Sharing knowledge
The long-term success of an organisation lies in its willingness to share information, a business philosophy that promises amazing advantages, says TAHIR SHARIF, president of buildingSmart ME.
01 October 2010
CONSTRUCTION industry professionals, although experts in their fields, often have an incomplete understanding of either how other trades could benefit from their work or why they should share information.
The advantages inherent in sharing output or, in other words, the ‘knowledge-sharing culture’, are neither evident nor desired.
The knowledge sharing culture can be exemplified using Japanese corporation Toyota as an example, whose huge success can be attributed in part to the company’s business philosophy, detailed in Jeffrey Liker’s book, The Toyota Way, where 14 management principles that underpin the carmaker’s success have been discussed.
Sharing knowledge is the driving force of evolution and eventually a point is reached when in order to take the next step, an organisation has to look beyond itself – and Toyota proved just that.
Sharing information is vital in many aspects.
Cultural: In The Toyota Way, a senior executive has commented: “We get brilliant results from average people managing and improving brilliant processes. Our competitors get mediocre results from brilliant people managing around broken processes. When they get in trouble, they try to hire even more brilliant people. We’re going to win.”
For any organisation to adopt new processes, cultural change is necessary. Any short-term risk to the business in sharing its knowledge is limited, as competitors will take time to bring about a change in their processes and work culture, during which the ‘front-running’ company continues to advance.
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Technological: If an industry uses common technology, there is a shared interest in seeing that technology advance. If businesses share successful processes and applications, there is an increased likelihood that technology vendors will respond through their development programmes.
Skills: It is essential that the industrial training providers and educational establishments are aware of current best practice, so that relevant education and training programmes can be evolved to match the demand for required skills.
Kudos: Publicising the fact that you are the best is an excellent way of elevating your business status and raising profitability.
Construction has a knowledge-sharing culture, but this is focused on the specific disciplines that make up a project team, rather than the construction process as a whole. Sharing knowledge across trades, to make the entire process more cohesive and efficient, is the logical next step.
Why the Aquarium
Sharing best practice is an efficient way of improving knowledge. buildingSmart has developed the Aquarium to meet that need and pave the way for overall cost reductions and on-time delivery.
buildingSmart Aquarium is a problem-solving process that explores business opportunities through digital collaboration. During this process, problem owners (generally architecture, engineering and construction companies), software vendors and buildingSmart experts gather to improve existing software or to create new solutions, using the open buildingSmart standards. After three to six months, a solution is ready to be put into practice.
In addition to the technology aspects, Aquarium can also develop the business process required to apply the solution. buildingSmart uses expertise from all over the world to facilitate the Aquarium process and to support implementation. The process, its documentation and results are open and observers are encouraged and welcome.
Ten years ago, Matti Hannus, from VTT in Finland, produced a cartoon of key advances in technology within construction disciplines, depicted as ‘Islands of Automation’. The illustration highlights the steady advances in technology, but critically, demonstrates that these have been undertaken in isolation. Hannus correctly identifies that if bridges can be built between the islands, they will allow an efficient route for data transfer. In essence, this describes the primary objective of buildingSmart, that is, establishing a set of international standards to permit data transfer between the technologies used in construction. These IFC (Industry Foundation Class) standards are essentially the ‘bridges’.
However, developing theoretical standards has limited value. It is necessary to both develop and prove such standards in a real environment. Aquarium provides such an environment, with the added bonus that the whole process is open and invites contribution, which further enriches the content.
How it works
The starting point for Aquarium is to identify a problem – ideally related to a wasteful or inefficient process in the construction value chain – that can, at least in part, be solved by addressing the technology and process of collaboration and/or interoperability. Having identified a problem, the buildingSmart member and problem ‘owner’ (can be the same company), invite buildingSmart to submit an Aquarium proposal, which considers the viability of the project, outlines the stages of problem solving, participants required, time scale and costs. Then the Aquarium team’s first task is to clearly define the problem and establish the value of solving it.
Local solutions are then coordinated with buildingSmart International, which allows comparison with existing standards and other Aquarium projects that are providing similar local solutions. From this work, a best practice solution is recommended for development and can comprise any combination of software product, process model or educational/training programme. From this recommendation, a product/solution is developed and tested at international and local levels.
