approach is made more rapid
and flexible. Machines to manufacture the modules can be driven by the BIM data.

Contractor involvement
The principle of completing a design that will not be changed after Stage 3
requires that buildability is considered before the end of the Design stage.
The rise of two-stage contracting reflects increasing interest in the practice of
early involvement of the contractor. In the current heated market (2015–16),
contractors prefer not to bid on a lump-sum basis where they cannot optimise
the design to their abilities. Specialist constructors are equally hard to interest
in the riskier single-stage market. This suits BIM users who need constructor
input to confirm and improve the design before handing it over for technical
development and construction. Leading practice is to seek a contractor using the
Stage 2 material so that they can play a consultant role in Stage 3. The contractor
receives a fee for Stage 3 input and develops the cost and time proposal during
the Stage 3 work so that the client can simultaneously sign off the design and
the contract sum at the close of the stage. Contractor input needs to be before
a planning application to have the ability to make significant suggestions to the
team. For example, contractors will often show the high cost of basements and
challenge the team to do without them. They may also propose significant off-site
construction and suggest that the detailed design is for manufacture and assembly
rather than site-based trades. That will affect the character at a detailed level.
The parallel working of designer and contractor teams during Stage 3 gives
a good indication of how well they will work together from Stage 4, whether
novated together or not. Clients can reject the contractor if they do not gel and
seek another. But the collaborative workstyle needed by BIM favours contractors
who can work that way.

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Controlling the process

Clients will be under pressure to uphold their part of the Project Execution Plan
as Stages 2 and 3 unroll. While planning permission is the greatest outside risk to
programme, obtaining stakeholder approvals that stick will be the main internal
risk. With up to four Information Exchanges to manage, clients will want to avoid
holding up the team by extended decision-making, whilst also making strong
decisions. Regular meetings with the team, at three to four week intervals, are
good policy. At each one the latest federated design model should be available.
This keeps the client well briefed on progress and aware of issues that may need
internal reconciliation. For example, keeping within the declared budget, for
capital or whole-life, may cause ‘value management’, a test to determine the
value for money represented by a particular solution versus others. Users may find
it necessary to reduce their agreed expectations or to delay fit-out of part of the
interior. Such issues need to be handled immediately and well to prevent them
causing major delays at Information Exchange points.

Completing the design stages

Stage 3 is complete when the client is ready to commit to build. In Traditional
procurement the scheme will go out to tender. In two-stage contracting the
contractor will become risk-bearing at the agreed price and timescale. The client’s
design team may be novated to the contractor from this point, or be replaced
by the contractor’s chosen designers. Responsibility for the BIM passes to the
contractor and their Information Manager. A different Common Data Environment
may be introduced. It is a complex moment in the project but is also the end of
full-time, hands-on client involvement until handover. ¢

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Note
1
BREEAM: the Building Research Establishment Energy Assessment Method. This standard way
of scoring the environmental performance of a design is often used by planning authorities
to call for a performance level above the legal level set by Building Regulations. Clients
often include their required BREEAM level in the brief (e.g. Good, Very Good, Excellent or
Outstanding). Simulations run on the BIM can supplement scores based on identified design
features. In practice, buildings do not often perform fully to their design criteria, for a variety
of reasons (see Chapter 14).

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Chapter 13
Stages 4, 5 and 6:
Technical design,
construction and
handover

Fig 13.01:
Furniture, fixtures and equipment
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During its progress through the work stages, BIM’s content changes to suit
the needs of the participants in the stage. Stages 2 and 3 are focused on
the client and consultants, developing the functionality and arrangement
of the building (its geometry) and the specification of performance (data
to be satisfied). Once we move into Stages 4 and 5, the emphasis shifts
to the interests of the contractor and their specialist suppliers. The design
is articulated into packages of work for the different specialists and
those packages are developed into detail for fabrication. The Stage 3 BIM
has most of its detail changed from generic ‘placeholders’ for intended
products to the actual chosen product detail. The consultants, either
novated to the contractor or chosen by them, work with the specialists
to coordinate the packages. This avoids clashes between elements and
maintains the approved design intent. The flow of information from
which to build is complex because of the increased number of players:
cladding specialists, structural frame makers, suppliers of many kinds of
engineering services, etc. The contractor reviews and adjusts the tasks,
and the timing of them, which is allocated to all players in the digital plan
of work. They plan sequences of sitework on the model and manage each
subcontract to keep within the contract sum allocated. The skill mainly
used is called ‘design management’. Clients should be clear that the last
thing that this process needs is interruption from changes caused by client
requests. Change management processes should have been set up but will
ideally remain unused after Stage 3.

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Indeed, the best role for the occupier–client during Stages 4 and 5 is to think
about the move into the completed building and all the facility management
and internal change management that will be required. For a property developer
client, the emphasis should move to the letting or selling of the property once
completed. The client team will need to receive regular reports and spring into
action should a problem arise that requires a client response, such as delays or
change to specified material for non-availability. Experience with BIM projects
suggest, however, that the previously typical flow of requests for information from
contractor to consultants falls away almost entirely. The model contains answers
to the coordination questions that typically arise and new drawings are not
requested as they can be taken from the model.
Stages 4 and 5 will usually be run concurrently by the contractor with a flow
of package designs moving in sequence through detail and fabrication onto site
assembly. Building regulations will be processed at Stage 4 and if a contract has
been tendered traditionally it will be during Stage 4.

Stage 6 – the main event

The majority of this chapter is therefore devoted to Stage 6. This period of
handover and ‘close out’ of the construction is newly emphasised in the RIBA
Plan of Work 2013 because of the greater attention it merits to overcome long-
standing issues and because of the new challenge of handing over the virtual
building as well – clients are receiving two buildings, one real and one virtual.
‘Snagging’ faults (listing problems and chasing down their elimination) in the real
building is a well-known process but snagging the digital handover is not. Two
techniques are recommended for the two forms of building handover.
1 Soft Landings is a process devised for Cambridge University to ensure defect
freedom and good handover of the physical artefact. The government
added in 2012 the ensuring of functionality to meet the business case to
form ‘Government Soft Landings’, its requirement for public buildings. Soft
Landings forms part of the initial brief at Stage 1 and is followed through to
Stages 6 and 7 to ensure that requirements for operation and maintenance
are fully provided for and proven in the early stage of use. Commissioning of

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plant and systems at the end of Stage 5 is followed by Stage 6 demonstration

to and training of the client Facility Management team in the correct operation
and maintenance of everything. Key people from the contractor, specialist
services contractor and consultants stay on site during the first months
of occupation (Stage 7) to de-bug anything that needs it. It is ‘sea trials’
for buildings.
2 The digital handover is newer territory and the snagging technique is called
COBie (fig.13.02).1 Clients will have specified in their Employer’s Information
Requirements at Stage 1 what they want and how they want to receive it. The
government model requirement is to receive from the contractor:
• The digital models made by each contributor, in their native formats, but
brought to the as-built Level of Definition. This resource will allow the client
to read the information as part of operation and maintenance but also
support changes later, as licensed in the BIM Protocol signed at Stage 1.
• The federated model from these sources, which offers a coordinated view
of the completed building. At BIM Level 2 the federated model is a viewing
device, not a working resource, hence the need for the native models. The
federated model can be usefully held as a printed (PDF) document also,
showing 2D plans, sections and elevations.
• The data in the models translated into COBie, the spreadsheet format way
to hold and display this structured information. COBie data can be loaded
across into the client’s CAFM (Computer Aided Facility Management) system.
This government requirement was first set out in 2011 when the BIM policy was
created. It assumed that public client facility management would not be able to use
the digital information directly, for skill reasons, and that conventional drawing and
spreadsheet formats would be necessary to enable use. Also at that time the COBie
standard was seen as the most practicable way to produce data that could cross the
‘species barrier’ between BIM and CAFM softwares. These two types of applications
developed in total isolation to each other, just as the design and construction worlds
had little contact with facility management.

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FACILITY
subject of exchange

ZONES FLOOR TYPE SYSTEMS

spatial grouping INTERMEDIATE ADDRESS COMMON SPECIFICATION FUNCTIONAL GROUPINGS

SPACE COMPONENT
spatial LOCATION EQUIPMENT OCCURRENCES

Fig 13.02: COBie schema

Since 2011 there have been many further thoughts on the format of handover
data. These cover both the geometric information and the associated data
for operation and maintenance. Clients should discuss with their advisers or
appointed teams at Stage 1 what approach to take. Options include:
• Setting the geometric BIM at a simpler Level of Definition than the Stage
5 fabrication model level used to build, so that facility managers are not
overwhelmed by irrelevant detail.
• Substituting for the ‘drawn’ model one based on scanning2 the finished
building, including inside now-concealed volumes. This shows what was
actually built. All associated data can still be tagged on.
• Using proprietary tablet applications to enable Facility Managers to ‘look
through’ surfaces to see installations and read off required O&M data.
• Loading the chosen CAFM system directly from the BIM using an application
to translate from proprietary platform to proprietary platform.

