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GBPB Green Building Price Book

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  • This was promoted 20 years ago but the publishers pushed back: “No demand”
  • 20 years on the industry is in financial and competency crisis at the same time as we have a biodiversity and climate crisis

The state of the Industry

  • Today habitually low-cost-focussed cost-planning is the order of the day:
    • It seems to ignore the Client’s brief, BREEAM, Ska requirements, Regulations
      • From bad cost-plan onwards, everything goes downhill
        • Hackett’s ‘race to the bottom’
        • Cost cutting towards an artificially low cost-plan
        • Value Engineering (Posh for cost cutting as practiced in UK construction)
        • Tender re-evaluation
        • Bread and butter contracts (no profits and low salaries)
        • Sub-contract dutch bargaining
        • Specification Substitution (Surreptitious or otherwise)
        • Short cuts towards incompetent building
        • Building fabric performance gap
        • Ultimately Grenfell fire
    • Building price books used for cost-planning are based on:
      • Low levels of granularity in choice of assemblies leading to inaccuracy and incompetent prices
      • Violet materials prices in a world that is demanding more greener low carbon materials
    • Cost-planning seems to fail to allow for:
      • Competent trade interfaces especially building integrated services
      • Procurement Methods that add a fee to reduce the quality of the end result
      • Contractor’s design responsibilities
  • The industry is as good as bankrupt financially.
    • Sub-contractors bankroll main contractors with 3 month delays in payment
    • Mental stress is rife and suicides are happening all too often
    • With all eyes on a violet cost plan any green brief will be eroded back to a violet building.
    • Fiduciary Rules (a legal obligation to make a profit for shareholders) drives a need to save money at every step in the process
    • Penny pinching and shortcuts happen
    • Tradesmen are rushed to meet unrealistic deadlines and have no time to care
    • Jobs are not completed, lives may be in danger, again.

Competent Information

  • Grenfell enquiry has highlighted ‘a culture of incompetency’ runs from top to bottom of the construction industry affecting:
    • regulators, accreditors, assessors, test houses, insurers, advisory bodies, clients, agents, designers, constructors, installers, suppliers and manufacturers; directors to employees
  • Current and future information sources need to be part of the new ‘Culture of Competency’ (CoC) instilled in the Code of Construction Product Information (CCPI) and handled or manipulated within Product Information Management (PIM) systems and design and decision tools like GBC.
  • Existing test evidence, certificates, accreditations or assessments need to be refreshed within the new CoC to provide confidence to the users
  • GBC, GBPB & GBPDC will seek ‘culture of competency’ data from CCPI signatories and from new evidence as it becomes available.

Green Building Price Book (GBPB)

  • We all need better materials and product price data to get out of this mess
  • We all need to build low carbon buildings without the ‘race to the bottom’
  • We all need better price data to feed robust cost-planning
  • Clients need robust competent cost-planning to protect their ambitions
  • Green Building Calculator (GBC) needs better price data to feed the calculations
  • GBC’s integrated Bill of Quantities interacts with many calculation and has numerous functions:
    • Cost-planning (using previous project rates data)
    • Collating prices from manufacturer’s websites and literature
    • Capturing sub-contract quotes and prices
    • Main Contractor tendering
    • Tender evaluation
    • Real Value Engineering not just cost-cutting
  • Hence GBPB is planned to feed GBC and other design and decision tools in the same boat
  • Initially GBC needs data in Excel worksheets
  • An intelligent worksheet has been developed and is available to download now
  • GBC anticipate manufacturers, suppliers and installers providing their prices to get their products used
  • GBC will priorities collecting data on low energy, low carbon, low plastic, low chemistry materials and products
  • Once populated GBC will merge in the worksheets so users have access to them
  • Drop down lists will be expanded to give access to new product added to worksheets
  • Prices and rates need to be realistic prices that are available in the market not the best price only available to big or repeat customers (see Future Developments)

Future developments

  • GBC anticipates quickly developing an online platform to capture:
    • Green Building Product Data Collection (GBPDC)
    • Green Building Price Book (GBPB)
    • They may be the same platform with two data entry portals
  • As GBC versions develop more datasets will be required to interrogate products
  • GBPB anticipate collecting rates for small, medium and large quantities of materials and products for more precise cost-planning on different sized projects.

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GBPB Green Building Price Book C#882 End.

© GBE GBC GBL NGS ASWS Brian Murphy aka BrianSpecMan **
12th March 2022 – 13th March 2022

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