Aug 03 2011

Aconex O&M manuals offering nothing new

Melbourne, Australia-based Software-as-a-Service construction collaboration technology provider Aconex has announced and blogged about a partnership with Adelaide-based Grazer to accelerate the production and handover of post-construction operation and maintenance manuals to clients in Australasia.

Steven Brant, Aconex’s general manager for Australia and New Zealand says:

“O&M manuals are a key deliverable for contractors and one of the last areas of construction where paper, ring binders, email and CDs are still prevalent. In the final rush to project completion, this outdated method of compiling manuals often results in incomplete data that is delivered late, adding unnecessary costs to the contractor and risk exposure to the asset owner.”

The Aconex O&M Manuals solution links the Aconex collaboration platform, used during construction projects, with Grazer’s C-Manuals solution, which provides a fully digital set of O&M manuals with visual navigation capability.

Deja vu

Reading the news releases and online descriptions of this new service brought some memories flooding back. Back in 2002, when I was working for BIW Technologies, retailer client Sainsbury’s wanted to use the BIW platform to automate production of the Health & Safety File (read the case study).

Required by the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 1997, these files were a substantial, comprehensive and expensive-to-produce library of documents, often filling numerous A4 ring binders, and rarely complete until weeks after project handover. Once compiled, Sainsbury’s had to store, maintain, and make the files available to anyone needing information about the facility, including for routine O&M or for longer-term use, eg: major alteration works, or due diligence during a property transaction.

Taking Sainsbury’s ‘Health and Safety File brief’, which stipulated the structure and content of a conventional paper File, BIW create a set of health and safety ‘attributes’ that were used to electronically ‘tag’ drawings or other documents published to the BIW platform. The planning supervisor, responsible for producing the file, could continually monitor published documents and their health and safety attributes (and, if necessary, amend them), and start building and safeguarding the integrity the File from the outset. Instead of ring-binders or a read-only CD upon handover, the store manager or FM help-desk received a login and password, and could access, search and, if necessary, update the File online using a File Explorer tool.

By 2003, use of this electronic system was standardised across all Sainsbury’s projects, and the BIW Health & Safety functionality has been available to all its customers ever since. At the time, BIW was the first collaboration provider to deliver electronic data compliant with the UK Health & Safety Executive’s requirements, and among the earliest to anticipate its clients’ facilities managers and other professionals’ post-construction information needs.

So Aconex’s tie-up with Grazer helps the collaboration vendor deliver something that has long been available from a competitor (updated to help UK-based customers comply with the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2007). And, following last December’s acquisition, I expect BIW’s whole-life asset information capabilities will be extended as it incorporates infrastructure life-cycle management (ILM) functionalities delivered by its sister company conject AG.

Currently, the Aconex/Grazer combined offering is only available in Australia and New Zealand but apparently Aconex have “got bigger plans”!

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/08/aconex-om-manuals-offering-nothing-new/

Aug 01 2011

New BIM battleground emerging

When a construction IT conference at the ICE sells out three months beforehand after just three weeks, it’s clear there is a lot of interest in the subject. Building Information Modelling (BIM) currently seems to be the UK industry’s hottest topic, and some of the SaaS-based construction collaboration technology vendors plainly don’t want to get overlooked in the rush.

To be fair, Asite has been pushing its BIM capabilities for years; Asite started talking about its collaborative BIM (cBIM) toolset in late 2006, and it was launched the following year, when even the BuildingSMART BIM enthusiasts in 2007 were still talking about a 5-7 year time span for industry adoption. Similarly, Bentley was talking about using its ProjectWise collaboration system to help manage the ‘I’ in BIM in 2007 (though ProjectWise isn’t normally deployed on a SaaS basis). As sponsors, Asite’s Tony Ryan and a Bentley representative will both be contributing to a panel discussion at October’s ICE BIM event.

Both firms have continued to promote their BIM toolsets, and other collaboration vendors have also begun to take notice of BIM adoption. Aconex‘s CEO Leigh Jasper, for example, blogged in April about the growing use of his company’s SaaS platform to manage BIM models; 4Projects‘ CEO Richard Vertigan was working on BIM in the 1990s prior to launching the vendor business; and it was significant (to me, at least) that one of the contributors to the working group report to the UK Government Construction Clients Board (post) was Sanjeev Shah, CEO of Unit 4 Collaboration.

The latest sign of growing collaboration interest comes from one of the smaller UK players, iSite, who see “Building Information Modelling as pivital [sic] to the future direction of the construction industry”:

In recognition of this we have commenced a pilot project looking to provide our customers with tools to integrate building models into to the iSite portal – allowing customers a global view of building assets, quantities and performance across their portfolio.

