BIM - Employer's Information Requirements (EIR)

By Iain Miskimmin

Be careful what you ask for!

The EIR is an Employer’s chance to define their requirements for information, but they need to be very careful what they ask for. Too prescriptive and you are preventing innovation and progress, too loose and you will probably receive something that you did not expect!

As an Employer, if you just demand that you want Level 2 BIM, you may be sadly deluded in the fact that it has not been finalised and will not go down to the level of detail required to stop the Employee running contractual rings around you.

If I asked every one of you to put the word BOW into a sentence, then I would get many different answers or interpretations of my requirement.

• I play a bow and fiddle...
• I shoot arrows with my long bow...
• The middle of my arm is an elbow...
• The front of the ship is called a bow...
• When meeting the Queen I bow...
• I wear a bow tie with my dinner jacket...

To get the answer you require you need to define the context, the same applies when asking for BIM. So let’s start at the beginning. Why is it an Employer’s Information Requirement rather than a Client’s?

The EIR needs to be present and used at every level of the supply chain, not just during the relationship between the client and the tier 1 contractor. Everyone at every level needs to understand what is needed of them and to be able to produce their information to the same quality. We are all employers, all the way down the supply chain.

So, let us state the obvious: A considerable proportion of the cost of creating information about an asset is not clear at the beginning and picking the lowest bid will not always get you the most cost effective asset information. To combat this, we need to be more specific about what we want. We do not necessarily have to define how the employee creates that information, but we do have to make sure they understand the validation it needs to go through and the way it needs to be delivered, so that you can make the best use of the information that you, as the employer, are paying for.

Contents

In the end, the EIR is what YOU want, not what others think you should be asking for, so the table of contents needs to reflect your priorities. The best way to test your EIR is to ask it a plain language question (see the AIR document) and see if you can get an answer that will help you to make a good decision in relation to the asset. If you cannot, then it is time to go back to the drawing board.

When writing what you want, you need to make sure that whatever you receive has gone through a rigorous enough validation process that you can trust what it tells you. To do this you must think about what is delivered, how it is delivered, who delivers it, where they deliver it to and when they hand it over (I also include validation in the delivery).

In the beginning

It is suggested that at the beginning you may want to define the following:

• Priority of contract documents
• Obligations of the employer
• Obligations of the employee
• Electronic data exchange
• Use of information models
• Liability of the information model
• Termination
• Definition of the Social, Environmental and Financial outcomes and the 3 year term used to measure their success.

People

We must then think about the people who are required to deliver the information. We must ensure that all members of the supply chain give someone the responsibility of delivering the information requirements. This is normally a GSL (government soft landings), IM (information manager) or BIM role that understands the importance of information and the risks of poor quality information.

A good source of information on this might be BS1192:2007

If their supply chain does not have the level of skills required for the project, this should not be a barrier to engagement and so defining how they might up-skill those people is an important response to the EIR in the BEP (BIM Execution Plan) - but unless you ask them how they might do this, it will not be a part of their plan.

What information might I get and what do I have to provide?

So that the Employee can respond with clarity, you must be clear on what information they will receive in the briefing data drop. This should be defined in the AIR and reflect your current assets and constraints. The AIR will tell you what information is to be provided, but the EIR will give the specifics of this particular project.

You also need to define what Common Data Environment the Employer has in place that the Employee needs to either use or interface with. This may also ask them to define a master delivery list within their BEP.

OIRs, AIRs and Classification systems

To ensure that the entire supply chain from top to bottom understands the client’s vision and the objective of the project, the EIR must define some of the Organisational Information Requirements.

The Classification of assets, or how we commonly identify things is important to allow the employee to structure their information and ensure we are all speaking the same asset language.

For example if Employer classified a particular asset as a stool, the tier 1 as a chair and the manufacturer as a seat -  and I asked the question “how many chairs are on site?” I could get very different answers, depending on who I talked to.

It must also reference the AIR, which needs to be comprehensive in its definition of the information needed at Facility, Entity and Element level.

Data Standards

To ensure that information can be federated into a joined up Data Model, we must make sure that everyone is using the same libraries, templates and coordinate systems etc.

• File attributes/ metadata
• Container naming conventions
• Location coding
• Zoning methods
• Suitability codes
• Revisions and versions
• Coordinate reference systems
• Units
• File formats
• Digital model file sizes
• Classification (data & Information)
• Security

This is not an exhaustive list but gives you a starting point.

Two things to note here are that you are not defining how the employee creates information, you are defining what it is when they deliver it. Also some may not think that size matters, but it does! If you do not define the physical size of the files you are expecting to receive, your own IT infrastructure might not be able to cope.

Libraries

It is really important that when generating information whether it is CAD, Document, Asset, GIS or Metadata that all the Employees follow the Employer's libraries and templates, so that this information can be picked up out of the PIM (Project Information Model) and placed in the AIM (Asset Information Model) without the need for translation and used to answer the questions that will allow good decisions to be made - i.e. taking into account everything known.

