From snagging to Building Safety Act evidence
Progress photos and a snagging spreadsheet used to be enough. Under the Building Safety Act, a project needs a golden thread of information it can actually produce on request.
Ask a site manager how progress gets recorded and the honest answer, on most projects, is still a phone camera, a shared drive and a good memory. That was tolerable when the worst case was a dispute over a variation order. Since the Building Safety Act 2022, for higher risk buildings, it is not.
The golden thread problem
The Act requires a continuous, accurate record of a building's design and construction information, the golden thread, held and updated through the building's life, not assembled retrospectively when a regulator asks. A folder of undated photos and a version controlled spreadsheet does not satisfy that on its own. What a project needs is a record that is dated, located precisely in the building, and traceable back to who observed it and when.
A weekly or fortnightly capture of a site builds exactly that. Each scan is a dated, geolocated 3D record of the building as it stood on that day, held against the same coordinate system every time, so a reviewer can move from a general area of the building straight to the relevant capture without hunting through folders.
Where the five construction roles actually use it
Progress tracking, review and approval workflows, and reporting that does not require a site visit to compile.
Defect capture against the exact location on the twin, and a daily log that does not rely on memory a week later.
Compliance evidence tied to CDM 2015 duties, and hazard identification across the whole site rather than the areas someone happened to walk.
Quantity Surveyors and BIM Managers get the same underlying capture put to different use, measurement and valuation evidence for the QS, and an IFC overlay against the design model for clash detection and as built comparison for the BIM Manager, aligned with an ISO 19650 information management approach.
Honest limit: the twin is evidence of what a scan saw on a given day. It does not replace a competent person's sign off, and it will not catch a defect that was covered over before the next capture. Capture frequency is a judgement call a project makes, not something the software decides for you.
The IFC overlay against a Revit or BIM model is a feature in its own right, and worth a closer look. We cover it later in this series. For the wider case for FM, insurance, security and defence teams, see our Construction vertical page.
See a live construction twin
We can walk you through a real project twin, including how the golden thread record looks to a Building Safety Regulator on request.
See the Construction vertical