Lifecycle Information management to offer asset portfolio-level value propositions

Sam Jack, a Driving Vision associate, explores how the construction & property industries could improve productivity from asset delivery and gain residual value from its in-use stages. Meeting these challenges is increasingly difficult due to skills shortages, tender price increases, project complexity, reducing yield returns and, of course, the global pandemic.

At Driving Vision, we believe that Industrialisation & Circular Economy based business models, if utilised & integrated correctly, help meeting asset delivery and operational objectives.

Design for Manufacture & Assembly (DfMA) is known as both a philosophy and a methodology whereby products are designed in a way that is as amenable as possible for downstream manufacturing and assembly enabling modular & offsite assembly, to gain greater degrees of freedom to decide to apply offsite and wider modern methods of construction from full volumetric modules through to small, packaged assemblies or kits of parts.

What could be automated?

Driving Vision and their partners Plannerly provide a platform for clients to establish & deliver their business objective of gaining more value from assets. This process includes:

• capturing information requirements and uses from all stakeholders at the portfolio level,
• collaborative development of BIM Execution Plans to ensure what, when and who is transparent,
• during delivery lean BIM task sequencing & production management
• and BIM quality validation based on operational and functional requirements.

What solutions Driving Vision could propose to help you?

• Automating the planning and scoping process of detailed 3D design elements capturing manufacturing details,
• Integrating into your processes an authoring system design using actual procurement equipment & materials, including fixings, supports, bracketry, etc.
• Ensuring concurrent activities to take place
• Eliminating assumptions in the workflows
• Undertaking functional validation of the design prior to manufacture.

How will these solutions help you to mitigate the risks?

While DfMA does expose opportunities for the types of assembly & standardisation earlier during the design stage it can also:

• improve the assembly and logistic planning process.
• assist with re-use
• identify other uses of co-ordinated design information for collaborative planning and sequencing in the form of 4D visualisation,
• simplify the amount of material tracking on site
• reduce human resources and waste. from the need to perform ‘on-site field engineering’.

• quality control is simpler to instigate as parts from factory assembly can be tracked and automatically update BIM databases with:

  • QR codes,
  • RFID tags,
  • Geo-fencing technologies once installed.

Some owner-operator clients are now moving towards adopting circular economy-based business models, driven by investment KPI’s, that require:

• assets to be energy efficient and adaptable throughout their lifecycle to meet changing occupants’ requirements
• uniformed ways to present & store information of product data for future reuse of materials and systems sometimes referred to as product passports.
• a robust understanding of how layers of the building or technical systems interface can be easily dismantled
• the content & quantities to be easily analysed & accessed so re-use strategies can be formulated quickly.
• a mechanism to gain residual value from materials being realised (i.e. cradle to cradle) as opposed to overhead demolition costs currently experienced at end of asset life.
• Convergence of design and manufacturing information via digitisation for use in 3D printing, assembly automation.

These aspects can be best managed throughout the lifecycle by applying the right-first-time approach to design and information management from the use of DfMA.

Implementing BIM can be daunting, but Driving Vision is here to help you at the pace you are comfortable with. Get started by getting in touch now