Conference Presidium: Pavel Goryachkin; Vice-President of the SE “Association of Manufacturers of Construction Materials”, conference moderator Oleg Razgulyaev; Evgeny Enokaev; Valery Uskov; Alfiya Nagmanova; expert of the Center for Expertise of Construction Projects Ekaterina Kuznetsova; Konstantin Podolyansky

During construction with the participation of a government customer in most regions of Russia, the resource index pricing method (RIM) will now be used. To discuss the details of the innovation, possible problems and ways to solve them, SPbGASU organized a conference “Estimates require adjustment - transition to RIM in St Petersburg and the Leningrad region”.

Boris Lysich

To recall, in October SPbGASU, SRO Association "Association of Builders of St Petersburg", SE "Association of Manufacturers of Building Materials", construction committees of St Petersburg and the Leningrad Region entered into an agreement to create a Consortium of the construction industry of the North-Western Federal District. As the coordinator of the consortium, First Deputy General Director of the Association of Builders of St Petersburg Boris Lysich, clarified, the conference was the first in a series of planned events aimed at solving practical problems. Together with the Union of Estimating Engineers, the National Association of Designers and Surveyors, the conference organizers invited representatives of the relevant government committees of St Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, experts and industry specialists whose professional competencies include working with RIM.

Evgeny Korolev

In his welcoming speech, SPbGASU Vice-Rector for Research Evgeny Korolev emphasized the relevance of the conference primarily due to its practical component.

“The conference does not involve discussions about this method, but a discussion of practical actions and the development of specific proposals for solving the difficulties that arise in the use of RIM. It is obvious that a mass transition to this method is difficult both due to the constantly changing regulatory framework and the insufficient competencies of estimators. Our university assists in training specialists for this field. In particular, the curriculum includes the discipline “Estimating in Construction”; “As part of additional professional education, a professional development program “Pricing and Estimated Standardization in Construction” is being implemented, as well as a professional training program in the direction of “Economics,” said Evgeny Korolev.

Alfiya Nagmanova

President of the Interregional public organization “Union of Estimating Engineers” Pavel Goryachkin added that the government has obliged to switch to RIM, and the industry’s task is to ensure that this method works effectively at all stages of construction.

The resource-index method allows you to calculate construction costs with higher accuracy and minimize the discrepancy between the preliminary construction estimate and actual costs, thereby eliminating possible contract failures due to lack of funding. When using the base-index model, which was replaced by RIM, the approved prices were multiplied by the indices of changes in the estimated cost. The new model uses current prices.

According to the First Deputy Chairman of the Construction Committee of the Leningrad Region, Evgeny Enokaev, the Leningrad Region switched to RIM at the end of last year. “Over three thousand price proposals for more than one thousand items, including 844 items for construction materials, have been sent to Glavgosexpertiza, and the range will increase quarterly. As of 1 March, only three projects are under consideration by the Office of State Expertise of the Leningrad Region. But the work has just begun, and we are ready to gain new experience,” said Evgeny Enokaev.

According to Deputy Chairman of the Construction Committee of St Petersburg Valery Uskov, as part of the transition to RIM in August last year, the Federal State Information System for Pricing in Construction (FSIS PC) included the estimated prices for employee services, construction resources, and transportation. Already in November, a government contract was signed under which RIM will be used. 225 organizations supplying construction resources were informed of the need to register in this system and publish wholesale prices. At the moment, there are more than 150 thousand positions, but only 904 are filled in St Petersburg.

• The figure shows extremely low activity of suppliers. Experts present at the conference named one of its main reasons as the reluctance of suppliers to post prices publicly, thereby revealing their business activities.

Alfiya Nagmanova, Associate Professor at the SPbGASU Department of Construction Technology, added that suppliers also incur additional costs for purchasing an electronic digital signature, allocating and training staff to load data into the system.

“Other reasons for low activity include insufficient awareness of the functionality of the FSIS PC, the discrepancy between the trade nomenclature and the nomenclature in the classifier of this system, and the unstable cost of building materials. The volume of estimates during RIM increases, while there is not enough practical experience in their preparation, and the final cost of construction projects decreases. All this creates problems for business,” said Alfiya Nagmanova.

• According to her, despite all the difficulties of the transition, RIM makes it possible to increase the accuracy of calculations for types of work, assumes the universality of the federal estimate and regulatory framework, one level of prices in the estimate, and also, with some exceptions, the proximity of prices for construction resources to market prices.

Regarding modern automation tools for determining the estimated cost of RIM, the head of the promotion department of the VIZARDSOFT company, Konstantin Podolyansky, emphasized that the use of the principles of TIM technologies in cost engineering due to data connectivity gives important positive effects. Among other advantages, this approach speeds up the process of calculating volumes and preparing estimate documentation, automates the control and accounting of changes in design estimates, optimizes control of project costs at different stages and makes it possible to add information about the plan and budget to the interconnected data of the digital information model of a capital facility construction. Thus, the combined use of RIM and TIM will make the process more accurate, faster and more transparent.