SMM7 comes under fire

A leading QS has described the industry's use of SMM7 as anarchy and called for the RICS to spearhead a new wave of standardisation.

Brendan Patchell, an associate at Bucknall Austin, criticised the method during the RICS' ‘Developments in cost planning' seminar last week: "It's not user friendly, it's very vague and it differs from one company to another. There's a lot of anarchy. People are doing their own thing," he said, adding that SMM7 was also being "used and abused".

He has called for the RICS to instigate new national rules of measurement, a central database to hold a new bills of quantities description library and a new set of rates, in order to allow QSs to offer more accurate early cost advice.

"You need people to buy into it - so there is true re-use," he said. "A lot of people out there feel the same way. The RICS should look into it."

The BCIS exists to exchange data at the elemental level and currently has over 15,000 projects on the database and nearly all firms subscribe to the service. However, Joe Martin, executive director at the BCIS, said: "At a more detailed level these is less consistency in data structures. There is an initiative in the RICS at the moment to try and address this and develop a coherent structure from elements through to detailed trade measurement."

Patchell said a new prescriptive B of Q library should be created, and then be tied into a cost planning library to allow individual elements "to talk to each other". But he said the main problem was reconciliation between the individual elements and the trades.

During the seminar, Patchell singled out life expectancy as an area he believes will "make or break" PFI projects. However, he admitted that life expectancy costs were difficult to ascertain: "Where do you get life expectancy costs from? There isn't the data out there. We need to get the industry to agree on life expectancies of comparative objects. If something goes wrong 23 years into a 25-year PFI project, contractors could potentially just walk away, leaving the government to foot the bill."

The QS said Bucknall Austin was already developing a web-based SQL (structured query language) database. Using SQL allows data to move more freely in and out of the various programmes currently used in the industry.

Drawing parallels with the aerospace industry, Patchell said: "They proved the new Airbus A380 jumbo jet was efficient, then built it. But in our industry, we build something and then say: ‘now what do we do with it?' Look at the Millennium Dome. If we're building a nuclear power station, we want to know the cost of demolishing it in 50 years."

Patchell argued that part of the problem was down to technology. "The architects have stolen a march on us with Autocad. We, as QSs, use Excel. Each function is in a different programme and the information is not flowing. It's like Chinese whispers, we're using common data repeatedly."

The first ‘guidance note' on cost planning, the Ministry of Education Building Bulletin No. 4' was published in 1951. It was introduced to speed up the construction of schools and is heralded as introducing the concept of elemental cost planning to the UK construction industry. The RICS Guidance Note 'Pre-Contract Cost Planning and Cost Management' was last updated in 1998.