The pilot project will look at utilising industry standard data exchange protocols to easily plug building models into the portal. iSite will be drawing on the experience of our colleagues S&W Design as well as working with BIM experts the _Space Group

Such initiatives are welcome, but is there is a risk of too many projects being run in parallel with potential lessons not being shared, and different approaches and standards emerging? Following the recent formal launch of the Government Construction Strategy (at the ICE on 19 July), various client-led and industry-led working bodies will be striving respectively to ‘pull’ and ‘push’ the UK AEC sector towards effective BIM adoption, looking at both technology, and the even more important cross-cutting people and process issues. I understand Constructing Excellence will be supporting the Construction Industry Council‘s BIM Forum in this process, trying to help coordinate and disseminate best practice, and looking to establish industry practitioners’ current and future needs with respect to collaborative IT.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/08/new-bim-battleground-emerging/

Aug 01 2011

4Projects promoting NEC3 Manager

4Projects NEC3 Manager may not (yet) have a highly-polished dashboard, but its NEC backing is helping push this young product forward.

On Friday morning I attended a breakfast briefing in central London by software-as-a-service construction collaboration vendor 4Projects who were showing off their NEC3 Manager product to some prospective customers, plus a representative from the contract publisher NEC (and me).

(Briefly introducing the main 4Projects SaaS platform, account manager David Warren said it now had some 170,000 users from 29,000 different organisations around the world; he also stressed that these figures were based on unique users logging-in during the last three months.)

NEC3 Manager

The 4Projects team (David, plus Richard Harrison) admitted that its contract management capability was still relatively new – it was launched in December 2010, when NEC appointed the company (and rival BIW, who’s NEC3 functionality is more mature) as licensed content partners (post) – and the product is clearly still being developed. For example, there were issues with how some tick-box data was presented in the contract reporting tools, and the system does not yet allow a user working on multiple projects, or on single projects involving multiple contracts, to have a single dashboard view across all their contracts. Nonetheless, the core contract management functionality is well-delivered.

David explained that the digital fee to use an NEC contract was included in 4Projects’ charges for using the system (indicative costs for using the NEC3 Manager alone – ie, without the rest of 4Projects’ document, communication and workflow management toolset – were around £300/month for a £5m project, with no limit on number of users, organisations, etc; this figure excludes consultancy costs). Once the system is implemented on a project, NEC3 Manager is used to manage two main elements: pre-contract award processes, and post-award contract management.

Contract creation

Prior to finalising the contract, commercial managers can use NEC3 Manager to access the content of any of the standard NEC contracts, and create a version specific to their needs. Alongside standard contract details and clauses, custom clauses (Z clauses) can be created, and the contract can be easily populated with details of the project, the professionals involved, and the proformas (eg: Early Warning notices, Compensation Events, Project Manager’s Instruction, etc) they will use. For firms using the system repeatedly, company-specific NEC3 contract templates can be created to reduce the effort involved in re-entering non-standard clauses, etc (one attendee asked if the system presented a summary schedule showing all the non-standard additions; it doesn’t – at least, not yet). Once a contract is agreed, clicking on “Finalise” closes the contract creation process and enables users to start interacting via the contract management dashboard.

Contract management

The NEC3 Manager real-time dashboard is populated with configurable widgets (“4Portal widgets”), and users can also configure the dashboard interface so that it quickly delivers the key information relevant to their project roles. Rather than an “in-box” (used on earlier versions of the software), the platform features a “Live Events” summary showing the current status of all NEC3 processes instigated through the system; overdue items are shown in red, others in black. If users do not log-in to the system for a while, email notifications containing links to the relevant information are automatically issued, helping ensure critical issues or deadlines are not missed.

As communications about an issue (or “incident”) develop, associations between different processes are created and tracked, and there are simple bar-chart and pie-chart tools to quickly convey status information graphically. Reports could also be configured and, if required, exported to Excel, and all user interactions with the system are time- and date-stamped to create a transparent and secure audit trail of all the contract processes, reducing the risk of conflict and litigation.

4Projects NEC3 Manager is clearly still a relatively young product, but the company has benefitted from the detailed feedback it has received from NEC and from existing users (Richard explained how staff at contractor Sir Robert McAlpine, while not actually using the NEC3 tool on the 2012 Olympic stadium, had volunteered contract-related experiences to help guide its development). The interface looks quite intuitive and user-friendly, and the contract creation process will be familiar to managers who have used the NEC black book and related documents. To me, the dashboard isn’t quite as polished as that delivered by NEC specialist Sypro Management* (see Sypro updates NEC3 interface), but the widget-based configurability may appeal to some users.