So with that in mind, the EIR must reference documents, standards or libraries for 2D & 3D CAD models, structured data, drawings and documentation.

Working methods

To ensure there is a consistency of information throughout the supply chain and all information that is generated no matter by whom, the EIR must set out a minimum standard of working methods to create a base line of quality and trust. This should prevent information being regenerated because of lack of trust between partners.

Procedures

Most procedures will already be defined in the standards and methods of working, but if they are not, then as a minimum the EIR needs to set out the processes for the following:

• Create/ Amend information
• Undertake container compliance checks
• Review and approve information
• Review and authorise information
• Review and accept information
• Mobilise resources
• Undertake assurance and change control
• Appointment close out

Benchmarking & certifying

During many projects we find that the Employees that were originally promised to the team are taken off and put somewhere else. They are invariably replaced (through no fault of their own) by less competent Employees which increase the risk to the Employer’s asset delivery.

To prevent this from harming the Employer’s vision of delivering a world class asset with a reduced maintenance and operations cost, the EIR should define how the Employee is assessed.

This should take place prior to the bid through some form of self-assessment tool such as the BIM Compass, during bid through case studies and finally throughout the project phase by ongoing  audits.

Summary

The EIR is a great method for ensuring that the Employers get what they need from the information delivered during the lifecycle of an asset, but it needs to be comprehensive enough to ensure that there are no misunderstandings. A good way of doing this may be to hold pre-tender briefings with potential Employees to explain in some length what is meant by each section and show examples of how it might be delivered.

It is a fine balance between dictating what is delivered and how the employee creates that deliverable. One reduces the risk of asset procurement and the other decreases innovation and pushes up costs.

Speedy Expo in Telford on Back To The Future Day!

By Gerry Samuelson-Brown, COMIT Director

I've just spent two days at the Speedy Expo in Telford, their largest show ever. The COMIT stand was in the “future’s zone” and given that COMIT is all about embracing emerging technologies and what they can do to enhance the construction workplace, what a great location we had. Even better, it coincided with THE date of 21 October 2015 from the “Back to the Future" film and I got to sit in the DeLorean! 

COMIT gave presentations on the amazing Bloodhound project and one entitled “BIMboozled” that cleverly covered all one ought to know about BIM.  These presentations will be repeated at the COMIT / Fiatech conference on 10 and 11 November in London. Don’t miss out - come and join us!

Mobile IT – Its Promise and Challenges

Written by Peter Daly, a longstanding & active member of the COMIT Community

Those of us who are involved in COMIT share a common vision – that one day, no one will go in-field without their tablet or smartphone any more than they would without their hard hat.

But we are quite some way today from such a dream and on both sides of the Atlantic.  As a former vendor of such systems, I have seen at first hand the benefits that this technology can bring but also its challenges. This article provides an overview of the promise and pitfalls and some ideas on where it is going.

An early wireless tablet (2005) running Windows CE

This is an industry whose origins go back over a decade and a half to the era of expensive, rugged PDAs and “slate” computers. It has been emerging slowly, notwithstanding the invention of the iPad in 2010.  In the US the two pioneer vendors were Latista and Vela, both now acquired and Priority1 in the UK, also now acquired.  Progress in the US has been more rapid but is still at a relatively early stage - only 26% of firms track the flow of project information to other firms although 37% have access to data outside the trailer (site office) according to a 2013 report from McGraw Hill Construction (“Information Mobility – improving team collaboration through the movement of project information”).

Mobile clients of collaboration platforms have advantages over SaaS based stand-alone apps (such as avoiding a duplicate horizontal “silo” of information for instance where collaboration platforms are being used) but such mobile client use is also fairly restricted despite the widespread use of collaboration platforms in the UK at the top end.  Of course, mobile IT here is not confined to vendor offerings - there is also the emerging opportunity for larger firms to create and curate their own app stores (as in the promising MobiCloud project from COMIT and partners such as Appear Networks).

There are many reasons why mobile IT is not more universal in construction yet; the project centric nature of buying SaaS solutions which also applies to collaboration platforms; the lack of perceived ROI due in part to the inability to trial easily; the cost of mobile devices; inertia and lack of interest in IT; the fact that such systems have been targeted mainly at Tier 1 contractors to date.  But things are changing now under a number of influences.  It is very instructive to look beyond construction and see what is happening more broadly in other sectors.

Rise of the Enterprise Apps

In recent years we have seen the rise of a new type of enterprise software which challenges the status quo of major vendors in many ways. These include apps for collaboration and communication  across devices and include such apps as Yammer, Asana and more recently Slack which is taking the enterprise world by storm.

