Richard Shennan, Chair of ACE BIM Engagement and Support Group muses on re-thinking the boundaries between consulting engineers and contractors – a key step in realising the benefits of BIM…
The way in which people with varied and complementary skills come together to enable the creation of built assets has varied greatly over the years. The diversity of skills required for a great asset that meets the prevailing social need has always meant a collaboration between individuals, from master craftsmen and great architects as well as engineers over the centuries, to the complex interactions and sophisticated standard forms of contract or conditions of engagement covering professional as well as construction services today.
What is not so clear, is whether the progression over time is always in the right direction, and from time-to-time a re-think is necessary, a sense check on what is seen as conventional practice. The advent of BIM heralds one of those moments, especially in the context of buildings.
The boundaries are blurring between the typical skills that might be associated with consulting engineers, such as independent thinking, ingenuity, an analytical mind, and the ability to present ideas and information; and those skills that might be associated with ‘doers’ or ‘makers’, such as a practical understanding of materials and how things go together, and of procurement and innovation within a commercial framework. This is taking place in the context of the need to reduce waste, deliver greater through-life value, and increasingly to address through-life carbon impact.
Let’s take the example of building services engineering. One imagines that the early practitioners of consulting, such as Henry Lea and Robert Kell, would have had a clear idea of the practicalities of their designs, respecting and learning from the fitters and craftsmen, but also giving trade contractors clear instructions which would need to be followed. As the systems became more sophisticated and complex, an increasing body of key knowledge would come to be vested in specialist contractors, but firms of consulting building services engineers grew and blossomed, and in the UK up to the mid 80’s it was common for detailed designs including specification of actual components and systems, named by manufacturer or supplier, to be provided to the main contractor, often together with a nomination of the primary subcontractors.
The seeds of change had however already been sown. Increasing numbers of practising consulting building services engineers were university graduates, and did not always have the opportunity to gain real practical experience on site, leaving them only partially equipped to produce fully-resolved designs.
The specialist contractors, fabricators and suppliers were custodians of key knowledge that was not generally held in the consulting sector. An increasing realisation that the reliance on consultants’ detailed specifications and drawings that might not represent an optimum solution in practical and cost terms, together with an insatiable appetite for risk transfer, slowly led to the transfer of key decisions on details of suppliers and installation arrangements to the contractor, leading to various forms contractor design supplement, and a myriad of hybrid contractual configurations that tried to address the fundamental need to combine the different skills and contributions needed to make up a great project that is closely aligned to the client’s needs.
The advent of CAD brought another development; qualified consulting engineers began to lose the ability to use the drafting tools to resolve geometric information within the disciplined structure required for best use of the new tools, and new tensions began to emerge between certified engineers and ‘technicians’.
The end result of several decades of ‘progress’ in procurement systems for building services systems is a situation where waste is rife, in time as well as materials, confrontation is common, trust between consulting and contracting sectors is often low, profit margins are low, and perhaps worst of all, performance of buildings in meeting the needs of the owners and occupiers is poor, precisely when delivering an efficient and sustainable built environment is the primary duty of all of those in the built environment industry.
The work of consulting engineers is often re-done once contractors have been appointed, final choices of manufacturers and suppliers was pushed ever backwards by a ‘best-buy’ notion that is usually anything but for the building owners, important choices are made out-of-sequence, and poor co-ordination can lead to inadequate provision for maintenance leading to increased cost and yet more waste over the life-cycle. The problem has been recognised, and work in BSRIA such as BG6 and Soft Landings have shown that the building services community itself understands the direction in which we need to move, but the problem persists.
So why does BIM provide the opportunity to fix what is broken?
