By David Shepherd, Product Manager (Data & Construction Programme Enablers)
Practical guidance on process and payload: indispensable keys to Avanti’s success
In the Article 1, I explained how the Avanti Programme successfully facilitated project-wide design collaboration using structured data within information containers. This was achieved by integrating CAD files into a combined (a.k.a. federated) model.
Within that programme, all participants adhered to principles enshrined in BS-1192 Part 5:1998. Those principles included strict visual control of each discipline/trade’s CAD drawings by means of layers (defined in the standard as an “attribute of an entity used for identification commonly used to control visibility, and for the classification of entities within a model”)
On major construction projects, the benefits of this disciplined approach to managing CAD drawings and structuring the design data within them were impressive:
- 50 – 85% saving on effort spent receiving information and formatting for reuse.
- 60 – 80% saving on effort spent finding information and documents.
- 75 – 80% saving in effort to achieve design co-ordination.
Far more than just the process efficiencies of consistent file naming and information exchanges, the value of CAD lay in ensuring consistently structured design data within each drawing. In the previous article, I defined this useful information inside of information containers as the payload.
Importantly, abovementioned savings could not have been achieved without practical guidance. Most notably, Mervyn Richard’s Building Information Management. A Standard Framework and Guide to BS 1192 provided practical steps that enabled both Tier1s and SMEs alike to implement the standard in furtherance of the Avanti outcomes.
Principally, the social proof of value that Avanti achieved through CAD required both process compliance and payload compliance.
The 2011 Push-Pull Strategy and the need for guidance and affordable data platforms
In 2011, the Government Construction Strategy (GCS) announced an ambition that few industries attempt at national scale: a 15–20% reduction in construction costs across the public estate driven by digital information, collaborative working and whole‑life optimisation.
BIM was positioned as part of a raft of measures aimed at reducing the costs of both capital delivery and operational cost. To this end, earlier that year, BIM Working Party Strategy Paper proposed a push‑pull model where Government demand (“pull”) would be matched by industry capability uplift (“push”).
As a strategy paper, it was entirely (and rightly) focused on process, governance, contracts, role definitions, licences, risk, and intellectual property. It also proposed COBie as the required handover schema. However, as with Avanti, beyond the development of a standard for COBie (BS-1194-4:2014), suppliers needed and were lacking practical guidance on how the COBie payload would be generated, validated, or maintained by the supply chain.
In essence, COBie was very well-defined as a handover payload, but it had no widespread enablement for supply chains to deliver it, no affordable tools for SMEs to create it, no unified platform for validating outputs, no incentives for SME adoption, no ownership model, and no practical means of scaling production.
And, unlike Avanti, the absence of practical guidance and affordable platforms that enable both process compliance and payload compliance made it impossible for the construction industry as a whole to achieve the technology benefits that were envisaged in the 2011 Government Construction Strategy.
So, here we are a decade later. Certainly, the UK has achieved global recognition for its leadership on developing process standards (e.g., BS 1192, PAS 1192 and ISO 19650). These have even become embedded in training, procurement and the Common Data Environment (CDE) workflows used on almost every major project. Nevertheless, the economic benefits that were originally promised (such as less rework, lower costs, better asset performance) have not materialised at industry scale.
Read next: Government digital transformation and regional growth – Build in Digital
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