The End is where to Begin

The enormous benefits that utilizing a data-driven digital workflow can bring to the life cycle phase of a facility are perhaps, by now, well known. However, to realize the potential benefits, those in the facility management (FM) sphere must step up and start stating, prior to a specific capital project being considered, what it is that they need out of this process.

There is an up-front cost to defining and establishing the data requirements for an organization. However, it does not end there since there is also a cost to be borne in auditing the data to ensure that the project teams are following the requirements, associating installed asset information, data and documents to the model data for handover, and checking that the data being generated aligns with the facility owner’s defined goals and uses.

As a group, FM needs to be at the table from the outset, ensuring that life cycle needs are included in the capital plan.

Questions to consider are:

How is the data intended to be used? Options could include some or all of the following functions:

• Tracking & management of facility maintenance and operations.
• Improving internal communication and collaboration through transparency and access to information.
• Analytics from real time monitoring to improve performance and service efficiency.
• Improving maintenance planning and equipment performance.
• Streamlining compliance and reporting.
• Predictive maintenance.
• Space Utilization optimization.
• Visualizing facility changes or maintenance tasks.
• Training and onboarding.

How best can the cost benefit of requiring a data-driven digital delivery for projects be conveyed to capital planning? Consideration of this involves:

• Discussing the apportionment of cost between capital planning and facility management.
• Evaluating the benefits of being able to easily access, maintain and replace equipment in your facility.
• Assessing the value of having all required information, visualization of the issue, data and documents all available at the click of a button. No more digging through piles of paper, drawings and binders in a facility plan room.
• Assessing the value of being able to do preventative maintenance planning during construction so that all required information can be transferred to CMMS at handover.
• Discussing the value of being able to train all staff virtually ahead of handover.
• Discussing the benefit of being able to visualize asset locations during a failure event.
• Assigning a value to the ability to access all required information, sorting and filtering with a point and click approach. This could apply, for example, to the identification of warranty durations and end dates.

The entire AEC profession is undergoing a shift in how they work, where The Data is the Deliverable not the drawings.

Let’s make 2025 the year for following through on a resolution to effect this change!

If you are interested in learning more about how to get started and our process, please reach out. We would love to help you.

We are here to help!