Overview of the EIR life cycle

There is currently a lack of streamlined and consistent processes for the creation and distribution of EIRs and the evaluation of the responses to those EIRs. The result is that the process is typically manual, time consuming, prone to errors and inaccuracies and suffers from a lack of accountability and traceability.

The production of an EIR is time consuming and requires collaboration between the BIM Manager and the many different stakeholders involved in the project. Typically a single BIM Manager is responsible for managing the authoring the EIR but they rely on other stakeholders and contributors to provide content and feedback on each section of the document. That communication is typically via internal communication (emails, meetings, telephone calls, etc), which can be inefficient, ambiguous and, ultimately lost in the long term.

The distribution of the completed EIR suffers from a lack of consistency in terms of the format of the EIR (PDF, Word,paper, etc) and the distribution channel (email, post, file sharing, etc). As a result it is difficult to be sure that the EIR has reached the intended recipient and if the recipient has viewed the document. In addition, when it is necessary to distribute an updated version of the EIR, the process of recalling the previous version and distributing the updated version is manual making impossible to ensure that the recipients are responding to the correct version of the EIR.

Collecting, reviewing and rating responses to an EIR is typically a antiquated, manual process with many companies printing each response and comparing them side by side. This offline approach to reviewing and rating responses makes it difficult to obtain feedback and share opinions and scores between interested parties. It also results in inconsistencies in the approach to reviewing and scoring responses.