Hello and welcome to this exclusive roundtable event brought to you by
The B1M in association with Bluebeam.
The construction industry is experiencing a digital revolution.
From collaborating in the cloud and
developing digital twins of entire built assets
to the rise of wearables, robotics
and even artificial intelligence
technology is really affecting how people work in the industry
improving efficiency
and productivity.
That matters to all of us because the construction industry
impacts everyone's lives and affects
pretty much what everyone does
on planet Earth.
In that digital context, we're going to explore how
people communicate in the industry
particularly with regards to design review standards.
So in 2017, five of Sweden's largest general contractors
put aside their competition
to come up with a set of design review standards that
would make everyone's lives easier
and much more efficient.
So today we're going to look at how that can be applied
in the UK industry market,
but also probably draw some conclusions that could be applied
in other markets around the world.
To enable that to happen I'm very proud to say that we've
got four of the UK's largest contractors
all with us today and all sat around the same table.
Andrew Gamblen who is digital manager at Willmott Dixon in Hitchin,
Vicki Holmes, learning partner at Multiplex,
Rennie Chadwick who is chief operating officer at Osborne,
and Jimmy Forsberg who is development leader at Skanska.
So Jimmy I really want to turn to you first because
obviously the work you've done in Sweden is phenomenal and it's why we're all sat here today.
Can you tell us a bit about what you did and the impact it's had.
Yeah sure, we actually, Skanska, me and my colleague Eamon
were approached by a competitor at a conference in Stockholm.
We both came to the conclusion we are doing design review in Bluebeam
and we have the standard within each company.
We realised we are doing very much the same thing with minor sort of tweaks or adjustments.
We thought: OK, why don't we try to standardise this?
Absolutely. So it wasn't necessarily that you'd set out and come together just because
you were using Bluebeam,
you came together from that approach you were taking to wanting to solve a problem
- it just so happened that you were all using Bluebeam.
Yeah, so we started to call up people and email people
and that's when we sort of realised we have brought together the five biggest contractors in Sweden
to discuss a standardisation when it comes to design review in Bluebeam.
Just to clarify for some our viewers that might not know
when we're talking about design review
in digital context we're largely talking about
marking up of PDFs that sort of thing.
Yeah exactly we use a common data environment (CDE)
within Bluebeam, Bluebeam Studio,
where we have the possibility to upload binders with PDFs
from each discipline
and then we enable the design review
with the help of a tool chest
markups, connected to statuses and colour change
and those mark-up tools are then sort of attached
to different statuses and those statuses have different colours.
So if you were to put a new markup out on a drawing
it gets the status "new comment".
If you change the status to let's say "needs to get fixed"
or something like that it then changes colour as well
so you get a visual aspect of; which has been approved?,
which do I need to look at again?,
is there any of my things that need to go
through a new review? for example.
When working in Bluebeam Studio
everybody can collaborate on the same document
so we don't have to have 12 sets of the same drawings.
So obviously listening to you, Jimmy, the work you've done is fantastic and I think on one level it sounds
very obvious and straightforward when you've got five of the biggest contractors
in an industry who all we use the same subcontractors,
working in the same way and having a standard way of reviewing design,
makes everyone's lives easier.
It might sound obvious for people outside the industry watching who
think that's how the industry works - unfortunately it isn't how it works there's
lots of standards between different organisations and different supply chains
even though there's a lot of overlap between all those businesses and I think
really listening to it - I'm kind of listening, I'm processing the barriers in my
own head in the UK industry it's less about technology and just more about
culture, behaviour, vested interests, collaboration, those sort of things.
Well that's a good point Fred, because I think we can, you know we can sit here and
kind of frame a mindset around us not collaborating all the time, but
actually there are lots of circumstances where different combinations of
companies in the industry do collaborate
so at framework level we have collaboration,
collaboration of companies that maintain the assets for Highways England and
for Network Rail.
So it's a behaviour we can demonstrate when we put our minds to it,
but our kind of default seems to be well other than that
we need to be in a competitive mode and that's
clearly not what we are with digital construction because we're all
learning how to do it
at different rates maybe, but
all on a journey to becoming more efficient and productive as a consequence.
It's interesting along the lines of collaboration, the other
key word that's often thrown around when we're talking about digital construction
is standardisation as well, and from the perspective of a client you will
often have conversations with people who say well I've had the same contractor on
three of my jobs, and even that contractor within the different projects have
different sets of standards for each of those and so it might seem like a huge
ask to get organisations to collaborate with each other - sometimes it's
actually about asking organisations to collaborate within its own environment as well,
figure out what its own standards and processes are. So maybe
actually coming up with something industry-wide would assist organisations
maybe who are very large, have lots of projects and a bit of disparity there, to
begin to standardise, because somebody else has almost done the legwork for them.
Do you think we have the kind of base level of digital
fluency in the UK for something like the way that Jimmy's done to be applied in
this market, I mean do we need to take a step back and look at the base level of
digital construction adoption first before we can move on to design review standards?
