Step into the future of building information and safety with our exclusive interview featuring the innovative mind behind our upcoming new feature, Goldenai. In this insightful article, we interview Ian Yeo, the dynamic CEO at the helm of our innovative platform. The spotlight of our conversation shines on Goldenai, the latest feature set to revolutionise how users engage with our platform. Goldenai is not just a feature; it’s your new personal assistant, meticulously designed to enhance your digital experience. This advanced tool promises to streamline navigation, provide tailored support, and bring a new level of efficiency and personalisation to your interactions with our platform. Join us as we delve into the inspiration, technology, and aspirations behind Goldenai.

Before getting into finite detail, we wanted to ask Ian his overall thoughts about Goldenai. Have a read of what he said below:

“I’m incredibly excited about this new feature. The results we’ve been seeing are astonishing, surpassing our initial expectations. This feature not only provides easy access to the content of your building information but also offers valuable insights into your data. We’re all too familiar with the ‘Information Tax’ – the cost incurred every time we search and disseminate information throughout a building’s entire lifecycle. Goldenai is designed to be your solution to this challenge, acting as your personal assistant.

The development journey over the past six months has been intensive, focusing on delivering this innovative solution to our customers. What’s been truly remarkable is the rapid evolution of the technology underpinning this feature since its inception, expanding the possibilities and potential it holds.”

On that note, let’s get started with the interview:

Rest assured, your data with Operance remains entirely secure and is never shared with external AI providers like OpenAI (ChatGPT). We strictly host your data within the UK or EU cloud infrastructure, ensuring it stays within a controlled and protected environment. This means that external AI entities neither retain nor utilise your information for their model training purposes.

Regarding the use of your data for training large language models, we adhere to a stringent policy of non-disclosure and non-utilisation. All data is securely stored within our AWS-provisioned cloud infrastructure, which prohibits its use as training material for any large language models. Your privacy and data integrity are our top priorities, ensuring a secure and trustworthy experience with Operance.

Welcome to a new era in building project management and safety! We are excited to introduce our latest innovation on our esteemed building operations and safety platform – a Home Dashboard! 

Operance is providing both practical expertise and software to the Golden Thread Initiative (GTI), a collaboration of industry professionals launched to trial Government proposals on the “golden thread”. 

The golden thread is a digital way of working to enable a systematic, controlled approach to the management of building safety information throughout the design, construction, refurbishment and management of occupied buildings. 

It was one of the key recommendations of the Hackitt Report into the failures that led to 72 people losing their lives in the Grenfell tragedy.

The process will produce an audit trail of information about a building, the decisions made about it and who made them. In doing so, it will provide increased accountability and ownership of decision-making through the design, build and occupation phases.

Sponsored by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), the purpose of the GTI is to bring together industry professionals to work collaboratively for the benefit of the built environment and to trial methods of producing a standardised digital golden thread for building safety information that will satisfy the requirements of the future Building Safety Regulator.

The GTI is working with the Government and the HSE as the future Building Safety Regulator to trial different ways of meeting the information management requirements to help prevent another tragedy and create a working prototype of the golden thread.

The eight-month initiative, led by housing association L&Q on behalf of MHCLG, launched in November and is split into specific working groups, in which industry experts from particular specialisms collaborate on exploring different standards and creating a working prototype of the golden thread. 

Participants from the GTI will produce a report for the Government later this year revealing the findings of its work, sharing lessons learned, and potential options on implementing a digital golden thread. 

As a leading digital estates software developer and consultancy practice, Operance was invited to join the GTI and is represented across several of the working groups, with a particular focus on information management technology, project management, information and process mapping and asset information collation.

The company is developing its own pioneering software to define, coordinate and audit building operations and maintenance (O&M) information.

Scott Pilgrim, Chief Product Officer at Operance, is a member of the GTI’s Information Management Platform working group.

He said: “It’s a privilege to have the opportunity to share our knowledge and expertise with the GTI to help transform the construction industry, making buildings safer and protecting lives.

“Our vision to create a digital golden thread is completely aligned to that of the GTI. A disaster like Grenfell must never be allowed to happen again and for that to happen, it’s imperative leading industry professionals come together in this way to drive fundamental and lasting change.

“As well as being able to provide our own insights through this forum, Operance’s participation in the project means we can listen and learn from all of those involved to understand fully what the industry needs.

“This will be a huge benefit to the development of our platform, ensuring it is truly revolutionary.”

Operance’s new information management platform, Operance O&M, is a purpose-built desktop-application to define, curate, audit and maintain information about a building from design to occupation. The solution provides an immutable ‘quantum ledger’, built on blockchain technology, to produce a secure lifecycle record of high-quality building safety and asset information.

Accurate and easy to understand building and asset information will be shared with owners, operators and occupiers via the pioneering Operance FM mobile-application, providing users with crucial detail in real-time via smart building and home user guides. 

With this building information in the palm of their hand, users can easily search, share, update and utilise their data to operate and maintain their facilities, whilst managing risks and continuously developing the golden thread.

Both the Operance O&M and Operance FM applications are currently in beta-testing with a full release planned for the summer.

Operance is offering a limited number of social housing associations and other organisations the opportunity to test the software and help shape features to suit their needs. 

To help social housing associations get ready for the new legislation and begin digitalising their portfolio, Operance is also providing strategic digital transformation and Building Information Modelling (BIM) consultancy services to enable them to define and articulate their digital estate ambitions. 

By creating robust systems and processes and coordinating their digital building information, Operance provides clients with the best possible chance of generating a quality golden thread and digital estates legacy in which to provide safer, more efficient homes.

Operance’s Digital Transformation Lead, Tom Oulton, one of the country’s leading BIM professionals, is a member of the GTI Project Management working group.

