Lean Construction Ireland Annual Book of Cases 2021 35 Case 9 Established in 1977, Ardmac is an international construction specialist delivering complex and high-value workspaces and technical environments. Headquartered in Dublin, with offices in Manchester, Craigavon, Brussels, Cork, and Switzerland, Ardmac is supporting projects all over Ireland, the UK, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and have this year announced their expansion into Finland and Germany. Ardmac employs over 350 people and are a leading global provider of cleanrooms,data centres, fit-out and refurbishment, and modular solutions. At Ardmac, we work Smart, meaning we deploy innovative technology throughout our business to empower our people, drive performance, and delight our customers.We believe in setting new standards for our industry and driving innovation, we believe in tailoring solutions to our clients’ evolving needs, and in working hard to harness our unrivalled knowledge to deliver safety first and excellence as standard across award-winning projects. The successful construction of complex technical environments for the data centre industry involves the carefully sequenced integration of multiple building components.To aid this process,modern digital construction techniques within the data centre construction sector require the use of BIM to integrate and coordinate components in a 3D virtual environment ahead of construction.The process of coordination through unique digital replicas of the building has become an established industry norm. As a consequence of the proven benefits to cost and schedule certainty, clients or end-users of the building expect a high standard of BIM from their specialist supply chain partners as standard. Although the use of BIM is an established practice, the level of detail and accuracy required to leverage the benefits of BIM at a preconstruction stage vary from project to project, and, furthermore, from component to component. Equally, reliance on competent specialist fire-stopping has become increasingly important to clients for the safety of personnel and the protection of assets. Herein lies the challenge for providers of specialist interior architectural partitions, and inter-dependent service providers needing to pass piping, ducting, cable-trays, and other sector-specific building components through the partitions from one internal space to another.This case study describes how a Lean initiative developed and utilised by Ardmac leverages a technology-based process to apply an innovative digital construction process, namely “Service Penetration Management”. Company Overview ARDMAC ardmac.com Overview & Background to the Lean Initiative Peter Lonergan Author Challenges in Service Integration Where services interface with or pass through internal partitions, a tertiary construction element is created and upon which multiple stakeholders depend.This interdependency is represented in model form by a penetration in a partition, allowing services to pass from room to room clash-free.The sum total of penetrations can be costly to clients,with varying commercial impacts based on quantity, size, height above floor level, location, and type.Often, the true cost of the penetrations is unclear and can remain largely undefined until well into the construction programme. Additionally, service penetrations require specific and often expensive firestopping materials to maintain the integrity of fire rated partitions and to conform with building standards. However, at the time Ardmac developed the Service Penetration Management Process, there did not exist any one end-to-end dedicated sectoral standard or defined BIM process for the modelling and management of service penetrations.The existing standard management procedure for this element of works was limited in most cases. Figure 1. Example of Complex Service & Partition Integration within BIM Model Lean Initiative Undertaken – Lean Thinking, Tools, Techniques
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