I don't think we need to worry about the base level of adoption of digital construction
because the reality is and I've had experience of
this people who have been skeptical about the whole digital construction
the reason why they're skeptical is because they haven't found that one thing that
effectively sparks the light in their mind
so you find that one aspect whether that be something like simply showing scaffold in 3D,
or whether it be as simple as there's a clash detection between what's in front of a
window, you know that they wouldn't necessarily have thought of before
all of a sudden you get that one item and they start getting more involved
and they want to know more and they want to find out more
so having a group of contractors or clients, consultants,
everyone like that working on a standardisation process
which harnesses this digital stuff, it eventually, it will filter down
because people will realise, actually it works and it is more
efficient and you don't have consult-
or consultants understand - consultants and supply chain -
they all understand what it is that's being pushed back to them.
They understand what the comment is, they understand where things are going and so it just
makes everyones lives easier.
It takes away that need for someone to take responsibility as
well because a big problem as a tier one contractor is trying to identify if you
haven't inherited the information that you need for a digital project how much
is it your responsibility to bring that information up to standard and how much
of your money do you need to be spending to create that baseline
and so I think there are elements of standardisation that can take away that concern for a
contractor or a consultant.
and I think this whole topic of collaboration with the design review standards
can be adapted to other aspects of digital
construction which would make the whole UK industry that much easier to work within.
If there was standardised parameters that need to be within models
or standardised methods of drawing for example, for different elements
within a model, you create that base set of data that everyone can manipulate and
you're not losing any competitive edge between contractors because it's how you
manipulate that data and how you utilise that data that provides you the
productivity and the efficiency moving forward, and that's what we - I mean this
is kind of like a leading light in terms of the world if you want to call it that
of what can be done between large contractors I mean go back 15 years ago -
We had this discussion many times okay, are we sort of, how do you say "killing
our competitive advantage" in this case?
Just by sitting down at a table talking
about stuff doesn't mean we're sort of selling our soul to whomever it
might be.
It's-and then taking it from there
I think business that are not really competing on that basis-
exactly yeah it's quality, it's environments, it's safety, it's how efficient we are
money, time, budget, everything like that -
and I think that's one of the really nice things about the design review standards that
you've developed is that it's giving people a way into what we are talking about as digital
construction, that doesn't have a badge on it.
It's just using technology to do something they have to do anyway, better -
and that's the way I see things progressing.
Most of the people that work in our industry already have a phenomenal bit of tech
they carry around their pocket all the time, that's 300 times more powerful the
thing that sent man to the moon
so the access bit is not really the issue,
it's the understanding: OK how can we use what we've got really access to
to make what we have to do easier?
I mean building on the success that you've had in Sweden
I know it's an ongoing project and also listening to
the kind of context we've discussed about the UK industry
what are the first practical steps you could take to bring this into the UK
or into any other market around the world?
I think this is the first step isn't it?
As you said there's four contractors that are sitting here that are willing to discuss this
and have a discussion about it
and I know for one I'll probably be speaking to all
three of my compatriots here
to see if we can organise some kind of a sit-down after this
I mean it's something that needs to be done,
it needs to be pushed forwards there needs to be some some proper collaboration
going on.
I feel like you guys have done a lot of the-
the dangerous stuff for us because there's
an attitude in the UK I believe among contractors where
you don't want to be the first one to stick your head above the parapet
but then you also don't want to be the one that gets left behind.
So we're constantly doing this dance of we want to innovate but
we don't know innovate too much,
what's everybody else doing and now we can
say well that actually has already been done we're just following that lead it's
not one business in the UK going "Guys we should do this" and everyone turning around and go
"no" and them going "oh okay".
LAUGHS
We should say as well, today's conversation is certainly not exclusive to this table
we really want this to be a vehicle for broadening the conversation
in the UK industry so if you are working for another large general contractor
in the UK please do contact us please do get involved
because we'd love to get much bigger roundtable.
So thank you so much being with us today guys
I have really enjoyed our conversation
we hope you've enjoyed watching it as well
I think there's a few takeaways.
First of all some phenomenal work has been done in Sweden and I think it really
underlines the fact that this is not something that contractors necessarily
compete on
it's a shared problem that everyone is experiencing that is in a
way the bane of everyone's lives
and the work you've done can really take that problem away for everyone
and that matters to pretty much any individual watching this video because
the work this industry does affects everyone's lives
and if we can do what we do at a higher quality more efficient way
that will impact everybody's lives, that's really important
I think we've also explored some of the kind of UK industry context,
we've looked at some of the dynamics there,
some of the barriers but also some of the opportunities so it's not all doom and gloom
there are some really good things we do I think that Rennie was saying around collaboration as well
that are really good building blocks that we can start to take forwards
if this has been proven in Sweden there's a
great case study there we'd love to see it coming to the to the UK market.
The loudest message that we want to come out loud and clear from this table is that the
conversation is not limited to the people you can currently see in this
video we want this to go wider than today, we really want more people
involved we want this to have a tangible impact in the UK industry so if you'd
like to get involved please do message us and we will take that forward likewise
whatever country you are watching this in, if the tools and advice we've
discussed today would be helpful for you then please, get going, if we can eventually
get to some sort of global design review standard that would be quite an achievement.
As always guys thanks for watching and
if you enjoyed this video you can subscribe to The B1M.