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The government COBie approach took into consideration the need to avoid
being limited to a proprietary approach such as occurred when office IT became
predominantly Microsoft based. For BIM, the public-sector ideal is to use open
standards allowing all suppliers to compete. These open standards are based on
the IFC concept3 which allows softwares to interoperate. COBie uses the IFC data
structure. The UK BIM market for buildings is however dominated by one supplier,
Autodesk, although other platforms compete for the infrastructure market.
The threat of proprietary lock-in is therefore substantial and many clients are
pragmatically using that approach to obtaining their data transfer to CAFM.

COBie as verifier
COBie can, however, do much more than act as a data transfer medium. Because
it is a digital repository of shareable, structured information it can be used to
check the completeness and accuracy of the data within it. It has always been
laborious and unreliable to check documents manually to see that the required
information is present in the handover material. COBie allows automatic checking.
It will flag missing, inaccurate or incomplete fields in its matrix and help ensure
completeness. COBie and IFC data structure allows checking in other contexts
too. For over a decade Singapore has processed planning and building regulations
submissions made in IFC BIM format on a computer-to-computer basis. Work has
started on a UK building regulations checking system on a similar basis.
Specific handover requirements can be met precisely with tailored COBie
processing – for example, the balance of content in geometry and data shifts
through the levels of definition until data dominates at handover. The geometric
information can be edited down at handover to that relevant to O&M. The
database of O&M information can also be edited, to be in full or limited to links
to the databases and websites of the suppliers of each item. The ‘link’ approach
lightens the storage and processing load and also avoids obsolescence of
information. But link addresses can shift over time and must be scanned regularly
to keep them live.
COBie checks can be run at each information exchange as the data build up
through required levels of definition. The key check however is the final Stage 6

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handover package. Successful COBie compilation and transfer into the client
CAFM system saves months or even years of post-handover work by client facility
managers to transfer all the information required to operate and maintain the
building successfully. Roomfuls of ring-binders from the contractor are replaced by
a laptop interface. The Soft Landings team is also able to use and prove the CAFM
system to support its ‘sea trials’ and to sort out any issues that arise in use.
The project data has up to this point been held in the Common Data Environment
(CDE) provided by the appointed Information Manager. At handover of the
deliverables it may be sensible to take the data into client keeping. As several
parties may need access for FM, Asset Management or remodelling work, it may be
sensible to set up another Common Data Environment under client control.

Completing Stage 6
The Soft Landings process, including commissioning the CAFM system, runs from
Stage 6 into Stage 7. Close out of Stage 6 is the settling of the final account of the
capital project. Forms of contract best suited to BIM support a rapid resolution of
all issues which can affect the final account. They should have been surfaced and
settled as they arose. ¢

Notes
1
COBie is a compression of ‘from Construction into Operation of Buildings: information exchange’.
The standard was devised by the US Army to meet its need to digitise facility information and is
used across the US Government estate. UK COBie was formalised in BS1192-4:2014 to work with
the UK BIM Toolkit. A version for infrastructure use has also been created.
2
Scanning: two technologies have emerged for capturing existing assets into digital form. Laser
scanning uses light like a radar beam to identify a ‘point cloud’ of millions of measurements which
can then be drawn up as a BIM. Computerised photography uses digital camera images integrated
to form a 3D view of reality. This is both a model and a picture. These methods have transformed
surveying and allow completed work to be checked against the design BIM as well as recorded for
O&M purposes.
3
IFC stands for ‘Industrial Foundation Classes’. This term covers the common description of building
elements in design software platforms so that elements are recognised when read by another IFC-
using software platform. So a door remains a door with all its characteristics when two otherwise
incompatible platforms are exchanging information. Platform-neutral operation is very helpful to
supply chains as they have invested in a variety of trade-specific softwares to support their work.
Transferring from one to another before IFC meant re-entering information, with all the cost and
risk of error involved. The IFC vocabulary is still being extended to meet all requirements, together
with its associated dictionary of terms. Full interoperability of IFC-based softwares is one of the
requirements of moving to the next level of BIM (see Chapter 15).

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Chapter 14
Stage 7:
Living and
learning

Fig 14.01:
Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, Liverpool,
2015, used BIM for design, build and
operational support.
Client, Alder Hey Children’s NHS
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Stage 7 was added to the RIBA Plan of Work in 2013 to recognise a major
change in the concept of asset creation, facilitated by the arrival of BIM.
Previously, clients had treated the operational life of the building as a
separate matter from the capital construction. The design and build team
was retired after handover and completion of the defects liability period.
Information on paper about the built artefact was requested but was
frequently slow to arrive and expensive to use. Facility managers had their
own tools to help them operate and maintain the asset. They were not
often asked to report on actual performance against planned performance
and hardly ever on the effectiveness of the asset in comparison to the
business case that justified the project. Objective in-use assessment (or
Post-Occupancy Evaluation) was rare.

The new model changes the linear model of a project into the circular form
of an asset life cycle. Stage 7 represents the in-use period which is likely to be
many times the length of the capital phase and to cost more. Costs arise from
consumables, utilities, operational staffing and maintenance and replacement of
elements. Within the life cycle are several sub-cycles of renewal:

• Spaces are reconfigured to serve changing user requirements.

• Furniture, fixtures and equipment have relatively short lives.
• Main services elements like pumps, fans, lifts, switchgear and controls
probably need replacement after 15–20 years.
• Cladding may be replaced after 25 years as glazing seals age and surfaces no
longer stay clean.
• Buildings change use, owners and tenants.
Much can be learned from what actually does and does not work, to inform those
making the case for further projects, as well as for changes to the asset itself.
Capturing that learning has rarely been good, nor has it been delivered well. The
arrival of digital tools, both BIM and smart building management systems (see
Chapter 15) are making capture of data simpler and feedback much
more available.

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O&M information
in BIM connects
Cost reduction System integration
designer, builder,
• O&M information ready at building owner • BIM data integrated with
handover and occupier Computer-Aided Facility
• lower FM set-up costs Management
• speedier data retrieval • BIM data integrated with
Building Management
• reduced visits to address System
issues.
Performance enhancement • BIM data integrated with
Enterprise Resource
Accessible O&M data supports: Planning
• better preventive maintenance • continuously updated
• fewer breakdowns database.
• faster problem resolution
• longer system life
• more satisfied customers.

Fig 14.02: O&M information in BIM

Considerable benefits can be gained from the use of the AIM, the post-handover
description of BIM, in facility and asset management (fig. 14.02):
• The O&M information arrives complete and available, cutting the time and
cost of setting up CAFM (Computer Aided Facility Management) and CMM
(Computerised Maintenance Management) systems.
• The information can be integrated with the Building Management System
(BMS), increasing control and improving reporting.
• The enhanced ability to manage and maintain the asset preventatively increases
user satisfaction through improved environment and avoided breakdowns,
reduces utility consumption and carbon emission and prolongs the life of
equipment and systems by up to 50%. The sustainability score is high.
• Finally, all the data can be integrated with the client’s Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) process, allowing business management to oversee the use and
costs of the facility.

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Facility Management with the Information Model

In his book BIM for Facility Managers1, Paul Teicholz estimates that using paper-
based O&M information with non-interoperable data sources costs 12.4% of
the annual operating cost of a building. Investment in digital FM with BIM data
loaded pays for itself in 18 months. Non-interoperable data (before BIM Level 2)
costs all the parties in a project but the client picks up two-thirds of the cost as
the burden continues over the life cycle. Digital transfer of information into CAFM
saves the predictable and significant loss of content which occurs whenever data
is transferred manually, from designer to contractor and from contractor to client.
The information that the FM needs is primarily about the many products and
items of equipment in the building and how they need to be maintained. The
AIM’s geometric information, which dominated during the design stage, now falls
back in usefulness and can be abbreviated. COBie content can be structured to
concentrate on the attribute data. This, too, can be abbreviated if it can be found
by linking to supplier websites rather than the stored data in the AIM. Model views
of installations can be called up, with relevant information alongside, by a number
of means including use of ‘augmented reality’ where a tablet ‘looks’ at the area
of interest and shows what is behind the surface and inside the installation.
Maintainers save much time by not needing to visit a problem area to identify
needed parts or tools, then returning.
The Soft Landings service, which is a recommended part of BIM usage, provides
support to the FM team in getting used to the technology and processes to follow.
It will be normal for adjustments to be needed to items of fabric and equipment
during the Soft Landings period of three to six months, as commissioning issues
may be unresolved. This will give rehearsals to FM staff on accessing and
using information.
FM teams need to be able to use BIM/AIM technology at a ‘reading’ level, but
the equipment itself is normal office/domestic stuff and the data and servers can
be in the cloud. There is no need for an FM file room. The AIM will need to be
updated to cover any changes made to the building. That skill can be outsourced if
necessary, ideally to the originator of the model in question. The agreements with

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those who created the model (see Chapter 12) allow the client to use the data for
normal purposes but exclude liability on the original team for any changes made
after handover. Good practice in managing the AIM is set out in PAS 1192-3.
Core requirements are:
• An authorised person to approve all information issued and received.
• Currency of all information to be maintained, either by automatic
synchronisation or periodic review.
• Appropriate roles to be allocated for all information handling.
• Removal and archiving of all obsolete information.
• Provision of full security, including back-up and recovery.

