Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/1083348
www.wwtonline.co.uk | WWT | MARCH 2019 | 11 approaches had been adopted by water companies in their current business plans when talking about resilience. "Resilience planning is di erent, it is not just about systems, it is about collabo- ration, and as we go forward this will be the acid test," Bishop concluded. BIM's Asset management benefi ts 'being missed' The water industry needs to take sig- ni• cant steps forward in digitising asset management information if it is to reap the real bene• ts of BIM, delegates at the conference also heard. Mott MacDonald digital delivery princi- pal Simon Kerr, who chairs the BIM4Wa- ter group, said the water industry has become highly e ective in delivering new assets through digital engineering and adopting approaches such as alliances, early contract involvement and Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA). However, BIM4Water has estimated that just 20 per cent of BIM's bene• ts come in the design and construction phase, with the remaining 80 per cent available once the asset has been handed over and is in use. "BIM is about looking not only at the lifecycle-of-project information but the whole-lifecycle-of-asset information," Kerr told delegates in Birmingham. "Within the water sector, we've got roughly £350 billion worth of assets that are in use, and we're adding to it at the tune of around £2 billion a year. In short, we're not going to be able to build our way out of trouble this time – we've got to manage those existing assets in a smarter way." He said asset information is "typically in a pretty poor state" and that, while there are many streams of data coming in, they can fail to deliver many of the insights that are required. "We may typically know when the as- set is turning on and o , what part of the network it's in, how much it costs to run, what our customers are thinking about it and that sort of thing, but in my experi- ence we don't know with any con• dence what that thing actually is, what it was designed to do, exactly where it is or where our spares are for it," he said. "What we need then is a consistent, structured approach to procuring the digital asset along with the physical asset to maximise the value. This is where we need BIM – this is what BIM was designed to do." BIM4Water has been making e orts to de• ne standard product data templates that can be shared throughout the indus- try and provide the non-graphical infor- mation that sits behind the BIM model. SPONSORED BY "Climate change will mean more unpredictable winters as well more intense storms in summer, so we will all need to plan for a wider range of conditions then we are used to." Manuela di Mauro, Water Sector Lead, National Infrastructure Commission "Everybody thinks they know what BIM level 3 will look like – it'll be smart cities and smart infrastructure and those sorts of things – but nobody knows how we get there." Gary Ross, Head of Digital Transforma- tion, nmcn THE SPEAKERS "The environment is the super system that everything relies on. If the water industry doesn't play its part in protecting the environment, then it could compromise system resilience in future." Trevor Bishop, Director, Water Resources South East (WRSE) "The sewer system was built to take bodily effl uent, but these days in developed countries it has become normal for people to use the sewer as a bin." Elvira Gabos, FOG and Unfl ushables Man- ager, Southern Water Kerr also called on the sector to unite behind the various existing standards such as BS 1192, which introduces the concept of Common Data Environment and a standard • le-naming convention, and PAS 1192-3, which is the speci• ca- tion for information management for the operational phase of assets using BIM. He said that while BIM is now evolv- ing towards the international ISO 19650 standard, it is built on the same princi- ples.