The starting point is PAS 1192-2:2013, and more specifically the information delivery cycle introduced in Figure 2. What does this diagram tell us? The employer needs to clearly state what information they need to answer their key questions along the way, and when they need it. All parties involved in the project delivery need to work out how they are going to deliver that information as part of a fully integrated process, whether they are consultants, contractors or suppliers. The project information model is developed through a series of levels of graphical detail and non-graphical information, with all parties working on shared and current information with a known status. Only that detail required to produce the information outputs needed by the Employer is provided at each stage. Decisions on specific solutions, suppliers, and manufacturers are made in a logical sequence. At handover a complete and accurate set of organised information is handed over to the owner in a way that allows them to make sense of it and use it effectively to optimise the performance of the building in use. This may not sound new, but the difference is that we have a clear over-arching vision and a name that is focusing everyone on the urgent need to bring efficiency to our industry at all stages in the asset life-cycle.
The technology is the enabler, and what an enabler it now is, with a wide range of software addressing all of the potential ‘dimensions’ of BIM. Interoperability is increasing. Collaboration in the cloud, visualisation, generative design components, data capture for existing assets, and much more, it all seems to work with increasing reliability and at reduced cost as the technology firms compete for advantage. This is not where the main problem lies. The challenge is to re-imagine the way in which the diverse and complimentary skills that I’ve mentioned are brought together in a way that encourages enterprise and innovation but also builds in practical experience and accumulated wisdom.
There will never be one universally accepted procurement system, as owners and developers have varied business drivers and appetite for risk, as well as different experience and personal preferences. There are however some key common elements related to BIM that are becoming increasingly apparent as key to overall efficiency whatever the procurement method. These relate to all aspects of the built asset, not just building services systems:
- Consider how things are physically put together at an early stage in the design. This is essential to allow opportunities for efficiency through DfMA and modular design to be assessed and incorporated where appropriate. The parties involved at that early stage, from whatever firm or combination of firms they are drawn, must collectively have the ability to make this assessment. The BIM environment is a great enabler, including model-based simulation of sequencing of operations both on and off-site and use of model based information to manufacture components and assemblies with confidence that they will fit together as part of an on-site assembly process.
- Design for safe and effective operation and maintenance from an early stage. The principles are already set out in both Soft Landings and the 2015 CDM Regulations, as well as ISO 55000:2014. Model-based visualisation is increasingly used to make consultation with operation and maintenance teams more engaging and effective. Thinking is beginning to extend to adaptation and ultimate de-construction of built assets.
- Exchange model-based information between parties, and steer the common data through different software packages as it moves from outline right through to fabrication and on-site assembly. Dumbing down model based work and handing over drawing sheets or information schedules in an attempt to step back from responsibility for what might be in the model will not be a sustainable strategy. Suitably skilled practitioners can lead this process, whether they are employed within consulting or contracting firms.
- Establish a collaborative approach to innovation. The balance of risk and reward relating to use of technology to find savings in construction and operational cost and carbon emission or reduced risk is often skewed by current procurement systems and contractual configurations. If a consulting engineer makes additional effort to develop capabilities in BIM technologies such as generative design components, use of model-based methodology to assess more efficient construction techniques, or development of data structures that can connect to data collection from assets in use to enable optimised performance over the life cycle, there is often no connection to a commercial return if these efforts bring benefits to contractors or owners. Contractors may also be deterred from innovation if, for example, they are required to submit their ideas as part of a competitive bid process where their ideas may end up being passed on to others if they are not successful, and may also have no incentive to invest the additional time that is often lacking in handing over a complete set of integrated asset data and helping owners in the early stages of operation to achieve complete transfer of all knowledge required for optimum asset performance.
One thing is for sure, there is a great opportunity for individuals and firms that can deliver these elements. It will take imaginative thinking and a measured approach to risk in the supply chain, from both consultants and contractors to bring these benefits to owners, but I believe the urgency and the prize is too great for the opportunity to be missed.
Richard Shennan
Chair of ACE BIM Engagement and Support Group, and Group Practice Manager Buildings, Group BIM Champion – Mott MacDonald
Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE)
Tel: 020 7222 6557
consult@acenet.co.uk