Performance reporting
This should be a normal part of the duties given to the Facility Managers.
Operating costs, emissions and utility usage should be tracked closely, with
departures from predicted levels investigated to reveal why. It may be that the
building’s use is not in accordance with the design assumptions: more hours
of use may be accruing and plug loads for IT and research tools may be higher
than expected. Some of the outlier results will point to issues to be addressed,
such as air leakage beyond tolerance, water wastage, over-lighting at night for
cleaners, under-utilisation of space and poor security practice. Reports should
enable continuous improvement in performance and the setting of higher targets.
They should also be a source of learning for future buildings or improvement
to the building in question and to the behaviour of occupiers. Is there over- or
under-design, over- or under-use, excessive maintenance cost due to incorrect or
reduced specification, unreliability? A recent university building proved to have
an inadequate front door design for the exposure on site: the disabled-friendly
double-door lobby was too often wide open to the elements as student groups
came and went, with resulting waste and discomfort. Replacement with a
revolving door proved essential and will be the expected solution in future projects
on such sites.

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Space management
Conventionally, space management is achieved by loading 2D plans of the
building into a free-standing programme for allocating and recording use of
space. With AIM such a function can be achieved running as an application on the
AIM. Floor space geometry is available, of course, but so are all other attributes
which affect the capacity and capability of the spaces. Integrated with the Building
Management System (BMS), the space-planning function can be used to allocate
rooms and ensure that relevant services are available to users.
In multi-tenanted commercial space, the marketing of space to tenants is like
the briefing and design stages of new building creation. Illustrative occupational
patterns may be needed to show tenants how a space could serve their needs.
The ability to generate 3D imagery, walk-throughs and virtual reality experiences
is a prime virtue of the AIM. Structural and servicing capabilities can also be
displayed and modified if necessary.

Asset management
Integration of the AIM into client organisational management systems is
possible and desirable. Figure 14.03 shows how the AIM can relate to other
asset management processes. A facility is there to support an activity. It is also a
financial asset with exchange value and liability attached. In both these senses it
is an asset to be managed. Corporate real estate functions in major companies
consider all stock available and work to make best use of it. They acquire when
new locations or space is needed, move occupants when sensible and dispose of
when space is no longer necessary, appropriate or economic. Data from buildings
in use is essential to knowing how well assets are performing. It also supports
valuation if selling an asset or receiving offers for it. A combination of the AIM
and the BMS will provide the necessary data. The feedback of performance data
is thus equally useful to an owner–occupier and an investor in revealing what
works and what does not and how business cases are fulfilled or not. The Asset
Information Requirements identified will form the basis of Employer’s Information
Requirements in any future project.

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ASSET MANAGEMENT PLAN

ORGANISATIONAL INFORMATION REQUIREMENTS (OIR)

EXTERNAL PIMs
New asset
acquisition,
major works

LINKED ENTERPRISE
OUTSOURCED SYSTEMS
ASSET ASSET INFO ASSET
INFORMATION Maintenance INFORMATION Finance.
REQUIREMENTS management MODEL
Property database.
(AIR) systems (AIM)
supervisory control
& data acquisition
DIRECT INPUT e.g. BMS
Minor works,
surveys,
performance
evaluation

. 1: The Asset Management Policy, Strategy and Plan should comply with the requirements of PAS 55-1
Note
(update to ISO 55000 when published).
Note 2: The Asset Management Plan should define the event triggers that lead to local supplier direct input to
the AIM.
Note 3: The Asset Management Plan, with references to the Asset Management Strategy, should define the event
triggers that lead to external PIMs arising from new asset acquisition or major works on an existing project.
Note 4: Activities such as governance, data quality, monitoring of provision and usage of asset information are
implied in Figure 14.03 but not shown in detail.
Note 5: Where the OIR results in a new project within the scope of PAS 1192-2 then the relevant AIR shown here
becomes part of the Employer’s Information Requirements for that project.

Fig 14.03: High-level asset information process map: PAS 1192-3 2014

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In-Use Evaluation
Often called Post-Occupancy Evaluation, because if carried out after occupants
had left, the concept of evaluating the success of a new building is more talked
about than carried out. Officially it is government policy to close the file on a
project by comparing its original business plan to the outcome after two years.
Occupants are rarely those who made the plan. Those involved in the project,
both client and design/build team, tend to ignore the need for evaluation in case
it shows them in a bad light. This is a well-founded concern, as the majority of
buildings do not deliver as much as they were planned to deliver. The concept
of ‘Display Energy Certificates’ in the lobby to show what a building is using
compared to its designed performance was dropped by the government in 2014,
as likely to be embarrassing rather than motivating. Awards may have been won
and testimonials may glow but environmental performance and operating costs
are rarely on target and often widely out. The comfort and usefulness of the
space for its purpose may also be compromised in some way. One of the reasons
for underperformance is the lack of learning from in-use evaluation. Projects
are briefed, designed, built, commissioned and operated without sufficient
understanding of how performance is actually delivered and why potential is often
lost at each step as the project progresses. Teams may normally be evaluated on
their success in meeting budget and time goals at project handover but the in-use
evaluation, done at least two years into the occupancy period, needs to become
normal too, probably by making it ‘no-blame’2.
Good practice is to have the evaluation done by a team not involved in the
delivery. This ensures objectivity. The evaluators need access to the business case
as well as to operational records and occupiers’ opinions. Their report, a formal
Information Exchange, needs to be in the public domain in some way so that all
can learn. Anonymised reporting, such as that by the CarbonBuzz programme3 is a
step in the right direction. Periodic evaluations are expected over the building’s life
cycle. One aim is to collect data on the out-turn whole-life cost of specifications
used. Was good value achieved? Did replacement come when expected?

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The hope of the BIM ‘movement’ is that tomorrow’s buildings will be better
because they will be based on better data, designed more economically for
‘whole-life’, built to higher standards and well operated with the support of
the information model. ¢

Notes
1
BIM for Facilities Managers, edited by Paul Teicholz for the International Facility Management
Association, published by Wiley, 2013.
2
No-blame feedback processes are used, for example, by the British Army to ensure full and frank
disclosure of all outcomes and actions, without which vital lessons will not be learned. No record
of individual contributions is made.
3
CarbonBuzz is a programme at University College London (UCL) to capture actual performance
data from buildings in use, holding it without attribution so that contributions are encouraged
and benchmarking is supported (www.carbonbuzz.org).

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next for BIM?

Fig 15.01:
Fulton Center metro station, NYC, 2015
Client, New York City Transit and Arup.
Architect: Grimshaw and James Carpenter
Design. The project used many advanced IT
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This book focuses on the successful application of BIM Level 2 by clients.

But whilst Level 2 was defined only in 2008 and the Toolkit for it only
completed in 2015, BIM itself is increasingly seen as a half-landing on the
staircase to a much wider concept of ‘digital built environment’. The rate
of progress in thinking and in technological development is such that the
road beyond Level 2 is becoming clear. Incremental increase in potential
will be continuous and further step changes are likely over the next
decade. Adopting BIM Level 2 is the start of a journey.

BIM Level 2 works because it supports the present, transactional nature of

construction in the UK and requires no change to its structure and commercial
arrangements. It is apparent, however, that the UK model is sub-optimal, with
relatively high costs compared to other advanced countries and a worrying gap
between the planned and actual performance of finished buildings. The lack of
feedback in the process is one major weakness. Another is the short-termism of
selecting scratch teams per project, separately insured and with no continuity
and learning from job to job. Thirdly, the clients’ typical separation of capital
and operating accounting creates waste and inefficiency. In improving BIM,
the goal will be to support better processes and practice, from both clients and
their suppliers.