(I understand from 4Projects that more breakfast briefings are being organised during August.)

[* Disclosure: I have provided consultancy services to Sypro Management Ltd.]

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/08/4projects-promoting-nec3-manager/

Jul 26 2011

OpenBuildings now on Android

Tom Mallory and Adel ZakoutOpenBuildings.com, the crowd-sourced building directory I wrote about last month, is now available on multiple mobile devices. Just ahead of the launch of its Buildings Android app, I met up with the business’s two founders, COO Tom Mallory (left) and CEO Adel Zakout (right), in London last week.

As previously described, OpenBuildings is a social media application for sharing information and knowledge about architecture, and Adel outlined the three primary audiences for its services.

Buildings App for AndroidFirst, OpenBuildings is aimed at enthusiasts, providing a crowd-sourced wiki that can be progressively expanded and improved through the inputs of its users. To date, it has logged over 40,000 buildings and has 50,000 registered users, with approximately 8,000 unique visitors to the website each day. Take-up of the first GPS-enabled Buildings mobile application, for iPhone, was enthusiastic with almost 300,000 downloads, and Tom expects the Android version to be at least as popular. The company is also planning to develop audio guides to help, say, tourists find out more about buildings in places they were visiting, but there are no immediate plans to develop an augmented reality tool (we talked about Layar and its potential to overlay information from Wikipedia and other sources over a cameraphone image).

Second, Adel said OpenBuildings provides a forum for locals to provide structured feedback about building projects in their area, and to be alerted to new proposals. We discussed other online services doing similar tasks – the YouCanPlan consultatative tool from Slider Studio, and PlanningAlerts.com, for example – but Adel sought to differentiate OpenBuildings. As an architect (trained at the Architectural Association), he was wary of compromising the integrity of building design in response to local residents’ feedback; he was also hoping to provide a more reliable and more international alerts service than that provided by the MySociety volunteer-driven and UK-focused PlanningAlerts.com.

Third, OpenBuildings aims to provide a platform for professional firms. Architects, engineers and even suppliers of products and materials involved in the design and construction of a building can create site profiles which can be searched by website users. Basic profiles will initially be free, but OpenBuildings’ revenue model is based on getting firms to pay a modest monthly subscription ($20 was mentioned) to upgrade their profiles, incorporate more features and achieve greater prominence as they seek to win new business through the site. We also briefly talked about potential integration between OpenBuildings and the Woobius Showcase mobile portfolio toolset (they have been talking to Bob Leung apparently)

OpenBuildings’ strategy is to provide an excellent end-user experience underpinned by extensive information about buildings and their designers. By making use of existing crowd-sourced material from Wikipedia, it has already accumulated a large database (even if Wikipedia isn’t always clearly acknowledged or referenced), and its user-friendly interface should help this database grow. However, this is a competitive area with some established players including traditional publishers – for example, the day after I met Adel and Tom I was emailed about the Architects’ Journal Buildings Library – and online businesses such as TheConstructionIndex (see pwcom blog post) and ESI.info.

To help grow online awareness OpenBuildings is using social media and building partnerships with complementary online ventures such as the products-sourcing service DesignerPages and Archinect.com. I expect OpenBuildings will announce other partnerships as it grows its registered userbase and becomes more attractive as a marketing platform for AEC firms (and I am hoping Adel or Tom will use Be2camp events to increase its profile among some of the Web 2.0-savvy users already active in the industry).

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/07/openbuildings-now-on-android/

Jul 19 2011

BIM not mandatory, but COBie will be

Last month (see BIM – a new role for collaboration tools?), I wrote about the government’s “push” to expand BIM adoption across the UK architecture, engineering and construction industry (and, through its focus on asset information, into facilities management too). Today, I attended the formal launch of the Government Construction Strategy at the ICE in London, at which a lot of attention was focused on BIM.

I had been under the impression that the ‘push’ involved making BIM mandatory, but it now appears that “the Government’s BIM strategy is non-prescriptive.” Instead, it is based on an information requirement, and “BIM is the most effective way of delivering this information.” According to some BIM FAQs distributed at today’s event:

“The information provided by the BIM model will be valuable in enabling the Government Client to confirm that facilities meet performance expectations and also in providing a readily accessible source of information for the teams involved in operating, maintaining and adapting completed facilities.”

