Clients like Bass Leisure Retail, which has a yearly capital investment programme of £140m-240m, are fuelling the take-up of IT in construction. Contractors, consultants and architects have long blamed clients for not showing enough interest in how technology can improve processes, but now it is clients who are highlighting their views on where IT is going.
No more so than at a meeting at Salford University two weeks ago, where Millbanks was one of two construction clients to speak. The other was Bernard Fenton from Boots The Chemists. The gathering was convened by Construct IT, based at the university, which aims to encourage the use of IT to improve construction processes. Members of Construct IT include Citex and engineers Montgomery Watson and WS Atkins, as well as recent recruit Bass.
Design is a key area where IT is making its presence felt. For Bass, this includes creating virtual reality images of proposed buildings. Millbanks is responsible for theme pubs such as O’Neills and All Bar One, where continuity of design from pub to pub is crucial, and is using “spin-rounds” to show the firm’s contractors exactly how the pub interiors should look. These allow the viewer to rotate a virtual reality image as if he or she were turning around in the room.
Millbanks concedes that the quality of the spin-rounds leaves something to be desired but says that, for now, they more than serve their purpose.
He notes that when Bass built a Vivo pub in central London, the brewer involved the contractor five months earlier than is usual and showed the foreman an image of what it wanted, which “made a huge difference”. The pub included stonework arches that would have been difficult to portray in line drawings, so the virtual image of the interior gave the foreman a much clearer idea of what he needed to produce.
Design is not the only area where clients are forging ahead with IT. The latest buzzphrase in industry circles is “knowledge management”. This is a woolly term that usually means providing easy access to manuals and best-practice tips for any process from operating a computer to health and safety. As development and implementation manager at Boots, Fenton is setting up a company intranet to store such information.
Fenton expects the intranet to save time wasted looking for information before a project begins, but says it could have wider applications. “What if we shared that data?” he asks. This would involve giving outside suppliers secure access to the Boots intranet. This “extranet” would replace slower communication methods such as fax machines and the post. Fenton plans to have the intranet up and running within nine months. The extranet could be in place this time next year.
Another area Millbanks is looking at is how the little understood area of object technology could help his business. Although he has yet to master the technical detail, he is convinced that object-based CAD design is the natural successor to virtual reality images. “I didn’t know what it was four months ago,” he admits. “As I understand it, everything in a building has a little CV.”
The “little CV” is the key to reducing design and construction errors because each object “knows” what it is, how big it is, how much it weighs, where it should fit into the building and what it costs. This should help to satisfy the client’s brief, simulate the building, introduce standardisation and allow immediate cost modelling.
As a starting point, Millbanks is introducing Architectural Desktop Version 2 as a standard design tool for all the firm’s architects from next June. The CAD system supports project model data exchange as defined by the International Alliance for Interoperability.
Millbanks may have coined a neat phrase by describing objects as having CVs, but his flash of inspiration underlines a more serious point – the need to make new technology comprehensible. Systems are useless if nobody wants to work with them, no matter how whizzy they seem. Millbanks needs pubs that people want to drink in. If e-mail can help him get that, all well and good. But he needs to keep up with the new technology that will help him get pubs quicker and cheaper, because, if he does not, his competitors will. Contractors and consultants should do the same.
Construct IT is looking for more industry members, particularly small and medium-sized businesses. For more information, contact Marjan Sarshar on 0161-295 5317.