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INTERNET
OF
THINGS

SMART
GRID DECARB
‘power by GRID
the hour’ DIGITAL smart
(servitisation) BUILT buildings
BRITAIN and cities

FABRIC ALL
ELECTRIC
RENEWABLES

whole-life
value incl.
well-being Value SUST
circular NEW
economy MATERIALS

social
insured
media BEHAVIOURAL
outcomes SOFT ICT
&A ECONOMICS
LANDINGS

BIM BIG DATA

HPC
& HPC
APPS
feedback & APPS
new and
professionalISm MANUFACTURE ROBOTICS
evidence
based THE CLOUD
design

3d
dPOW printing
collaboration
tools and
contracts

Fig 15.02: The Innovation Galaxy

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There is a national strategy for construction, agreed between the industry and
government in 20131 and with a target for transformation by 2025. Amongst many
issues tackled, the strategy aims to raise headline performance:
• 33% reduction in capital and operating cost.
• 50% reduction in project timescales.
• 50% reduction in carbon emissions.
• A switch from expecting ‘outputs’ toward ‘outcomes’, the resultant impact on
stakeholders.
This ‘Better, Faster, Cheaper’ mantra contrasts with the long-term trend of rising
costs, timescales and energy use. The strategy recognises that the use of digital tools
will be one of the main ways in which its goals will be met. These tools include BIM,
at progressively higher levels, but also many other technologies.

The Innovation Galaxy

There are several strands of technological innovation which are interacting to define
the potential of our future built environment. The diagram (fig. 15.02) attempts
to show them and their links, within the limits of 2D. At the heart of the chart is a
triangle of factors identified nationally in 20082 as being central to the improvement
of the built environment industry:
• Value-based operation, where the industry focuses on creating client and
societal value, based on evidence.
• Sustainability, where construction becomes economically, socially and
environmentally responsible and viable.
• Use of information and communications technology, and automation, to assist
in reaching the other two goals.
Radiating from this triangle are areas of innovation close to their main factor. Left of
the Value circle come issues like Whole-life Value, Soft Landings service, Feedback
and Evidence-Based design. To the right of the Sustainability circle lie subjects like
Renewables, the Decarbonised and Smart Grid and the Circular Economy. Below and
above the ICT&A circle come the change-makers: BIM, The Cloud, Big Data, Smart
Cities and Buildings and the Internet of Things.

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The interaction of these innovations is explored in a 2015 paper from the BIM
Task Group, ‘Digital Built Britain’.3 It sets down the likely next phases of evolution
of digital built environment and plans made to achieve them in the UK. It sees a
series of steps forward:
• Incremental improvements to BIM Level 2 use, towards Level 3.
• Maturation of related digital technologies, complementary to and competing
with BIM.
• Emergence of new business models for the supply of built environment.

Improving BIM
By early 2015 BIM had most of its Toolkit for Level 2 working but lacked the
important Digital Plan of Work (see Chapter 10) and an all-through classification
system for machine-reading of elements in models. Those tools arrived in
mid-2015 but will take time to bed down and affect practice. There is also a
continuous stream of improvements offered by the software industry to make
BIM Level 2 flow more easily. Common Data Environment tools will offer more
support to work flow. Decision support tools will help clients take better stage-end
decisions. Good practice in BIM will become widely shared as client and supplier
experience is gained, succeeding to the somewhat academic initial codes
of practice.
E-Briefing is a new concept, where clients for buildings to house high-technology
processes are able to populate their brief to suppliers with ‘chips’ of data about
elements to be incorporated from the start, to form a basis for testable solutions
and provision of automatically validated data.4 E-Regulation is being developed
for the UK, on the model long used in Singapore. This will allow designers to
test their models against building regulations, health and safety rules, licensing
requirements and potentially even town planning regulations where these are
based on pre-planned or permitted development. Automated checking and
approval would result, freeing inspectors to concentrate on site-based checking
that permitted design is actually executed.

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Changes to contractual practice are in the pipeline. The major trial in progress
is of procurement based on Integrated Project Insurance (IPI).5 Current practice
dictates that all parties to a client’s contracts are separately insured against claims
of error. This creates a situation where, when a problem arises, all team members
are forced to retreat to their corners to protect their position and where four-fifths
of insurance premiums are spent to defend claims, with only a fifth going to solve
the client’s problem. Clients also have to prove professionals have been negligent
to succeed in a claim – a major hurdle. With IPI, the client takes out a single policy
to ensure that the project will be finished on time and budget and remain defect-
free for 12 years. No negligence need be proved. The team members are at risk for
the first increment of any claim, but collectively. They have an agreement between
them on how they will share risk, and reward if they outperform. Collaboration is
rewarded and more stable design-build teams are likely to form.
The IPI concept, when proven, should allow risk-averse clients to get the
collaborative benefits previously only available to confident, risk-retaining clients.
It will also allow future forms of BIM to be used, where the team shares a common
model and individual liability cannot be easily identified.
The concept of BIM Level 3 will arrive once the set of tools to enable full
interoperability across diverse platforms is mature. Several years of work lie
ahead to write all the elements still required, given the levels of funding available.
When mature, BIM Level 3 will allow a shared, multi-user project or asset model
with continuous synchronisation of worldwide inputs, held in the Cloud for ease
of access.

Smart technologies
While BIM is over 20 years old and developed slowly at first, smart technologies
are more recent but developing rapidly. ‘Smart’ in this context means technologies
based on sensors, analytics and actuators to provide a level of artificial intelligence.
Internet and mobile phone technologies have empowered this approach and
reduced its cost dramatically. Telemetry, which could only be afforded to monitor

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jet engines, is now able to be included in a fitness wristband. Data pouring from
the accelerometers in mobile phones can reveal the location of potholes in roads.
We are looking at buildings becoming ‘connected’ as people now seek to be.
Sensors are becoming small and cheap, communicating via the internet and
often powered by ambient movements. The performance of all systems and the
occupancy and comfort of occupants can now be captured as streaming data.
Big Data analytics in the Cloud can derive correlations which can inform facility
management and future design and installation. Self-operating building systems
are nearer than the self-driving car, raising the potential smartness of building
management systems from ‘not very’ to ‘extremely’. A lot of this technology can
be retrofitted so that it is not just for new buildings.
Social media has a role to play. Building occupants interact with the building in
currently unrecorded ways and their habits in energy use are a factor in the gap
observed between planned and actual performance. Social Physics6, recording
the group dynamics of occupants, could nudge them towards better behaviours
but also provide insight into Behavioural Economics and how design influences
people.
The motive power for buildings is likely to become solely electric with many
buildings connected to a smart grid which can use surplus renewables and supply
decarbonised grid power. Much less heat will be needed and carbon emissions
from remaining fuel-burning will be better captured at power-station level. Local
renewables are naturally lower voltage and direct current so buildings may well
store and use such power for building systems and plug loads.
High-performance computing is the mainstay of industrial design. Prototypes
are created virtually and tested in ways that previously required real-world
prototyping. Many options can be created to find optimum characteristics, far
more than human patience could explore. This capability will migrate into building
design. There will also be applications (apps) in abundance to handle design
issues such as behaviour in fire, disabled access, search for ideal products or value
engineering to find potential savings.

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New business models

Digital Built Britain sees new ways of providing built environment as likely to
emerge as the technology provides feedback and insight, as well as automatic
control. The separation of capital projects from operation and maintenance
may fade as feedback supports better whole-life services. The Circular Economy
concept, where waste is eliminated by recapturing resources or using them as
inputs to other sectors, suggests that systems and elements of buildings might be
leased rather than owned. They would be maintained by remote monitoring and
replaced at impending failure or obsolescence, reclaiming materials.
Instead of accepting the approximate performance of today’s buildings, clients
could opt for performance contracts, as do infrastructure clients for railways.
They would pay for availability of expected performance, not purchase for their
own operation. Suppliers could offer this more confidently, as they have constant
awareness of the performance of the building; an ability to tune it. Insurance-
backed guarantees should be possible.
Beyond mere building performance, however, lies the outcome of the project. It
was justified by a business case to deliver an outcome for the public or commercial
investor. As we gain confidence in what works to create the desired outcome, so
this kind of contract may become possible for some asset types. With integrated
operation the contract basis of health, welfare, educational and infrastructural
assets may become outcome based.

