Fitzalan school: fully harnessing the benefits of digital construction - Andrew Miles, Project Director & Russell Baker, Senior BIM Manager, Kier and Jo Kemp, Deputy Head, Fitzalan School

Kier Construction implemented their Digital Transformation programme. Reviewing all of our software application estate, with aims to modernise, standardise and consolidate our technology use. Part of this review was Collaboration Software, bringing models and drawings together in a cloud based platform, allowing project teams to coordinate in the 3D space and associated 2D drawings, in a managed environment.

Kier is bringing this digital strategy to life at Fitzalan High School, a hugely significant, £64.3m project which will provide state-of-the-art teaching facilities for 1,50011-16-year-old schoolchildren, plus a sixth form for Cardiff City Council.

Kier is combining individual discipline models into a federated model for viewing overall 3D co-ordination. This approach also enables us to align 2D PDF drawings to the 3D model and is having a number of positive benefits on the programme including:

- Increased client engagement - easily able to visualise progress in the 3D environment
- Speed of decision making
- Easier co-ordination on issues management
- Creating, marking up and saving viewpoints to assist with design coordination activities
- Creating selection sets to categorize objects to filter by work package
- Easy and effective reviewing of object data

The digitally-led approach pioneered at Fitzalan is having important benefits 'beyond the build' and client engagement has been significantly elevated through being able to show end users then and there, a particular space in its bare form using tablets. The Fitzalan team are also able to involve pupils and teaching staff of the existing school in a safe and effective way: by using the VR Headsets and Matterport, the school can carry out site inductions and pupil interaction. This approach has also facilitated community liaison events where XBOX controllers can be used by staff and pupils to navigate digital models to view what their new building will look like.

Using Digital Technologies & Data Analytics to Improve the Operational Performance of Higher and Further Education Estates - Dean Drobot, Head of Energy & Utilities Management, Uni of Edinburgh and Michael Pollock, IES

This joint presentation from the University of Edinburgh and IES will demonstrate how emerging digital twin technologies, dynamic simulation modelling and data analytics approaches are being deployed as part of a “living lab” initiative to identify operational savings across the University estate. The session will present practical solutions which can be adopted by any estates team to reduce the performance gap, tackle declining performance in existing buildings, and support a cost-effective net-zero transition.