Stephen Bartlett, Chief Executive of Invigilatis talks about how BIM can aid NHS estates and facilities…
The government’s aspirations in respect of BIM – building information modelling – will be achieved because there is a growing consensus about the information which is required to deliver the most cost effective services over the entire life of the a building, often 25 years or more. By enabling all building data to be shared in a consistent form, services for a “BIM building” will be considerably more effective than the current ways of work and overall operational efficiency will be improved greatly.
Technology and information standards are key to these changes. All the overarching technology is simply labelled as BIM but the many underpinning standards are equally important. From the strategic management of assets and life cycle approach enshrined in ISO 5500 to PAS 1192-3 which focuses on the operation of assets and is the companion document to PAS 1192-2 specifying the information management processes to support building information modelling. The link between to technology and data is a data schema for holding and transmitting information – typically this is COBIE – Construction Operation Building information exchange.
At BIM level 2, essential support is provided by PAS 1192-2 and PAS 1192: see below
As BIM develops to its higher levels and parallel developments occur, such as the Internet of Things and the infrastructure which will underpin Cities of the Future, these technology driven opportunities and will inevitably merge and the standards will cross refer.
Your starting point?
For Estates and Facilities to derive the full benefits of BIM, PAS 1192-3 is an essential starting point. It describes the Asset information management process necessary to achieve BIM Level 2 in relation to the operation and maintenance of the building and associated assets.
The two main associated data transfer processes are
- Creating the asset information model (AIM)
- Exchanging asset information with the project information model (PIM)
In turn, these are supported by several other processes to record decommissioning, organisational requirements and the evolution of the AIM itself.
Typically the AIM is manifested as the Asset Register, something which is very familiar to all Estates and Facilities departments. However, with BIM, asset information is created in the Project Information Model and then transferred automatically to the Asset information Model – i.e. superseding traditional manual processes of creating O&M manuals which were then rekeyed into the Asset Register, with the associated risk if errors arising through mis-keying.
Once the BIM terminology has become more familiar, the underlying asset management processes and associated benefits can easily be identified.
Invigilatis – How can we help?
Invigilatis can help in many ways by working closely with Trusts to free up managerial time and thereby enabling greater focus on CQC’s goals to improve the overall Patient Safety and Satisfaction by ensuring services are safe, secure, effective, responsive and well-led.
Support is available for the key steps in creating the AIM – i.e. the building model for the building assets and facilities:
- Establishing information governance processes to direct, control and assure that asst information is managed effectively as an organisational resource with reference to asset management strategies and plans.
- Establishing the Organisational Information Requirements. While ISO 55000 provides a good framework for the policies, strategies and plan, the requirements need also to pay regard to the organisations approach to its statutory and regulatory reporting requirements. CQC, PAM and ERIC all impose obligations which impact upon the Organisation Reporting Requirements.
- Defining the Asset Information Requirements which both enable the Organisation Reporting Requirements to be met and the specification of information exchanges needed to ensure information can be transferred to and from the model: i.e. agreeing on the COBie subset of data to deliver the building/asset information
- Defining the mechanisms for creating, receiving, validating/verifying, storing, sharing, archiving analyzing and reporting on the information held in the AIM: i.e. all the workflows surrounding the asset register
- Defining interfaces for exchanging data and information between the AIM and other organisational systems
Modelling Support
As had often been said, Estates and Facilities and Control of Infection teams need to be engaged from almost day one of every new BIM project. Invigilatis can help support those efforts to ensure operational and compliance information requirements will be satisfied from the model, and either the model is passed to those teams as part of the project handover, or relevant space and asset information is extracted from the model and loaded into other operational systems.
Knowledgeable support will enable operational teams to justify their participation in the BIM planning process and help them achieve their desired outcome.
Data Extraction and integration
Information from the Project model must be extracted and loaded into the operational teams’ maintenance and compliance management systems. Typically space, asset and job information needs to be extracted for re-use in these other systems.
BIM Level 2 collaborative working relies upon standard formats so information can be output into a series of spreadsheets to:
- Define the building’s constituent spaces, zones and floors
- List types of component s used in the construction
- Detail specification information about each component
- List associated maintenance jobs
These outputs can then be loaded into Space Management systems, Asset Registers and Planned Maintenance tools.
The most challenging aspect of exploiting BIM in FM is integrating the new project data into the data that already exists in various other information silos. Invigilatis has considerable experience of system integration and data cleansing. However this seemingly simple form of integration – adding new data to old data – is unlikely ever to get to the root of many Trusts’ problems, i.e. the poor quality of the existing data.
Integrated System
A more robust and future proofed solution is to deploy Invigilatis’ integrated solution which can combine the well defined BIM data with sanitised data from the existing silos to encompass all aspects of:
- Property Management
- Estates and Facilities
- Compliance
Invigilatis’ integrated solution will facilitate:
- Detailed Asset Management which can also be linked back to the BIM model to plan future refurbishments.
- Comprehensive compliance planning, combining statutory requirements e.g. full Asbestos and Legionella systems with other existing operation inspection regimes to provide a full suite of Compliance Dashboards.
Stephen Bartlett
CEO
Invigilatis
07899 955 658
stephen.bartlett@invigilatis.com
Please note: this is a commercial profile