The future of BIM

BIM will be part of the digital built environment toolkit, but it will not stand alone.
Some of the jobs currently assigned to BIM may be usurped by other methods.
For example, facility managers may look up the spares required for a pump by
‘talking’ to the digital entity which represents the pump rather than searching the
COBie file. BIM and the sensor-based Internet of Things will probably interact like
the two technologies at the heart of a self-driving car. Google’s insight was to go
beyond the sensor-based attempts at self-driving being used in the first decade of
the century. They added the map/model, scanning and storing the world to enable
a vehicle to know exactly where it was, not just in GPS dead-reckoning terms but

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down to what it should be seeing. ‘It helps when you see a red light to know that
you are approaching a stop light,’ said a Google engineer to the New York Times.
BIM will play the role of the map in the digital built environment. Sensor-based
data will interact with the BIM data to provide comprehensive diagnostic and
control responses. BIM will be driving the design and fabrication of buildings and
infrastructure but sharing their operation with other technologies.
Clients should look forward to a construction industry that really does become
client-focused, and can deliver value to increasingly demanding organisations.
Clients can also expect the whole-life cost of building to fall, in line with costs in all
other industries. Quality of life will increase as the built environment actively cares
for its users and produces a superior outcome, surprising on the upside rather
than disappointing. As the world’s urban population stands to double in the next
35 years, it will be a matter of survival for the built environment to be made and
run far better. Thanks to BIM and related technologies, this is looking possible. ¢

Notes
1
Construction Industry Strategy (see link in Note 2, Chapter 1).
2
www.nationalplatform.org.uk
3
www.digital-built-britain.com
4
E-briefing (see www.brydenwood.co.uk)
5
IPI: www.griffithsandarmour.com/Integrated-Project-Insurance.aspx
6
Social Physics, by Alex Pentland, published by Scribe 2014.

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APPENDIX A
Employer’s Information
Requirements Template
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Appendix A

buildingSMART UKI  
Employer’s Information Requirements 2015 
 

Employer’s   
Design/Construction/Operation and Supply Team  

Information Requirements 
Template 
 
EIR Template by buildingSMART UKI is licensed under a  
Creative Commons Attribution‐NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 
 
This  template  is  intended  to  aid  the  documentation  of  the  “Information  Requirements”  for  the 
Employer and others acting as information customers in a design and supply team. An Information 
Requirements  document  can  help  inform  the  design  and  supply  team  as  to  what  information  is 
required,  together  with  its  format  and  extents,  along  with  sufficient  context  to  support  their 
professional judgment and assessment.  

The twin objectives of an EIR are to support the acquisition of asset and product information by client 
and customer and to support the supply chain to respond with advice, execution plans and delivery. 

An EIR is (as defined in BS PAS 1192 part 2) a “pre‐tender document setting out the information to be 
delivered [to the customer], and the standards and processes to be adopted by the supplier as part of 
the project delivery process”. It offers “document setting out the information to be delivered by the 
supplier as part of the project delivery process to the employer.”  It may be referenced in the Contract 
through directly or through a ‘BIM Protocol’ 
 
This template does not proscribe the supplier’s internal arrangements or responsibilities in the supply 
team,  nor  proscribe  training  and  competence  assessments  that  the  supplier  may  wish  to  offer  in 
support of the BEP supplied.  

Some  organisations  may  have  a  standing  Organisational  or  Asset  Information  Requirement  (as 
defined in BS PAS 1192 part 3) which may follow this template, so that only the specifics in Section1 
vary across projects. Section 2 may implement ISO 55000, SFG20 and BS8536.  

An EIR should: 

 cascade down the supply chain so as to be effective 
 be generic, concise, clear and unambiguous 
 provide for common naming and classification  of documents and assets to aid searches 
 document the customers and any received policies s as to achieve consistency 
 clarify customer involvement and checks that are required 
 indicate the customers purposes for the information so as engage with the supply chain 
 indicate acceptable formats to reduce data loss 
 should help define completeness by discipline and stage and purpose 

  © 2015 buildingSMART UKI            Page 1 .                                      

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buildingSMART UKI  
Employer’s Information Requirements 2015 
 

Guidance 

In  many  of  the  topics  below,  the  Employer  is  asked  to  choose  between  using  named  industry 
standards, taking other advice from their design and supply team or providing their own policy. The 
Employer should expect to receive back a detailed response showing how the requirements are met 
in  the  suppliers  BIM  Execution  Plan  (BEP).    The  outline  strategy  as  to  how  these  will  be  delivered 
should be within the Pre‐Contract BEP and further clarity in the post contract BEP. Wherever possible 
International, European and UK standards should be chosen in preference to the advice of the design 
and supply team, or specific requirements. 

Adopting named industry standards: The nominated standard or policy is to be used. These 
standards are intended to be familiar and efficient. The first (unstared) option encapsulates 
the requirements for the delivery of UK Governments Level 2 BIM. 

* As advised by the design and supply team in their Execution Plan provided in response to 
this Information Requirement. The employer/customer has no opinion, but the design and 
supply team choice should be explained and documented in the Execution Plan. 

** As listed/described/referenced: The employer/customer has a specific view on this which 
is  then  described  or  listed.  Using  the  employers  own  custom  lists  or  policies  may  incur 
additional  costs,  delay  and  risks  in  the  information  delivery  over  and  above  industry  best 
practice.   

Requested names and codes should be concise, contain no punctuation or spaces, and kept short as 
they may be used in file names. 

Requested descriptions can be longer but should not contain abbreviations, commas, or colons or 
special characters.  

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Appendix A

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Employer’s Information Requirements 2015 
 

Section 1: Facility/product, site and project information : Is there any specific information? 

Specific information and requirements that are specified by the Employer and primarily affect the 
next tier of the design and supply team. 

 Identification: What is the facility/product, site and project? 

The  preferred  names  for  the  facility/product,  site  and  project  will  be  used  to  ensure  that  all 
documents and information carry the expected identifying names, typically a code or number. There 
can also be a longer description for each. For the site, this longer description should be the address. 
Otherwise the design and supply team will choose these.   

The facility (either a building or piece of infrastructure) or product that is, or will become, your asset. 

 Facility: Name, Description 

The site gives the relevant surrounding context, and is usually of limited extent. 

 Site: Name, Address and postcode 

The project defines the commercial context, and is usually of limited duration. 

 Project: Name, Description 

 Pre‐Existing Strategies: Are there any already known volume, phasing or discipline strategies? 

You may already have some knowledge of how the project, site or facility is to be broken down. Are 
there any known volumetric divisions of the site, or any known setting out requirements? This could 
be in the south west corner of the site and may be related to the Ordnance Survey Grid, or another 
other geospatial system in use. Otherwise a common site datum setting out point benchmark for the 
site will be defined and used consistently by the design and supply team. 

 Volume strategy: As advised* / As listed**: 

 Employer’s volumes list: name, description, (extents or disciplines) 

 Common building origin and orientation: grid point,    grid line 

 Common site origin and orientation: named point and north direction 

 Geospatial : OS / geospatial reference / as advised 

Are  there  any  known  names  of  required  phasing  divisions  of  the  project,  or  any  known  working 
calendar  information?  An  example  might  be  a  regeneration  project  needing    ‘decant’,  ‘demolish’, 
‘build’. Otherwise the team will use best practice. 

 Phasing strategy: As advised* / As listed**: 

 Employer’s list of name, description, (dates/months/weeks) 

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 Common calendar and  week numbering : ISO 8601 /As advised/As listed: 

 Employer’s calendar pattern 

Are there any known named project work‐package or discipline divisions of the project? An example 
might be the distinction between contractor‐supplied and employer supplied equipment. Otherwise 
the design and supply team will use best practice. 

 Discipline strategy. As advised*/As listed**; 

 Employer’s list of work‐package name, description, (content)  

 Collaboration and Involvement: Are there any information sharing or security protocols to be 
used? 

Do  you  expect  to  be  involved  in  the  specification  and  use  of  the  means  used  to  deliver  your 
information requirements?  What is the expectation for the security and accessibility of the processes 
and  data  locations?  Advice  is  that  neither  ‘dropbox’,  ‘sharepoint  ‘nor  ‘ftp’  are  adequate,  so 
preference is for professional environments that support compliance to BS1192. Otherwise the design 
and supply team will follow best practice. 

 Collaboration process: BS1192 with PAS1192 part2 and part 3 / As advised* / As 
described**: 

 Description of specified collaboration process 

 Common Document/Data Environment tool: As advised* / As nominated**: 

 Employer’s nominated CDE tool 

 Security: PAS 1192 part 5: S/A/3/2/1/ CESG: IL1/IL2/IL3/IL4/ As advised*/As 
nominated**: 

 Employer’s list of nominated security standards 

 Information and Security management role  

 Employer’s nominated person with these responsibilities 

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Appendix A

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Section 2: General: Are there any general information requirements? 

General information requirements additionally affect subsequent tiers of the design and supply 
teams. 