He said: “We’re on the cusp of revolutionary change to the design, construction and management of our built environment.

“Following Grenfell, we must take this opportunity to work collectively to ensure it’s never repeated. This is a chance to affect change that we must not let pass us by.”

The Hackitt Review was published in May 2018 following an independent review of building regulations and fire safety at Grenfell, led by Dame Judith Hackitt. It included 50 recommendations on how to improve the design, build and operation of buildings and facilities to make them safer and more efficient.

A public inquiry into the Grenfell disaster is ongoing. The first phase focused on the factual narrative of the events on the night of 14^th June, 2017.  The second phase of the inquiry is examining the causes of these events, including how Grenfell Tower came to be in a condition which allowed the fire to spread the way it did.

Any social housing association or other organisation that would like to take part in the beta test of the Operance software can register their interest by emailing beta@operance.app.

The Operance team is also available to provide advice and guidance about the implementation of the golden thread and what it will mean for the construction industry. Email info@operance.app to get in touch or, for more information, go to www.operance.app or follow @OperanceApp on Twitter or Operance on LinkedIn.

Any organisation that would like further information about the GTI should contact the Programme Manager Kirsty Villiers by emailing kvilliers@lqgroup.org.uk.

To speak to one of the team for more information, call 0800 464 3316.

Search beyond assets with information about your building, floors and spaces now available. 

In addition to your assets, you can now search for information relevant to your actual buildings, floors and spaces.

Should you need the perimeter, area, height or cubic space of a particular room for example, your answer is just one screen away!

Not only can we provide information about individual spaces and floors, but also all your buildings within your portfolio or on your estate/campus.

Whether you are looking to replace the carpets on an entire floor for a new corporate tenant, rent out out a number of spaces to them, find and share floor or fire plans for them, then you now have everything you need in one handy place, your pocket!

With easy access to all this information and more, you can negotiate rates based on exact floor area, plan workspaces, re-name office spaces and so much more whilst standing in the exact space you are discussing and planning.

Let’s say for example you needed to replace the floor tiling within the first floor lobby and WC’s within your building and you need the exact area measurement to obtain a quote. You would simply follow these steps;

1. Click on the ‘Spaces’ tab in the top search bar from the Home page (see above image).
2. Filter your spaces by choosing which builiding and then the floor you require, in this case ’01 FFL’, click confirm.
3. That’s it! You now have the exact square area of each space in this area summarised by each space tab.

Now let’s say you want particular information about an actual room, such as the actual dimensions within say the Accessible WC (01.RM.05) now you simply;

1. Click on the space tab (see below image).
2. Click on ‘Dimensions’ and there you have it, your square and even your total perimiter.

It’s as simple as that! Now imagine you are visiting a carpet shop and remember you didn’t bring along your living room dimensions, soon that won’t be a problem either!

Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM) – Wikipedia

Construction Operation Building Information Exchange (COBie) – NBS

Operance invites you to test and help develop our latest innovation:

Artificial Intelligence (AI)
(noun) The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.

Want to know more about your assets, but don’t have the necessary information?

Whether your information is lost, never provided or simply incorrect; we are working on a groundbreaking solution to solve this very problem via the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI). At Operance we believe in continually investing in the future through innovation and this project is certainly no different.

We also want to help end-users using Operance to search, share, update and utilise their BIM data to continuosly grow and organise their asset register, through the use of Uniclass Classifications. Our AI tool not only detects and estimates what your asset is, it also auto-classifies it too!

The Concept: is simple, a user can already open up our AI tool, point their phone at an asset and take a picture of it. The tool then analyses the asset and provides a possible match, within a millisecond!

The Vision: is much harder, once we have established what the asset is, we then want to find a way of providing all the information available about your assets particular make and model.

We’ve still some way to go, but we are really pleased with our progress so far in such a relatively short space of time. Why not have a go yourself?

Take your first AI step today

To test our AI tool, simply click the above button or visit ai.operance.app on your mobile device and follow these steps;

1. Once the web page has opened, click on ‘Select image’.
2. Now either take a new photo of an asset in front you or choose an image from your photo library.
3. Once the image has been uploaded, click ‘Analyse’.
4. You should now have an estimate asset classification and confirdence %. Now click either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to tell us if we got it correct.

This last step is really important for us in order to build up our Machine Learning (ML) capability. The more we get right, the stronger the database will be.

Should your result not be what you expected, simply re-analyse the image, or take another, more focussed and central image of your asset and try again.

Together we can reinvent the future of asset information!

We now need your help to complete it. Simply click the link above, point your phone at an asset (boilers, light switches, radiators etc) and shoot. Within a millisecond we’ll estimate what the asset is, providing a probability rating.

It’s not perfect, it’s still in very much in design and development, but each time you test it, the database grows and becomes more reliable and informative.

Hopefully, with your help, we will one day be able to provide you with manufacturer details, specifications, warranties and more!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Wikipedia

12 Examples of Artificial Intelligence – Datamation

Machine Learning (ML) – Wikipedia

Uniclass Classification – NBS

Now have a solid minimum viable product (MVP) to build from, we’re speeding up the development of new features to increase the functionality of our app and your O&M information!

Our focus is now squarely on empowering users to add to their as-built information to continuously develop the digital record of their assets and facilities.

This means that for the first time via Operance, users can create digital O&M records for legacy buildings and not just new buildings derived from BIM models.

We are also working on our biggest request: Task Management and Notifications meaning users will be able to create proactive and reactive tasks from their as-built O&M information.

Having taken this leap into beta stage, we need your feedback more than ever to help our simple O&M, develop into a market-ready smart estates management platform with your needs in mind.