These sorts of apps have a number of things in common; their design is driven by great user experience and the ease of use as in consumer apps; they are easy to trial and easy to acquire online; their marketing relies heavily on digital marketing and they have low support costs. They are therefore scalable in a very efficient manner.

This trend has also reached construction (especially in the US) where PlanGrid and FieldLens provides great, easy to use and acquire apps but as yet the early stage US market is still dominated by the legacy and expensive systems which were formerly Latista and Vela as independent companies.  In the UK, Basestone also shows promise and is attempting the same approach. I believe that these sorts of simple app hold the key to the future as described below.

The Promise for Construction

Mobile IT systems today are mainly used for snagging and mobile access to drawings and a number of estimates and experience with real case studies indicate that such technology can save up to 1% of project value (Source: case studies from PlanGrid, data from various sources from US projects and unpublished experience with my former apps, SmartBuilder1 and Plan2Finish). That may seem small but is actually a huge benefit in an industry with thin margins. But there is actually a lot more that such technology could deliver. Many processes which could and should be transferred from paper and legacy IT systems to mobile clients or apps; progress reporting, engineering forms, RFIs (although the latter process will be extensively modified by BIM) and change orders. The list is as high as the stack of paper on your desk. 

Mobile clients and apps of course need enterprise level security, granular and configurable views to eliminate unnecessary fields and context specific access to data where possible.  The use of social media type “walls” to replace email is a common trend in new enterprise software generally and could offer a lot in construction where finding out who knows the solution to something can be time wasting.

Mobile BIM is at a relatively early stage but holds much promise and already we are seeing mobile clients of collaboration platforms allowing access to their BIM model servers on browsers. Being able to access the model in-field and to initiate BIM enabled work flow assignment from in-field will deliver powerful productivity benefits as will in time, use of Augmented Reality as well.  These benefits will also extend to asset owners as well during subsequent building operation.

Another trend is the trend towards real time working and real time mobile collaboration.  The use of the sort of technology involved in messaging apps along with video as well as images is going to allow much more real time working while also providing a secure audit trail of all communications. Some construction and design processes will always be asynchronous but there will be an increasing trend towards real time collaboration over tablets and smartphones (which are larger now days). Many issues which used to need meetings or even worse, trips to meetings to resolve, can be sorted out through use of this sort of technology from individuals or teams in different locations.

Finally” gamification” or including game like elements in software is an important trend in corporate training in a number of sectors. This could potentially have great benefits for construction in relation to induction, on-going training and very importantly, safety.

So what is needed to realise all of this promise within the construction industry and deliver the real productivity gains that other industries have seen from enterprise mobility?

Mobile Access for Everyone, Everywhere.

Mobile IT in construction will only realise its potential if four things happen – firstly if it is deployed enterprise wide by the large companies; secondly if its use extends down the value chain; thirdly if such software is made much easier to use, trial and acquire and finally if it all ties together through interoperability.

As in collaboration platforms in the UK, mobile apps are not normally deployed enterprise wide. In the case of the collaboration platforms that reflects a lock out effect of clients deciding which one to adopt so that even if a contractor has a favoured system they must change as required on a project by project basis. In mobile IT the causes are different although there are some similarities; procurement is also project to project; project experience is often lost so that even if value has been obtained key decision makers to do not know that; top management do not see mobility as a priority; the cost of giving everyone a tablet is too high and what to do about tablets for the sub-contractors? Finally the price of vendor offerings has historically prohibited enterprise wide use.

In relation to the device issue, there is really no alternative in the UK but to bite the bullet and accept Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies as is happening in other industries. This solves the issue of how to get the entire project team using mobile software. Given the availability of excellent Mobile Device Management (MDM) software from companies such as Citrix for apps and the security built into collaboration platforms, there is really not much excuse for rejecting this solution.  Of course, BYOD on its own will not solve the pricing issue – it also needs to be combined with software which is affordable across the enterprise and not just for a few projects.

Deploying a few individual mobile IT licenses per project as has happened in the UK is not the best way to get efficiency on a project. It needs the entire supply chain to get involved. That means project pricing and also software and pricing and policies which are attractive to sub-contractors so they can buy it themselves. There is a big untapped opportunity in the sub-contractor space.  An example of this from a different sort of technology is the US public company Textura Inc. which is growing a very fast rate as a result of its own financial offering to construction sub-contractors.  There is also a huge base of smaller main contractors who would benefit from mobile IT.

A key part of the solution here is giving people easy to use and easy to trial software. If software needs set up and training, then by definition it cannot be trialled easily.  If on the other hand users are delighted by beautiful, simple software that makes their life easier and needs no training, they will flock to it. This is the trend that PlanGrid and FieldLens are backing.

