Skanska UK nurtures supply chain collaboration
Skanska UK, headquartered at Maple Cross, north-west of London, has an annual turnover of more than £1.16 bn and 4,000 employees. Through its skills and experience in construction and infrastructure development, Skanska delivers projects in healthcare, education, defence, transportation and municipal services, delivered through both private and public investment. Specialist in-house teams provide foundations and piling expertise, as well as mechanical and electrical services for buildings and infrastructure. Skanska also provides facilities management, so is truly involved in the whole lifecycle of a building.
New building for Bevis Marks in London (artists impression). Picture: Skanska
A fundamental value for the business is a collaborative approach to delivering projects. Skanska actively seeks to maximize co-operative working, with Skanska teams working directly with selected preferred suppliers. On a large project this may include several hundred suppliers ranging from design consultants through to fit-out specialists. As David Throssell, BIM Implementation Manager, comments “We define BIM as a collaborative approach that ensures the right information gets to the right people at the right time. Collaboration means working together, sharing and reusing information so that we enter it once and reuse it many times. This avoids errors from rekeying data which is often the reason the wrong information gets passed on.”
With both public and private clients driving the rapid adoption of BIM in the UK, David saw some very specific needs and opportunities emerging from this transition. He continues “As an industry we are used to looking at drawings, overlaying them, marking them up and ‘reading them’. The currency of design is changing rapidly and we are receiving more models and data and less paper. So, how do we ‘read’ these models? How do we mark them up with comments? How do we compare versions of models? How do we overlay models? How do we interrogate the rich data contained in the models? Can we improve quality by carrying out checks on these models as this was never easy with paper?”
It was these criteria that the BIM team at Skanska used as the basis for selecting Solibri Model Checker (SMC). David sums up the team’s conclusions as “What we saw was a software tool that analyses 3D CAD Models. That analysis covers model quality (against project standards), model completeness (via material take off), model compliance (against national, local and client codes and regulations), model integrity (checking validity of the modelling approach) and model comparison (against different versions of the same model). In other words, all of our criteria and more.”
Also important in the selection process was the buildingSMART IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) format which provides for universal transfer of BIM models between different software products. The IFC format, which is central to bringing models into SMC, also supports Skanska’s aspiration to be software vendor neutral with respect to BIM. This neutral format will extend the life of data. Another important criteria was COBie (Construction Operations Building information exchange) which is a data structure for transferring model data into FM (Facilities Management). As COBie has been specified by UK Government for all future public projects this was especially important to Skanska with its extensive portfolio of public projects. David notes “Solibri’s support for COBie UK 2012 completeness, checking and creation of the COBie spreadsheets and their willingness to help us develop COBie tools to meet the UK Government BIM mandate was a crucial part of our purchasing decision.”
Skanska UK headquarters
Skanska has established both a BIM Technical Working Group and a Solibri User Group with representatives from across the business. In addition to furthering BIM and quality-checking within their teams, these representatives are also encouraged to bring forward ideas to simplify workflow and collaboration. Increasingly the focus has moved to working with the supply chain where it is paramount to ensure each supply chain partner clearly understands the data and quality required from them. These requirements are described in the project model auditing standards, which forms part of the BIM execution plan on each project, and as David explains are a key part of the on-going relationship strategy with supply partners. “In order to gain trust in the quality of information delivered by our supply chain we looked at our BIM delivery processes and identified a set of validation, audit and completeness checks required at different stages in the project process. With the help of Solibri and their large tool box of rule-based checks we have developed a set of model checks which are easily understood by our supply chain and something we can monitor and report against.”
Skanska has very clear goals from what is required from the deployment of BIM and the role the supply chain has in supporting this. Skanska is aiming to increase productivity, reduce on-site waste, deliver projects with zero defects and improve operational efficiency. Skanska recognises that achieving these goals is critically dependent upon receiving best quality information from its supply chain. With its teamwork approach, coupled with a focus on both its upstream and downstream supply partners, Skanska UK is well placed to meet these goals by helping the supply chain to work together by sharing and reusing reliable project data.
The importance of quality data from the supply chain is emphasised by David: “An important part of collaboration is trust and to get the ‘right information’. We all need to check and validate our information before we make it available to others. Solibri Model Checker is helping us to gain trust in information quality and therefore ensuring new standards for collaborative working on our projects. With high quality data our clients can optimise their operational costs year on year.”
