BIM4Estates: introducing standard requirements for universities

Hadeel moved into a consultancy role two years ago at Turner & Townsend and stepped down, and I became the chair. Brett Plant, head of estates information and systems at the University of Warwick, Paul Eyden, BIM manager at the University of Warwick, and Matt Hooper, senior digital information manager, are my co-chairs.

For the first four years, there were only six universities meeting regularly. But now membership has exploded to about 80 different organisations and more than 100 people. Matt Hooper, who works with me in the Birmingham University estates department, has recently become a co-chair because the group has become so much bigger.

We are all in very similar positions, and we still maintain the same mission of helping each other progress and improving how the industry uses digital information.

BIM4Estates is affiliated with two groups. Initially, there was nima and more recently, we have been asked to join the Association of University Directors of Estates as the Digital Estates Special Interest Group.

What sort of industry improvements are you talking about?

There are improvements to be made in several areas. I see these as being by contractors in terms of the way that they work with owner-operators and also from software suppliers, particularly CAFM [computer-aided facility management] suppliers. We feel that the CAFM market has just done its own thing and gone its own way. A big client group can provide some guidance on what is actually needed.

A member survey we conducted last year showed that they want us to focus on BIM implementation, CDE and CAFM systems.

With 80 members on board, it seems BIM for estate management has really gathered pace in the university sector.

Definitely. Our members have different levels of experience and interests. Some want to start doing BIM, but need our help to persuade their senior managers. Others are being told by their directors they need to do it. But the message is clear: we should all be progressing down a digital pathway for estate management.

With many of our members in the early stages of estate digitisation, we’re doing work on what BIM requirements look like. We have developed BIM requirements at the University of Birmingham, but we don’t feel that just cutting and pasting those would work across different estate sizes. So, we are going to work as a group to try to come up with a good approach for estates to start writing a BIM requirement, and more widely how to begin using BIM and producing digital models of their buildings.

How do you procure projects at University of Birmingham to get the right information for asset management?

A couple of years ago, University of Birmingham set up the Build Higher Framework. The procurement framework allows the University to build longer-term relationships with key contractors and consultants who provide construction, design and surveying services. This means we get consistency across the framework in the way that projects are being delivered, including data requirements.

Although it was set up by us, any university community can use it.

Recently, we added surveying into that framework so that we can procure BIM models of existing buildings to the same set of standards in a consistent way and significantly faster because of the way the framework is set up. It allows us to build models of existing buildings, which might be undergoing extensive refurbishment, before the architects start designing. Before that, typically the architect would be appointed and then have to start working out from the drawings what the structure and make-up of the building was and whether the drawings (if available) reflected the current structure.

But now we have improved our information processes through our CDE. We can get foresight on projects a lot quicker.

How is the information structured to make it easier to use and find?

We make sure our requirements for contractors are written in very plain English so that people understand it. It would generally take clients’ teams between 12 and 18 months after project handover to get project information from the contractor and into their own systems. On one of our latest projects, we had the process down to just one month, where the team engaged and  followed the strict naming convention and workflows for files.

The way we structure our common data environment allows us to find information quickly. That’s because it’s got all of the right metadata against all the right documents, ie plenty of specific information for them to be searched for. So instead of having a couple of dozen folders to file things into for your project, you have one file, but your metadata on your documents is consistent.

For example, if you had a folder structure with the drawing, you might have a folder of drawings, but you might also have a construction folder, and you might also have a folder for the building. Now, which one do you put it in? It’s hard to be definitive as we all think differently, because you might put it in one and I might put it in another. So, you spend more time looking through the folders. Whereas if you have all of this metadata already set out and the rules are all there around it, we can put things into one big bucket, and you search for it using a filtering system.

Read the first part of this interview with Rich Draper.

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