Finally there is the issue of interoperability. If major firms are using say, the mobile clients of collaboration platforms and smaller firms are using apps, they need some ways to work together unless the system of the top contractor can be driven down the value chain. I see the future as being a mix between collaboration platforms and apps.  The cloud based back end of the enterprise apps will increasingly offer simpler and less costly solutions for “a collaboration platform” for smaller companies.  All that is needed to make everything work at every level are APIs and the will to implement them but in the era of cloud computing that is not the barrier it once was.

The biggest challenge is not technical, it is cultural. This challenge is for construction managers to get with 21^st century ways of working.

Peter Daly (LinkedIn) is the former co-founder and CEO of SmartBuilder Software Ltd, later rebranded as Plan2Finish

Comit/Fiatech Conference 2014

This years COMIT mobile IT conference was held in partnership with Fiatech at the Crystal in London with a theme of Efficiency Through Digital Projects. The conference was held on the 30^th and 31^st of October and 150 delegates registered for the two-day event.

Stuart Young introduced the conference and gave an overview of the work that Fiatech do and the reason for the close collaboration with COMIT. Fiatech are a U.S. based organisation with a similar aims to COMIT but a much wider remit. COMIT have maintained strong links with Fiatech for a number of years now and the two organisations continue to work together to find ways of creating mutual benefit for their members.

Phil Jackson of the ICE chaired the conference and described some of the technological change that he has seen in the construction industry during the last 40 years of his career. When Phil started he was using a slide-rule and went on to see the introduction of electronic calculators, telex and fax machines, early computers and the first "Apps". Phil noted that Cloud computing is a return to the old Mainframe centralized computing model.


In all there were 21 presentations over the two days plus a couple of panel discussions and plenty of opportunity for networking. Links to the presentations can be found on the COMIT website and they were all of a very high standard. Some of the highlights on Day 1 were:

Richard Lane from HM Government UK BIM Task Group talking about the future of innovation and the way in which innovation can be driven, information management and what might possibly be in store with level 3 BIM.

Francis Rabuck continuing the future-gazing theme with a look at today's technologies and the direction in which they are currently heading - with the potential impact on construction. Fran returned on Day 2 with a roundup of technological stocking-fillers with his ever popular Toys for Techies presentation.

Sarah Dorey and Oli Morgan from the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers described their part in the Bloodhound SSC Project and the engineering problems of creating a car capable of 1,000 mph. Despite the extreme nature of the examples the parallels with the issues faced in all areas of engineering, including construction, were not lost on the audience.



Other presentations on Day 1 included Gary McDonald from Ordnance Survey talking about Resilience Direct, Christian Reilly of Becktel on the use RFID and Harrison O'Hara of Costain giving early results of a survey on the use of IT in construction. We also heard about Class of Your Own from Andy Clifton, Asset Information from Sandeep Jain (Mobibiz) and Iain Miskimmin (Bentley/COMIT), Advanced Work Packaging from Ray Topping (Fiatech) and Digital Processing at the workface from Firas Hijazi (Consolidated Contractors Company).

After a packed day there was even more to come with the MobiCloud Showcase after free drinks and nibbles. This was presented by Martin Wilson and Otis Burris of Appear. MobiCloud is an EU supported project that COMIT are a partner in and which comes to a close in December 2014. Martin gave an update on the progress and introduced the MobiCloud Construction App Challenge. This is being run to promote the development of new mobile applications for construction. It includes a cash prize for the most innovative idea and the chance to develop a prototype that might be trialled on site by a construction sponsor.

Day 2 of the conference was nearly as busy with a further seven presentation and an open discussion about the effectiveness of Integrated Environments for EPC Projects hosted by Steven Convens. Presentations on Day 2 included:

Heba Bevan from the University of Cambridge and founder of Utterberry, described the use of miniature wireless sensors that she developed for monitoring tunnel movements and conditions at locations such as Crossrail's C360. The sensors automatically establish a a network with each other and transfer highly accurate positional data back to an access point.

Professor Tim Broyd of University College London gave a wide ranging and fascinating presentation on the changing environment that construction faces, both within the UK and globally. The effects of climate change, the rise of BIM, smart transport, new business models, 3D printing and smart houses all featured in his presentation.

Ben Feltham from Skanska UK Civil Engineering described how interactive design boards have been used at Paddington on the Crossrail project. He explained their value and how they formed part of the wide range of benefits deriving from an integrated BIM approach to design and engineering.



Other presentations on Day 2 included "Inside a digital asset" by Vas Vernikos (CH2M), the use of iBeacons at Crossrail by Neill Pawsey (Crossrail) and Tim Jones (3Squared) and Modularisation by John Roberts of Lang O'Rourke.  The final presentation of the day was by Francis Rabuck who probably also provided the most memorable photo opportunity at the conference with his flashing high-tech glasses.

Thank you to everyone who attended the conference and to our sponsors and presenters for making it a successful event. All of the presentations as well as photographs from the two days can be found on the COMIT website.