By Rudd van Deventer
SANS 19650-3 Published
Update June 2024
SANS quietly published SANS(ISO) 19650 Part 3: Operational Phase of the Assets in August 2023 after public comment closed on the 25 May 2023. This is the completion of the efforts of several people, who represent different parties, who have worked together to ensure that South Africa adopts the international standard for the digitisation of information about building.
It has been an interesting ride for the BIMcommUNITY.Africa who have delivered on their undertaking. It is also a success for some of the South African Facilities Management Association members who took the initiative to work around uniquely South African obstacles.
Now that we have adopted the standard, we need to change focus to how we are going to implement the SANS 19650 suite. This is catered for in the approach applied by the ISO (International Standards Organisation) and is to be defined in the South African National Annex.
There is no debate as to the advantages of BIM when used in the construction documentation for most projects. The ability to see the detailed and accurate interface between the many subassemblies and components that make up a building is a major advantage over any existing 2D options. The issue however is that much of this data is lost once that portion of the work is complete, the facility is commissioned or is isolated in proprietary data formats. There is also very little interest in the data by the property and portfolio management sectors.
This needs to change and there is an undertaking by the CIDB (Construction Industry Development Board) to support the process for the compilation of the National Annex. The CIDB has a mandate from the government to formalize the way the state will contract with parties for state work and the CIDB sees a ‘Best Practice: Construction Works Requirements for Digital 2D/3D Collaboration’ as the vehicle. This document obviously needs to be built on the foundation of the National Annex. The introduction of a which will be tied to specific contract values in the beginning and cascade to other contracts values over time.
The preparation of the National Annex will be a giant task and will require a lot of input. Interest has been shown by the CIDB in pulling together stakeholder parties to formulate a position on the best practice mandate and flowing into that the National Annex. An Industry Focus Group* is seen as the ideal vehicle for this effort under the direction of a contracted party.
While the BIMcommUNITY has worked on a voluntary basis (through their BIM CoDE•SA initiative) over the years with events sponsored by the industry, this cannot continue as the information requirements for preparing the National Annex are too great and the scope of involvement needs to be right across the industry. This is not volunteer territory and needs funding that covers the input from specialists that represent the 20 or more stakeholders who have been identified and support for this from the CIDB is essential.
*If you would like to be a part of the CIDB National Focus Group, please send a mail to angela@bimcommunity.africa
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