The role of the Aquarium actually ends after ‘problem solving’, but the details of deploying the solution and the value realised, are measured and reported back to buildingSmart to complete its records. This cut-off is in place because the responsibility for taking forward the Aquarium solution in ‘day to day’ operations belongs to the business concerned and is not part of the Aquarium.
Deliverables
The deliverables will, of course, vary from project to project but at a high level will include: Description of business opportunities (value statement), problem definition, process map and information deliverables and proposed software solution. Further deliverables typically can include: the problem, which comprises problem description, problem/value pairings, solution KPIs (key performance index) and requirement specification; the process entailing business rules, process map and exchange requirement; and business opportunities, including pressure points and opportunities and return on investment (ROI) documentation. It also includes buildingSmart standards extension/development (IFC, IDM, IFD) and model view definitions; functional parts/concepts and proposed solutions including a list of potential software candidates, software user guide and software implementers guide and test cases.
Key benefits include: High ROI; access to global solutions and expertise; better decision-making capabilities in the early stages of projects; enhanced coordination between disciplines; significantly reduced change orders and mistakes; no manual checking of data using printouts and markers; high-level digital collaboration; and value – every time the final solution is used it should generate value directly to the business.
Case study
International design firm HOK, a global leader in programmatically rich projects, commissioned a buildingSmart Aquarium to improve room data logistics and, in particular, to combine the owner’s stated requirements and the initial design into graphical room data sheets, without manual work.
In the early phase of project programming, it is vital for the owner to define the scope of the project at the space/ room/equipment level. The scope is defined in ‘room data sheets’ based on intended occupancy/use and comprises key elements such as space, equipment, utilities and features. It is also important that this initial scoping of data is accessible so that it can be used downstream in the project, throughout the design phase, as the basis for controlling the project development and final delivery.
The problem and solution
The first step was to build a team comprising HOK and buildingSmart personnel and the preferred software vendors, who defined the problems that traditional processes fail to address. These can be summarised as follows: data processing – gathering data is a tedious manual process and prone to error; data consistency – the data is fluid and evolves as part of the design process and changes do not easily integrate with design drawings; data analysis – there is no ability to track revisions, report discrepancies or to compare the design to the initial scope; user interface – data is not user-friendly and rarely interoperable with software tools used by different disciplines, consultants and clients; robustness – standard Microsoft programmes commonly used to record and present data have limits in the design environment; and security – security management (user access and file structure) is difficult, often non-existent.
The buildingSmart Aquarium for the project addressed these with a series of workshops from Q4 of 2008 to January 2009, during which a first draft information delivery manual (IDM) was created defining the process and proof of concept was provided by a data model.
For this particular HOK project, Aquarium recommended that the optimum solution was to adopt a suite of interoperable products that the project software vendors would develop to enable automatic bi-directional exchange of data between the vendor’s products via an application programming interface (API).
Implementing the solution
HOK has already started project evaluation, using tools that were tested as part of the Aquarium, in its justice and healthcare practices. It has realised a number of business benefits as better quality data flow between the software solutions has improved the efficiency of the process. Additional benefits include better design co-ordination, a reduction of change orders and RFIs (requests for information) and significantly, increased customer satisfaction.
HOK has learnt that given the complexity of its projects, combined with the need for a room data solution ecosystem, no single software tool can provide the overall functionality required. Consequently, the HOK BIM platform needs better compatibility with third-party vendors. This requirement was identified by Aquarium and a solution initiated.
HOK chief executive officer Patrick MacLeamy, reports on his experience: “We commissioned a buildingSmart Aquarium to combine the owner’s stated requirements and the initial design into room data sheets, a process that currently requires a lot of hand-checking of data. The Aquarium demonstrated how architectural programming and design tools can seamlessly exchange core data via open standards and provided us with potential solutions to avoid manual handling and mistakes. I am confident that this will save significant project time in the future and result in a very positive return on investment.”
Sharing the benefits
The aforementioned IDM is an evolving document and in keeping with the Aquarium ethos, when completed, the information will be made available to buildingSmart members, including other software vendors, who can learn from the data to develop similar solutions. Data will include a draft process map, draft exchange requirement, software implementation guidelines and test files.
The solution utilised existing buildingSmart standards, but any new protocols developed will also feed into the buildingSmart IFC standards development programme to benefit all.
The Aquarium case sheet also informs other users of the ‘pain points’, problems and business opportunities identified whilst producing the software solutions and user manual.
