British Water Members' Handbook 2017 2017 Edition | Page 60

BIM
British Water Handbook 2017
Moving beyond BIM to realise the Business
Objectives BIM supports
BIM seems to be a term that has a Marmite effect on
people, they love it or hate it. Often the perception
that is held of BIM is whether it is interpreted as
‘Building Information Modelling’ or ‘Better Information
Management’. The BIM4Water Owner Operators Group
definitely see BIM as ‘Better Information Management’.
In some organisations BIM is being recognised as an
enabler that fits into the wider development of a digital
business capitalising on the technology of the 4th
Industrial Revolution.
The BIM approach set out in PAS 1192:2 (Capital
Projects/Construction Phase) and PAS 1192:3
(Operations Phase) is part of rethinking how we deliver
to customers, the people paying the bills and receiving
the services. The titles of PAS 1192:2 and 3 start with
‘Specification for information management…’, this
should be where the water industry starts and be
the primary focus with the objective of enabling
improvement in the service to customers.
There is now a growing set of tools which are being
used in the delivery of construction and operations.
This maturing Information Technology (IT) servicing
design and construction; Engineering Technology
(ET); and operations; Operations Technology
(OT); is starting to converge. The benefits of the
convergence of IT/OT/ET helps to resolve an issue
that the water industry has wrestled with for many
years, integrating design and construction with
operations, maintenance and repair.
Assets are created through projects to deliver a
service, the creation of the asset starts with the
development of the scheme using ET. A project is
only an intervention in the life of an asset, as shown in
Figure 1. The value in the ET models is often lost and
not transferred into the OT environment. This means
that when repair and maintenance is carried out
information is not always available and updates to the
asset data as a result of the repair and maintenance
is not always recorded. When the next project comes
along there are resurvey costs in building another ET
model. The convergence of ET and OT enables the
asset data to be kept up to date so the physical asset
and the digital asset are in sync, sometimes referred to
as the digital twin.
Figure 1
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