 Aims and Purposes – What is the overall aim of these information requirements? 

As a guide to the design and supply team, what use for the information, beyond matters of record, is 
intended? The information is to be provided with the appropriate licence to be used for the purposes 
identified. An example might be “Information is required for record purposes, statutory compliance, 
coordination  and  approvals,  construction,  handover  and  use  of  the  facility  including  end‐of‐life”. 
Otherwise the design and supply team will use best practice. 

 Aims:  

 Employer’s description of the aims of this information requirement 

 Purposes intended and full licence required for :  

 Matters of record:     As BS1192 part4 /As advised*/No 

 Statutory compliance:   As BS1192 part4 5.2.2/ As advised*/Yes 

 Capacity and utilization  As BS1192 part4 5.3.2/ As advised*/No 

 Security and surveillance  As BS1192 part4 5.3.3/ As advised*/Yes 

 Project Information Model:  Yes/ As advised*/No 

 Asset Information Model:   Yes/ As advised*/No 

 H&S/CDM:      Yes/ As advised*/No 

 Construction procurement:   Yes/ As advised*/No 

 Asset register:       As BS1192part4 5.2.2/ As advised*/No 

 Operational management:   As BS1192 part 4 5.4.3/ As advised*/No 

 Maintenance management:   As BS1192 part 4  5.4.4/ As advised*/Yes 

 Repurposing    As BS1192 part 4 5.3.4/ As advised*/Yes 

 Decommission and disposal As BS1192 part 4 5.4.6/ As advised*/Yes 

 Replacement planning and whole life:   As BS1192 part 4 5.4.5/ As 
advised*/No 

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 Predicted and actual cost and environmental impacts:  As BS1192 
part 4 5.4.2/ As advised*/Yes 

 Environmental compliance:   Yes/ As advised*/No 

 As‐built:         Yes/ As advised*/No 

 Others      No / As advised* / As listed** 

o Employer’s list of other information purposes 

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 Classification : Are there preferred classification tables for information about the project? 

Otherwise the design and supply team will use facility industry best practice classification tables.  

The project stages have been standardised in order to help you and the design and supply team 
follow a common project plan.  

 Stages: CIC stages/As advised*/ As listed**: 

 Employer’s list of code, description of stage classification entry 

Roles have been standardised so that there is less ambiguity as to who is doing what.  

 Roles: PAS1192 part 2 section 9.2.3/Uniclass C/As advised*/ As listed**:   

 Employer’s  list of code, description of role classification entry 

Suitability codes have been standardised so that there is less ambiguity as to what information is 
suitable and licenced for. 

 Suitability and licence: PAS1192 part 2 section 9.2.3/As advised*/As listed**:   

 Employer’s  list of code, description of suitability classification entry 

Facility classification codes have been standardised within the construction sector. (Other codes may 
be used for taxation, land use planning and so on).  

 Facility: Uniclass table D/ Uniclass 2 En /As advised*/ As listed**: 

 Employer’s  list of code, description of facility classification entry 

Zones and floors/regions are used to organise spaces within the facility. 

 Zones: Uniclass D&F/ Uniclass2 SP /As advised*/ As listed**: 

 Employer’s  list of code, description of zone classification entry 

 Floor/regions: COBie FloorType/As advised*/ As listed**: 

 Employer’s  list of code, description of floor/region classification entry 

Systems and Types are used to organise components within the facility. 

 Systems: Uniclass table G&H/NRM/Uniclass2 SS /As advised*/ As listed**: 

 Employer’s  list of code, description of classification entries 

 Types: Uniclass L/ Uniclass2 Pr /As advised*/ As listed**: 

 Employer’s  list of code, description of classification entry

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 Naming policies – Are there  naming policies for aspects of the project? 

Naming  policies  in  use  for  Spaces/locations  and  Components  in  older  FM  application  may  be  more 
prescriptive  than  in  more  modern  design  authoring  tools,  where  the  facility,  floor  or  region  should 
not be included.  Floors/regions and Types may be named after their filenames, rather than explicitly. 
Systems  and  Zones  may  be  named  through  the  use  of  layering,  rather  than  explicitly.  Layer  names 
may include other information such as classification and graphic styles. 

Zones and floors/regions organise the spaces/locations in the facility. 

 Zones (layers for spaces and locations) BS EN ISO 4157‐1  1999 /As advised*/ As 
listed**: 

 Employer’s description of naming policy for zones 

 Floors and regions : BS EN ISO 4157‐1  1999 /As advised*/ As listed**: 

 Employer’s description of naming policy for floors and regions 

 Spaces and Locations : BS EN ISO 4157‐2&3  1999 /As advised*/ As listed**: 

 Employer’s description of naming policy for spaces and locations 

Systems and Types organise the components in the facility. 

 Systems (layers for components) : PAS 1192 Part 2 section 9.3/As advised*/ As 
listed**: 

 Employer’s description of naming policy for systems 

 Types and assemblies: BS8541 Part 1 section 4.3 / As advised* / As listed**: 

 Employer’s description of naming policy for types 

 Components and equipment (items): BS EN ISO 4157‐3  1999 /As advised*/ As 
listed**: 

 Employer’s description of naming policy for components and equipment 

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Appendix A

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Checks ‐  Are there any  specific tests of the information deliverables intended?  

Note: some tests may be dependent on the use of specific classification tables. 

Compliance and continuity are technical expectations relating to the use of the standards, 

 Continuity tests:  Automated comparisons between information issues/As 
advised*/ As listed**: 

 Employer’s list of name, description of continuity test(s) 

 Compliance tests:  Automated checks of  information against schema/As 
advised*/ As listed**: 

 Employer’s list of name, description of compliance test(s) 

Completeness and coherence tests relate to the provision of full data and the absence of clashes. The 
recommendation is to use a published list to test completeness, called a digital Plan of Work (dPoW). 
A dPoW typically covers the level of information on attributes (LoI) expected and the level of Detail 
on shapes (LoD) expected for specific types of asset.  

 Coherence (clash and interference) tests:  Automated checks/As advised*/ As 
listed**: 

 Employer’s list of name and description of coherence test(s) 

 Completeness tests:  dPOW (2015) / UK BTG Labs dPoW / No,  as advised*/ As 
listed**:   

 Employer’s list of stage, object, property (LoI) or shape (LoD) test(s) 

Veracity relates the final as‐built facility/product to the information provided. Consistency is expected 
between the information delivered and any other documents. 

 Veracity tests:  Inspection checks/As advised*/ As listed**: 

 Employer’s list of name, description of veracity test(s) 

 Consistency tests:  Inspection checks/As advised*/ As listed**: 

 Employer’s list of name, description of consistency test(s) 

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 Information and documents – in what form should the information and documents be delivered? 

The advice is to use IFC and COBie for information, and to use PDF for supplementary documents.  

 Information schemas:  ISO 16739 IFC2x3 and BS1192 part 4 COBie2.4/As 
advised*/ As listed**: 

 Employer’s  choice of structured asset information format 

 Document formats:    PDF/As advised*/ As listed**: 

 Employer’s  list of file format extension and description 

 Document and information deliverable naming: PAS 1192 Part 2 section 9.3/ As 
advised*/ As described**: 

 Employer’s description of file naming policy 

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 Annexes provide some guidance on the standards mentioned. Wherever possible these standards 
should be chosen in preference to special requirements. 

Annex A: standards relevant to the Information requirements  

o BS1192:2007, PAS1192:2, PAS1192:3, BS1192 part 45 

o BS8541 part 1‐6 

o BS EN ISO 4157‐1:1998, Construction drawings. Designation systems. Buildings and parts 
of buildings 

o BS EN ISO 4157‐2:1998, Construction drawings. Designation systems. Room names and 
numbers 

o BS EN ISO 4157‐3:1998: Construction drawings. Designation systems. Room identifiers  

o ISO 8601: Dates and calendars 

o CIC stages: (see PAS1192 part 2 section 9.9.* or CIC BIM Protocol Appendix 1) 

o ISO 16739:2005 & 2013 IFC   

o PAS 1192 part 5 

S  Protect any commercially &/or personally (PII) sensitive data  

A  Additionally incl. adjacent site(s) 

3  Additionally protect security sensitive data from CIC 3 onwards 

2  Additionally protect security sensitive data from CIC 2 onwards 

1  Additionally protect security sensitive data from CIC 1 onwards 

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Annex: Requirable content in COBie 

If COBie is required in the absence of a formal dPoW, the minimum specification is to identify the 
required fields (columns) from the requirable fields (columns) in COBie. Requirable fields (columns) 
are coloured green. A COBie deliverable is made up of the tabs described in A.1 to A.20 : Refer to 
BS1192 part 4 for lists of all the fields (columns) 

Instruction

There are no requirable columns in this sheet 

Contact
Contact  Example    Required?