BIM is, of course, greatly encouraged – “The requirement to deliver data in a fixed format (COBie) at key project stages will be a very time-consuming and tedious task without the support of a BIM system.” – but there were plainly concerns about procurement rules and proprietary software:

“It is not possible to mandate the use of BIM within the existing procurement regulations. Furthermore, even if this mandate was possible, if we selected a prescriptive BIM tool set, we could risk failing our hypothesis criteria test of being open and competitive.”

As a result, the strategy focuses more attention on adoption of the COBie standard to manage data coming from BIM models into the client organisation, initially via exchange of spreadsheets. In the FAQs, the government has set itself a modest target, judged appropriate to the ‘trailing edge’ of the industry (though it recognises that some supply chains will aim to achieve greater levels of integrated collaborative working) – but Cabinet minister Francis Maude MP did tell industry that he wanted the UK to become a world leader in applying BIM technology.

Here we have the AEC industry’s largest single client exhorting the sector to work more collaboratively and to use information technology to support the design, construction and long-term operation and maintenance of its built assets. And as supply chains invest in the technologies, this is likely to pull other client organisations into taking similar steps. I think we have taken a significant step towards dispensing with old-style, short-termist, knowledge is power-type mindsets, shifting in favour of more sophisticated, collaborative approaches based on creating single shared, whole-life repositories of asset-related information.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/07/bim-not-mandatory-but-cobie-will-be/

Jul 14 2011

UK construction SaaS vendors continue to battle for contract admin customers

Since I ventured that contract administration would be the new battleground for construction collaboration technology providers, I have watched the various SaaS vendors try to outdo each other with their marketing and PR efforts, particularly regarding the NEC contract suite. The appointment of two NEC licensed content providers in late 2010 saw both firms ramp up their promotional activities – 4Projects was quick out of the blocks, with BIW Technologies soon hot on their tail – while non-endorsed providers (both NEC specialists such as CEMAR/CMToolkit, MPS and Sypro, and SaaS collaboration technology vendors such as Asite and Aconex) carried on business-as-usual, arguing that the Thomas Telford decision made no difference to how project teams managed NEC processes online.

4Projects, BIW, CEMAR, MPS and Sypro all exhibited at the NEC user conference in April, but NEC has also helped its preferred suppliers with further promotional opportunities. BIW had people on the NEC stand at a Guardian-sponsored procurement exhibition in London in June, while NEC has tweeted about 4Projects’ summer series of breakfast seminars on its NEC3 Manager capabilities (news release).

The latest shot in the battle is a news release from Asite, announcing a five-year enterprise agreement with Transport for London (TfL). The deal sees TfL and the Greater London Authority (including the Metropolitan Police, the London Development Agency and the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority) implementing the company’s SaaS platform, and Asite quickly gets into its contract stride:

  • First, it stresses that its system will be used for “all aspects of the contract administration process across their significant on-going portfolio of construction and facilities management works.”
  • Then Asite CEO Tony Ryan says: “Our Cloud Platform will give TfL the flexibility to deliver Contract Administration to their supply chain within their existing and proven processes.”
  • And the news release goes on to list seven areas of NEC functionality, plus support for other contracts such as JCT and bespoke forms.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/07/uk-construction-saas-vendors-continue-to-battle-for-contract-admin-customers/

Jul 13 2011

Will BIM kill the document controller?

I watched and listened to a Building Design webinar today on building information modelling (BIM). Hosted by Robert Klaschka of Studio Klaschka Architects (he and I shared a platform at a London Constructing Excellence event in May), it included a question and answer session with UK government chief construction advisor Paul Morrell, and short presentations from various BIM practitioners, including an architect, a software vendor and a contractor. Some viewers of the webinar were also interacting via Twitter (hashtag #BDbim), and someone asked: “Is BIM going to make the information manager/document controller’s role obsolete?”

I tweeted back that, under BIM, we will still need people to manage contract processes, correspondence, etc, but there would gradually be fewer drawings to control. I then added that we may also see the emergence of a BIM or Model Manager role, a more expert professional role combining design expertise with skills in team coordination (though this role is still in its infancy).

Of course, this gradual erosion of the drawing management aspect of the document controller’s role will take some years, but it will continue a process that started over a decade ago when electronic document collaboration platforms first began to be used on construction projects. Then, they dramatically reduced the volume of files (both paper-based and electronically) exchanged among project participants, and by holding a “single version of the truth” in one central repository, made it more transparent and easier to audit who did what and when. With document issue and receipt increasingly automated, controllers became more productive and, in some firms, were capable of managing multiple projects simultaneously, or taking an additional responsibilities such as extranet system administration.

