Council of West Midlands town looks to improve collaboration during design and delivery of construction projects

Solihull Council is looking has set aside up to £250,000 to establish a cloud-based centralised “common data environment” (CDE) to help it design and construct buildings more effectively. 

According to a contract notice published by the authority, it is looking to set up a “central data store that all consultants and stakeholders have access to” during the design, modelling, and project-delivery process for the construction of new buildings. Such an environment will be located in the cloud and operate on a software-as-a-service model, Solihull said.  

It added: “Solihull Council has special requirements, in that the product has to read and distribute a large number of file types, heavy with data and some of which are large in size.”

Some of the data will be “specific to the building industry”, so the chosen supplier will need to demonstrate compliance with the BS1192 and PAS1192-2 construction standards, the council added.

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“With our Building Design Group operating as a business unit, we are hoping that they will be able to market their improved capabilities to potential clients and demonstrate an extremely high level of control over construction contracts, from the feasibility stage, through to facilities management and beyond into completion,” Solihull said.

The council’s Building Design Group is striving towards Level 2 Building Information Management certification, a badge which indicates that all stakeholders in a building process work collaboratively using a CDE model and computer-aided design software tools.

Bids from potential suppliers of a common data environment are invited until 21 February, with a contract due to kick off on 23 March and last for an initial period of three years – but with an option to activate up to 12 one-year extensions. The deal will be worth between £40,000 and £250,000, Solihull estimates.