ONE Engage address the complex challenge of managing digital information in the residential sector for landlords, residents and fire and rescue services. The judges picked the platform as the Product Innovation of the Year at the Digital Construction Awards last night (2 July).
ONE Engage is an innovative building safety platform responding to the Building Safety Act. It connects residents, landlord safety teams, and fire and rescue services (FRS) digitally, addressing post-Grenfell obligations and helping to ensure safety-critical assets are compliant.
It has been developed by One Creative Environments, in partnership with software house Bluebox, with funding from Innovate UK. With the legislative landscape continually changing, the development team formed a strategic partnership with Totus Digital, led by Aman Sharma, also deputy chair of the Building Regulations Advisory Committee and chair of the BSI committee that has developed BS 8644-1 Digital Management of Fire Safety Information.
The new building safety regime means dutyholders in the housing sector must put provisions in place to share information relating to the management of key assets with residents and the FRS. This is a challenge. A typical social housing landlord with 2,800 dwellings will annually generate approximately 840 information exchanges with the FRS and almost 7,000 individual safety-related exchanges with residents.
Meanwhile, across 45 FRS regions in the UK, information management varies, exacerbated by a lack of resources. Also, there is no standard solution in place for the exchange of information for the approximately 13,000 higher-risk buildings in the UK.
The ONE Engage platform aims to address these gaps for all three user groups:
- Landlords use the system to manage information exchanges with residents and fire authorities. Landlords have a duty to understand who is engaging, when and with what content, to ensure that the correct measures are in place to manage buildings safely. It’s important that information exchanges are evidenced to enable statutory duties to be discharged.
- Fire authorities use the interactive map to access critical building safety information, both static and dynamic. Real-time alerts and vulnerable persons information allow fire crews to plan before responding to emergency incidents.
- Residents use the system to connect with those in their vertical community, understand their building better, their legal responsibilities, opportunities, the performance of their landlord and, above all, to feel safe.
Although in its infancy, ONE Engage has entered beta testing with several organisations.
“An important tool, developed with wide industry collaboration, that identifies and tackles a key challenge to legislative adherence required for the built environment.”
A tier 1 contractor, in collaboration with a local authority, is testing the technology on two operational higher-risk buildings, with 200 residential units in total.
Additionally, the National Fire Chiefs Council’s Phase 3 Golden Thread Pilot, which aims to determine best practice for information management in the FRS, will trial the use of the tool in mock-emergency situations, to evaluate the benefit in real-world scenarios.
The ONE Engage developers have also collaborated with numerous resident groups who have expressed interest in the technology, with first-hand experience of why such tools are required to help those caught up in the building safety crisis.
Jason Whittall, director of One Creative Environments, said: "The Building Safety Act is the biggest and most complicated piece of legislation that’s come into the industry in my lifetime. We have delivered a new, innovative solution that is needed for the industry to help residents connect with their landlords and the fire and rescue service.
"The Building Safety Act was created to better protect the residents of these high-risk buildings, and we’ve created a piece of software that empowers their voice."
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