The production of drawings is not going to suddenly disappear due to the advent of BIM. Indeed, today’s BAM Construction presentation showed 1100 drawings were generated from the building information model of one recent project, but the processes of clash detection and reconciling design issues were accelerated and the number of revisions was reduced. This is likely to be repeated across many projects by many more firms, and the productivity gains witnessed through using web-based construction collaboration technologies will doubtless be increased still further as they become used to manage data stored in the model (see BIM – a new role for collaboration tools?). However, the ins and outs of BIM-based design will still require management by human beings according to agreed project protocols, and so the role of document controller will evolve.

A sprinkling of job advertisements have already appeared for ‘BIM Document Controllers‘, mainly in the USA, and I expect similar vacancies will soon be advertised in the UK and other markets undergoing the transition to BIM. Over time, though, I expect the word ‘document’ may be replaced by ‘information’, and I also expect today’s document controllers will be looking for training and support as they become tomorrow’s information managers, complementing the professional design coordination role of the BIM or Model Manager.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/07/will-bim-kill-the-document-controller/

Jul 07 2011

Sypro updates NEC3 interface

UK construction contract management software specialist Sypro Management has released a new version of its web-based platform for managing NEC3 processes. This gives users an “at a glance” dashboard view of key metrics relating to their work on a project.

Previously, Sypro presented NEC contract data in a series of separate windows, but key data is now consolidated into a single view, with project ‘fuel gauges’ giving real-time cost and time statuses, and green-amber-red pie-chart reports for key processes like Early Warning Notices and Compensation Events.

Sypro MD Simon Hunt says the updated Software-as-a-Service system also looks great on the latest tablet devices. He continues:

“Once logged into the system, users have an at-a-glance overview of all the key metrics. Instead of something resembling a spreadsheet, the Sypro interface uses colour and bold graphics to convey time and cost data quickly. Users can quickly see what items need their most urgent attention, and can then drill down to the relevant workflows.”

While it lacks the document collaboration functionality of some rival products, Sypro has been making inroads into the health market by virtue of its focused support for NEC Procure21+ processes, and has also won support from other public sector clients. For example, an e-newsletter on Monday announced Sypro’s involvement in a swimming pool project for City of Wakefield, West Yorkshire.

[* Disclosure: I have provided consultancy services to Sypro Management Ltd, and was a guest of Sypro at April’s NEC User Group conference in London – post.]

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/07/sypro-updates-nec3-interface/

Jun 30 2011

Now Sword-CTSpace blogs

Sword-CTSpace blog home pageEarlier today I spotted another tweet about a new blog from construction collaboration technology provider Sword-CTSpace (this followed one on 16 June).

Hosted on WordPress.com, entitled “Sword CTSpace LAB“, and subtitled “Competence Center for Engineering Content Management”, the initial post is now dated Monday 27 June, with another yesterday. The first agenda-setting article was by Angela Restani, Director of Marketing US, who admitted:

“We are getting into the blogging arena a little late, but it was intentional. Before we started our blog we wanted to make sure that we had all the pieces in place for our blog to be informative, interesting and relevant. …”

The blog’s appearance prompted me to take a look at Sword-CTSpace’s other forays into social media marketing. It has a company profile on LinkedIn, a YouTube Channel, and a corporate Twitter account (complementing those of some employees). However, the Engineering Collaboration Community it launched 13 months ago (May 2010 post) seems to have disappeared – links from the Sword-CTSpace website just redirect the user back to the home page (perhaps a blog icon is due to replace the ECC icon in the website sidebar?). Hopefully, the blog will prove more long-lasting than the community….

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/06/now-sword-ctspace-blogs/

Jun 28 2011

US software trends: collaboration, SaaS, mobile, integration

Courtesy of US-based SoftwareAdvice.com I have just been viewing some video interviews with software vendors at the USA’s Construction Financial Management Association (CFMA) annual conference in Texas last week.

Software company executives were asked for their thoughts on the construction software market, and listening to their comments I found support for recent posts on the renewed US focus on collaboration (see US AEC market ripe for collaboration vendors), the growing importance of mobile-based solutions (see previous post, Android-based Smartbuilder1 launched, for example) and of Software-as-a-Service in general. Given that these were mainly finance and accounting software people talking, there was inevitably a bias towards financial management, but this wasn’t always seen in isolation – integrating document management with accounting was another trend identified (perhaps supporting BIW’s push into the north American market with Sage CRE – see post – and its technology push to provide project cost control functionality).

You can view the three videos via the following links:
Video 1: What’s Driving Firms to Implement New Construction Software?
Video 2: Which Segments Are Most Active in Implementing New Software?
Video 3: What Functionality Do Construction Buyers Want?

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2011/06/us-software-trends-collaboration-saas-mobile-integration/

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