Department  Support  no/as advised*/yes** 

OrganizationCode  buildingSMART UKI   no/as advised*/yes** 

GivenName  Nicholas   no/as advised*/yes** 

FamilyName  Nisbet   no/as advised*/yes** 

Street  Bucknells Lane   no/as advised*/yes** 

PostalBox  n/a   no/as advised*/yes** 

Town  Watford   no/as advised*/yes** 

StateRegion  Herts   no/as advised*/yes** 

PostalCode  WD25 9XX   no/as advised*/yes** 

Country  UK   no/as advised*/yes** 

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Facility

Facility  Example    Required?     

  no/as   
advised*/y
Description  Single storey secondary school   es** 

  no/as   
advised*/y
ProjectDescription  New build secondary school.  es** 

  no/as   
St Joseph’s Secondary School, Garston,  advised*/y
SiteDescription  Herts, WD25 9XX  es** 

Floor (region)
Floor  Example Required?

no/as 
Description  Entrance level  advised*/yes** 

no/as 
Elevation  0.0  advised*/yes** 

no/as 
Height  4000.0  advised*/yes** 

Space (location)
Space  Example Required?

no/as 
RoomTag  CL 101  advised*/yes** 

no/as 
UsableHeight  2955.0  advised*/yes** 

no/as 
GrossArea  24.837  advised*/yes** 

no/as 
NetArea  24.837  advised*/yes** 

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Zone
Zone  Example Required?

no/as 
Description  Basic teaching spaces  advised*/yes** 

Type
    Required? 

ReplacementCost  2760   no/as advised*/yes** 

ExpectedLife  15   no/as advised*/yes** 

On site warranty and 
advanced replacement 
WarrantyDescription  warranty   no/as advised*/yes** 

ModelReference  Short Throw Projector   no/as advised*/yes** 

Shape  n/a   no/as advised*/yes** 

Size  2105mm x 1329mm   no/as advised*/yes** 

Color  white   no/as advised*/yes** 

Finish  n/a   no/as advised*/yes** 

Grade  n/a   no/as advised*/yes** 

Material  n/a   no/as advised*/yes** 

Constituents  remote controller   no/as advised*/yes** 

Features  n/a   no/as advised*/yes** 

AccessibilityPerformance  n/a   no/as advised*/yes** 

CodePerformance  n/a   no/as advised*/yes** 

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Appendix A

buildingSMART UKI  
Employer’s Information Requirements 2015 
 

SustainabilityPerformance  n/a   no/as advised*/yes** 

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buildingSMART UKI  
Employer’s Information Requirements 2015 
 

Component
Component  Example  Required?Notes 

SerialNumber  S4567901   no/as advised*/yes** 

InstallationDate  2012‐12‐12T13:29:49   no/as advised*/yes** 

WarrantyStartDate  2012‐12‐12T13:29:49   no/as advised*/yes** 

TagNumber  247849   no/as advised*/yes** 

BarCode  n/a   no/as advised*/yes** 

AssetIdentifier  2f7761ec‐6323‐4dfc‐80c0‐52ae3703f410   no/as advised*/yes** 

System
System  Example  Required? 

Description  Small power circuit 1   no/as advised*/yes** 

Assembly (optional content)

Assembly   Example Required?

Description  Masonry ‐ Concrete Floor Block : 250.   no/as advised*/yes** 

Connection (optional)

Connection  Example  Required?

PortName1   IC5  no/as advised*/yes** 

PortName2   IC5  no/as advised*/yes**   

 Whiteboards to education resource  no/as advised*/yes** 
Description  server 1 

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buildingSMART UKI  
Employer’s Information Requirements 2015 
 

Spare (optional content)

Assembly   Example  Required? 

Description  projection bulbs   no/as advised*/yes** 

SetNumber  587‐1   no/as advised*/yes** 

PartNumber  587‐1   no/as advised*/yes** 

Resource (optional content)

Resource  Example Required?

Description  Manufacturer’s upgrade memory stick  no/as advised*/yes** 

Job (optional content)

Resource  Example  Required? 

TaskNumber  T901   no/as advised*/yes** 

Impact (optional content)

Resource  Example Required?

LeadInTime  15   no/as advised*/yes** 

Duration  0   no/as advised*/yes** 

LeadOutTime  0   no/as advised*/yes** 

Description  Specialist replacement team  no/as advised*/yes** 

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buildingSMART UKI  
Employer’s Information Requirements 2015 
 

Document
Document  Example  Required?

Description  Short throw White Board Handbook   no/as advised*/yes** 

Reference  Short throw White Board Handbook   no/as advised*/yes** 

Attribute
Attribute  Example  Required?

Description   Installed weight (excluding packaging)  no/as advised*/yes** 

AllowedValues      no/as advised*/yes** 

Coordinate (content optional)

There are no requirable columns in this sheet 

Issue (content optional)

There are no requirable columns in this sheet 
 

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Appendix A
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example
BIM Execution Plan
APPENDIX B
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Appendix B

BIM EXECUTION PLAN: PROJECT NUMBER

HTA Design LLP, 106-110 Kentish Town Road London NW1 9PX, Tel: 020 7485 8555

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01
HTA BIM Execution Plan – 00.07.15. Rev_00
Project:
Client:
Job Code:

HTA DESIGN issued for the Project outlined as part of the Building Information Modelling process. Modification not
permitted without obtained permission of the author.

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Project:
Client:
Job Code:

Document Control Sheet

Revision No. Description Date Author Status

Introduction

HTA Design LLP intends this BIM Execution Plan to be used to accurately catalogue and record the
Client/ Employer’s requirements as it relates to the Asset Information Model. Specifically to the model’s
anticipated use, analysis and level of detail expected at each stage of the development and design
process through to construction. This document represents the agreed input and output content,
standard, format and schedule from all consultants for use to achieve the required objective which is the
timely delivery, exchange, reuse and final handover of the Asset Information Model to the client.

Project BIM Goals

· To create a fully collaborated 3D model for Architecture / Structures / Services

· To clash detect this model.

· To have the architect maintain a schedule of accommodation which illustrates drawn area against client
room area requirements

· To sequence the construction work

· To integrate supply chain member models

· To improve safety

· To utilise the BIM models to output quantities to aid ‘take off’

· To review the scheme at regular intervals, to feedback lessons learnt and to feedback learning
outcomes and successes

The BIM Model will be used to provide the project team with live information to update and make timely
design decisions and create design alternatives whilst being aware of consequences and real time
impacts on the GFA, façade design, mechanical electrical, structural and other engineering and security
issues. It is intended that the model will also aid in producing cost-estimation, material quantification and
selection. As well as opportunities for fully investigating life cycle maintenance issues, energy efficiency,
solar impact and project scheduling.

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Project:
Client:
Job Code:

The BEP should be used in conjunction with the following guidelines:

 Employers Information Requirement (EIR)

 Project Brief
 BS1192:2007
 PAS1192-2:2013
 CIC BIM Protocol
 Contract documents
 Project naming convention document

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Project:
Client:
Job Code:

Content

1. Project Information

2. HTA project team

3. Collaborative Project Team

4. Project Milestones and timeline

5. Owner Required level of BIM and Employers Information Requirements

6. BIM Coordination

6.1 Lead Coordination Consultant

6.2 Meetings

6.3 File Exchange & Upload

6.4 Clash Detection

6.5 File naming structure

6.6 File setup and coordinates

7. Responsibility Matrix

8. Change Management

9. Proposed modelling strategy

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Project:
Client:
Job Code:

1.0 Project Information

Category Information
Project Owner

Project Name

Project Address

Contract Type/Delivery

Brief Project Description

Anticipated Completion Date

Documentation

Anticipated Completion Date

Construction

Owner Required Level of BIM

HTA proposed level of BIM

2.0 HTA Design LLP Project Team

Role HTA Team member Email address

Project Director

Project Lead

BIM Coordinator

BIM Manager

BIM Modeller
BIM Modeller
Landscape
Project Director

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Project:
Client:
Job Code:

3.0 Collaborative Project Team

Project Role Company Email Telephone

Contact

4.0 Project Milestones and timeline (According to project schedule)

RIBA Stage BIM Gateway Equivalent Projected date

1-3
4
4
4

5
5
6

5.0 Owner required level of BIM and Employers Information Requirements (EIR)

Refer to EIR document version __________ supplied by Client

Stage Level of BIM Items to be included Objective Consultant

required Responsible

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Project:
Client:
Job Code:

6.0 BIM Coordination

6.1 Lead Coordination Consultant and Model Use

BIM project Coordination to be led by ___________________________

Consultants responsible for the following model types and uses

Consultant to deliver Company Software Format

required

6.2 BIM Lead Contact Information by Consultant

No party is authorized to alter the platform or version without prior consent from the BIM
manager. Changes to the platform or version will have consequences to the way project
information / data is collaborated. No software shall be upgraded without being communicated too
all relevant parties for discussion.

