Notes from Kier’s Head of BIM, Andy Boutle
THE KIER DIGITAL STRATEGY
Improving project delivery is as the heart of our digital strategy. We created the strategy through liaison with colleagues across the whole of our construction business – asking them what they wanted from a digital perspective.
The result is a collaborative approach that supports our overall construction strategy. Our combined aim is to drive internal efficiencies, improve quality, reduce risk and support better decision making to continually improve project delivery to our clients.
THE ROLE OF BIM
The success or failure of a project hinges on the timely delivery of appropriate, good quality, information; how it is managed and shared across the project team. It leads to better outcomes because people can make better-informed decisions.
BIM’s role in our digital strategy is to standardise information management to enable these better-informed decisions at a project level. Read more about the importance of information management in a digitally maturing built environment
“We are noticing a bit of improvement on programme and we’re starting to see some tangible successes. The challenge is to work out how to properly measure and benchmark, which can be tricky. Our reporting work-stream of the digital strategy, which is delivering a ‘data warehouse’ capturing information from our commercial and operational systems, should make analysis much easier ahead.”
MAKING IT HAPPEN
To implement the digital strategy, the managing directors within our construction business were asked to nominate a digital champion in each of their businesses.
Most are BIM leaders but, refreshingly, some are not: we have examples where an operational person, say, a project manager has been nominated.
Covid has helped us accelerate our digital strategy and pick out some of those business-critical items to prioritise.
We are in the process of rationalising the tools we are using around information management, BIM, field tools, etc. We are bringing that all in centrally to benefits Kier, our supply chain and our clients because we are asking them to interact with the same tools consistently.
Another business-critical element is agile working, using the likes of Microsoft Office Teams and SharePoint and some of the clever collaborative tools that we can get from there. Meetings have been more effective, and less time has been lost to travelling.
BETTER OUTCOMES
You can see the positive impact BIM has had across a wide range of projects at Kier, with well over a 30% of our projects over the last few years having some form of information requirements set out by our clients. Katherine Warrington School in Harpenden, St Sidwell’s Point Leisure Centre in Exeter and Alness Academy in Scotland are a few examples of many projects across the width and breadth of the UK embracing BIM and digital.
https://www.kier.co.uk/our-projects/alness-academy/
DO YOU WANT TO SET THE STANDARD FOR THE NEXT EXEMPLAR PROJECT?
I now have 21 colleagues with BIM-specific roles across the construction business.
We have some great careers opportunities for BIM specialists who share our passion for digital construction excellence and want to make it happen. We want to help you help us deliver better which is why we are proud to be included in the Good Digital Employers list.
Kier are a GOOD DIGITAL EMPLOYER – read more