Stephen Hamil, Director of Design and Innovation at the NBS, describes how the NBS BIM Toolkit is used to support Employer’s Information Requirements (EIR)
A set of Employer’s Information Requirements (EIR) is a key document in the UK ‘standards’ (PAS1192-2) for anyone working to the Level 2 BIM process. It is intended to be part of the wider tender document set for the procurement of the Design Team and the Constructor and sets out clearly what models will be required at each stage of the project and what the purposes of these models will be.
The core purpose of an EIR is to document the information requirements and also to establish the information management requirements. This document forms the basis upon which the bidders can then respond with their outline BIM Execution Plan (BEP). The BEP demonstrates how, if successful, the bidders will deliver and manage this digital information throughout the project.
The EIR establishes, from the outset of the project, a whole host of issues and responsibilities that will run through its lifetime. By providing this guidance at an early stage this should enable bidders to remove allowances for ‘don’t knows’ within both cost and programme – working towards meeting two of the primary objectives of the Government’s construction strategy to which BIM is an important contributor.
A template EIR with embedded guidance may be downloaded for free from the BIM Task Group website. This may then be adapted to form project specific requirements for each of the sub-sections.
From June, the free to use NBS BIM Toolkit should be used to generate the content for sub-section 1.1.4 of an EIR, which deals with level of detail. The toolkit defines the specific information requirements that are aligned to the project stages that the bidders and then project team subsequently build on through the digital plan of work.
Typical tasks are used in the Toolkit, which the user may adapt to the specific project needs. This information can then be exported into a digital format for re-use, and also a Microsoft Office format for ease of insertion into an EIR document.
The client’s high-level ‘plain language questions’ may be added into this section of an EIR. This gives further clarity to the supply-chain in terms of the specific questions that need to be answered at each stage of the project. Some of these questions may be quite simply referred to against any tasks or deliverables within the information requirements. However, for other questions the complexity of the information required to answer is probably best provided by the expertise within the supply chain.
Example template ‘plain language questions’ may also be downloaded for free from the BIM Task Group Labs website. http://www.thenbs.com/BIMTaskGroupLabs/questions.html
The role of the NBS BIM Toolkit is not to pre-link each potential plain language question with specific tasks and deliverables. However, it does give an excellent base framework through the combination of the digital plan of work tool and the associated level of definition templates. www.theNBS.com/BIMToolkit
Stephen Hamil
Director of Design and Innovation
NBS (National Building Specification)
Tel: 0345 456 9594
info@theNBS.com
www.twitter.com/StephenHamilNBS