BIM Lead Company Email Telephone

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Project:
Client:
Job Code:

6.3 Meetings

Throughout the project the BIM Leader from each company is required to attend regular Virtual Design
and Construction (VDC) coordination meetings. During design, this meeting will be led by____
______________, as part of the Design Team Meetings (DTM). This meeting will review model and
documentation progress, highlight clashes that have developed in the model, and coordinate BIM usage
(model structure, linking of models, collaboration views, work set and naming generally etc.).

Each party’s models will contain a set of views specifically constructed for use by other members of the
team when they reference the model. Once established, do not change the names of these views as
others may be linking them.

Agendas for these meetings will be circulated/coordinated by the prior __________________afternoon

to all teams in attendance.

BIM Kick Off Meeting

BIM progress meeting

BIM Model exchange and

upload
Location
Time
Arranger/Coordinator/Agenda

6.5 File Exchange & Upload

Purpose Software & Version Extension Upload to/type

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Project:
Client:
Job Code:

6.6 Clash Detection

Type Frequency Stage Responsible consultant

6.7 File naming structure

Standards (With reference to AEC UK BIM Protocol & BS1192)

File Naming
File names will follow the naming convention outlined in guidance document BS 1192 . Do not add a date,
version or any other modifier that changes over time.

Job code Organisation Discipline Zone Drawing Drawing Description

(Module) Type No.& Rev
EAL-EGS_ HTA - A_ 45_ DR_ 1000-A- Ground Floor
Plan

Therefore, an example file name will be:

EAL-EGS_ HTA_A _ BA1 - S45_ DR_1000-A_Ground Floor Plan

Job code Organisation Discipline Zone (Module) Level File Type Description
xxx-xxx Xxx X Xx Xx Xx Xxxxxxxxxxxx

6.8 File setup and coordinates

HTA Modelling Practices

1. The project will be built to a level of detail, and in a manner which is 'as the building is built'.

2. Coordinates – For each distinct building the origin will be set at the intersection of grid, A/1.
Global coordinates will be published to each building file through a process of acquiring
coordinates from the site file via shared coordinates.

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Project:
Client:
Job Code:

7 Responsibility Matrix

Model Element Authorship & Level of development - TBC

In the table below fill each box by colour the party responsible for modelling each category of object, or
N/A if that category will not be modelled for a particular milestone. In some cases, two parties may be
responsible for one category. Consultants should also indicate the Level of detail they expect to have
achieved by a particular milestone.

TBC - Hill to review with HTA the authorship strategy, on the basis of the following suggestion.

- Level of development (LOD) to be 'as built.'

Structural
Architect - M&E Services
Engineer -
HTA Engineer - TBC
Gemma Design

Revit Category Milestone 1 -

RIBA stages 4 to5 -
To Construction (Level of detail)
(100,200,300,400,500)
Original Author Final Ownership
Casework
Cable Trays and Fittings
Ceiling
Columns (architectural)
Curtain Wall
Communication Devices
Conduits and Fittings
Risers
Major Runs (above 50mm)
Minor Runs (below 50mm)
Data Devices
Doors
Ducts, Fittings and Accessories
Major Duct Runs
Flex Duct & Distribution
Air Terminals
Electrical Equipment
Electrical Fixtures
Fire Alarm Devices
Floors
Structural - module
Architectural - finishes
Furniture
Lighting Devices and Fixtures
Outdoor Lighting
Mechanical Equipment
Parking
Planting
Pipes, Pipe Fittings and Accessories

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Project:
Client:
Job Code:

HVAC Risers
HVAC Major Runs (above 50mm)
HVAC Minor Runs (below 50mm)
Plumbing Risers
Plumbing Major Runs (above 50mm)
Plumbing Minor Runs (below 50mm)
Plumbing Fixtures
Roads
Roofs
Security Devices
Rooms
Shaft Openings
Site
Sprinklers
Stairs
Structural Reinforcing, Area, Path and Rebar
Structural Framing and Beam Systems
Structural Columns
Structural Connections
Structural Foundations
Structural Trusses
Telephone Devices
Topography
Walls
External - Structural - performance wall
External - Architectural - finishes
Internal - Smart wall
Windows

8 Change Management (to be agreed in meeting)

Changes that occur in the model once it has been issued need to be recorded in the tracking document in
excel as outlined below. This document needs to be issued with each exchange and updated by the
consultants before issue. The document should be archived after every exchange? Different strategy for
discussion.

Description of change Requested Date Changed Method

by by

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Project:
Client:
Job Code:

9 Proposed Modelling Strategy (Project type specific)

Modelling methodology to obtain required BIM level to enable the model to be used for:

BIM Level Required Output function Modelling requirement

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BIM for Construction Clients

Image credits
Cover image UBM offices, 240 Blackfriars Road, London © Dave Parker
Page iv, 1, 41 (all), 43 © Morley von Sternberg
Page vii © Terry Stocks

Page 11, 55, 57 (all) © Hufton & Crow

Page 19, 21, 71, 123, 125 © Richard Saxon

Page 31 (all) © AHMM

Page 33 (all), 35 © BIM Technologies

Page 37, 39 © Ryder Architecture

Page 45, 48 © Allies and Morrison

Page 47 © Boswell, Mitchell and Johnston, architects and MG Partnership, engineers

Page 49 © Allies and Morrison, architects and Curtins, structural engineers

Page 53, 58 © David Miller Architects

Page 63 © Martine Hamilton Knight

Page 65 Reproduced by kind permission of Constructing Excellence

Page 69, 95, 105, 113 © BDP

Page 74 © Mervyn Richards

Page 77 © NBS

Page 87 © Plowman Craven

Page 109 © AEC3 2014

Page 115 After diagram by Paul Tiecholz in ‘BIM for Facility Managers’
Page 119 Permission to reproduce extracts from BSI publications is granted by BSI
Standards Ltd (BSI). No other material use is permitted. British Standards
can be obtained in PDF or hard copy from the BSI online shop (http://shop.
bsigroup.com)

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Licensed copy from CIS: sci1, Steel Construction Institute, 31/03/2020, Uncontrolled Copy.

BIM
Building Information Modelling, otherwise known as ϐ  Richard writes from a position of great personal

BIM for CONSTRUCTION CLIENTS

BIM, brings construction clients a set of powerful insight based on a career as a successful architect
advantages from design to occupation. The in commercial practice and as an early adopter of
government’s five-year notice of its mandate to all BIM. His background in various leadership
its project sponsors to use BIM Level 2 by April 2016
means that leading designers, constructors and
positions where he championed a focus on clients’
needs allows him to understand the drivers and for CONSTRUCTION CLIENTS
product makers are now experienced at working challenges faced by many types of clients, and
with BIM. Many clients, however, are not confident BIM’s ability to enable integration and Richard Saxon
to play an active role in BIM, either not asking for it collaboration. It is difficult to think of someone more
or being passive users for lesser advantage. qualified to write such a book.

Acting as an authorative guide to Clients, this book: We commend this book to clients of all shapes and
• provides understanding of the strategic client sizes: those with large repeat programmes as well
value of BIM and how it changes the client role as those considering the need for a one-off
• shows via case studies how typical clients are construction project, and all those in industry
experiencing using BIM supply chains – particularly those directly able to
• includes guidance on setting up a project on a influence clients’ decisions. Its lessons will enable
BIM-using basis the industry to deliver better value for money for its
• demonstrates how structured information clients by finally delivering on integration and
enhances the briefing, design, construction and collaboration.
operation stages, supporting better decisions Don Ward, Chief Executive, Constructing Excellence
• contains guidance on where BIM is going next. (incorporating the Construction Clients’ Group)

This book is a must-have for public and private

clients of all sorts. Facility and asset managers, ϐ  Richard’s book is a timely aid to clients, whether
advisers, architects, project managers, cost they are using BIM or intend to use BIM. It shares
consultants and contractors will also find this book practice and experience from key industry clients
invaluable, for their own work and to assist their and provides a ‘how to’ guide, which maintains a

Richard Saxon
clients to make successful use of BIM. balanced approach on the effort required and the
benefits that are achievable.

Terry Stocks, Director, UK Head of Public Sector

and Education, Faithful+Gould

BIM for Construction Clients_Cover.indd 1,3 25/01/2016 17:28