IBF: 2013

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Integrating FM and BIM: Benefits and Costs

As mentioned in last week’s post, BIM is gaining large momentum in the AEC community and in some project sectors is becoming a de facto standard, even when it is not a client requirement. This is because AEC’s benefit significantly from using the technology, shortening project delivery times and improving quality. Owners, represented by FM, should be adopting BIM technology as a way of improving the performance and costs of the project over its entire life cycle. Many, however, are reluctant. This may be because they do not understand its value, costs, or processes.

It is the value proposition that is most important since it will drive adoption. While BIM is most often thought of as appropriate for large projects the reality is that all projects have life cycles. When you are talking about buildings they are long life cycles, thereby offering an extended benefit timeline. Adopting BIM as part of a development strategy pays lasting dividends by bridging the gap between the AEC team that builds the building and the Owner who must occupy and operate the facility.

Integrating BIM data with other building systems allows data to be continuously updated over the life of the building. CMMS, IWMS, BMS, BAS and other systems share data, improving data visibility and efficiency.

Building performance is improved by this increased data transparency, allowing faster analysis and response when problems occur.

Data availability lowers the cost of data capture and reduces the cost of operations by allowing deeper analysis of systems behavior, including energy performance and the effect of operational processes.

Building data in digital form is instantly available to operators and planners at their desk or on the move – not locked away in a basement cavern in a “seek and maybe you will find” manner.

Ah, but what about the costs, you ask. Like many good things in life BIM does not come free. There are acquisition, roll out, training and continuing staff costs. Usually, however, the ROI is around two years, often shorter than that. Here is a quick summary of cost factors.

Initial costs to design using BIM technology and then produce a model that FM can use.

Initial cost to integrate multiple FM systems, collect data and train staff.

Continuing costs to update information and maintain a current “As-Is” information set (not to be confused with “As-Built” which only codifies the building at a particular point in time).

Savings begin before initial operations and continue through the life of the facility.

Less time is spent collecting data.
Less time is spent searching for data.

Modification projects benefit from real time availability of accurate information.

Utility expenses are reduced by better performing equipment.

The benefits of BIM outweigh its cost as reflected by short ROI periods and improved operating efficiencies and costs. Those benefits are lost, however, when FM chooses not to implement the technology. As time moves forward BIM is likely to be available on most projects as its adoption further penetrates the AEC industry. That means that it will be available to most FM’s. We will not have to require it of our builders. Rather, they will wonder why we are not taking advantage of a transformational technology.

For more information see BIM for Facility Managers, a publication of the IFMA Foundation edited by Paul Teicholz.

FM & Beyond

COBie – Your Data Your Way

The Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBie) protocol is improving Facility Management’s access to building data and increasing our ability to leverage design and construction information across the operational life of buildings. The use of open information exchange standards like COBie allows FM to import data into a variety of building management systems such as CAFM, IWMS, BMS, and CMMS; making asset information available on day one of occupancy. That is a far cry from the classic basement room filled with warranty binders, design drawings and as-built documents. If you’ve ever had to research detailed information from such a “system” you have no doubt dreamed that it would someday be instantly available. That day is here.

COBie offers information advantages across the operational spectrum and throughout a building’s life cycle. Immediate access to technical product specifications, serial numbers, warranty information, and maintenance requirements improves operational efficiency, speeds replacement projects, and facilitates enhanced asset management across the suite of FM applications. The requirement that designers and contractors input data during design and construction eliminates duplication of effort and improves information quality; providing reliable, available, and actionable information at the outset of operations. Having this information available at the beginning of occupancy is helpful in its own right, having it available and keeping it current as the building lives its life becomes a serious lever on efficiency and cost control.

While a boon to project start up and continuing operations, COBie is still a relatively new component of the build and operate continuum. With initial release and implementations beginning in 2008 it continues to be adopted within the AEC community at an increasing rate. Adoption within the Owner/Operator community is not at the same stage but is improving as knowledge of the standard and success stories become wider known. FM’s with CAFM, BIM, CMMS, or IWMS systems will benefit most quickly since they can quickly leverage COBie’s “authoritative source of information” status across platforms. COBie is first and foremost an information exchange protocol, however, and data may be exported to spreadsheet format for those without access to sophisticated applications. In one sense this might be one of its greatest contributions, making detailed asset information available to FM’s who operate in a leaner environment. In simple spreadsheet format they have all of the practical asset information they need without the manual effort required to research, categorize, and enter the data.

There is another benefit of standard open information sharing that all FM’s should appreciate. While we spend considerable resources capturing asset information it is then often placed inside systems that make it their own. While we may benefit from the output of these systems they can make us less facile with our data when trying to use it in ways the proprietary system does not support.

“Unfortunately, commercial software developers have used business process implementations as classic business “barriers to entry” that keep users locked into proprietary methods of accomplishing their work based on vendor-specific feature sets.”

Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBIE)
Requirements Definition and Pilot Implementation Standard, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (ERDC/CERL TR-07-30)

Open information standards protect against the loss of data value by enabling users ready access to data in a way that allows them to use it in any manner they wish, in addition to how it is used by the suite of FM applications. As the importance of data agility increases in FM organizations, specifically the ability to look at data in new ways to solve new problems, this unfettered access to data outside of specific application constraints becomes more important.

FM’s engagement at the beginning of new development projects utilizing COBie is an important factor, fostering early agreements on system standards and information processes which are tailored to FM’s benefit. These agreements allow designers and constructors to contribute to long term building efficiency beyond their normal brick and mortar parameters. FM gains not only the long term benefit of these actions, but also the opportunity to influence design and inform economic trade-off decisions with a total cost of ownership perspective.

BIM takes construction beyond three dimensions

Source: http://www.information-age.com/technology/information-management/123457055/bim-takes-construction-beyond-three-dimensions

Architects and engineers are using building information modeling (BIM) to make construction more collaborative, more innovative, and more efficient

Computer-aided design has revolutionised the building and construction industry. At first, CAD was simply an electronic facsimile of architectural drawing, but technological developments such as 3D wireframes and “solid modelling” have pushed the capabilities of CAD software beyond what was possible with draftsmanship.

As processors became more powerful and storage cheaper, the amount of information that architects and engineers could build into their CAD models grew. In the 1990s, CAD software makers began to offer the ability to add ‘parametric’ data such as the characteristics and cost of particular building materials.

This has progressed to the extent that the most sophisticated CAD software today allows the user to model anything from the carbon footprint of a design to the way in which a structure will bend in the wind.

This is known as “building information modelling”, or BIM, and for a number of years now it has been the talk of the construction industry.

BIM is a little like customer relationship management (CRM), in that it refers both to a business practice and a category of software. It is defined by David Philp, head of BIM at construction company Mace Group and an advisor to the UK government, as “constructing a managed digital information 3D model of an asset, be it a building or an infrastructure project that is infused with data”.

BIM’s proponents argue that it offers a range of benefits. The most immediate is improved productivity of construction projects, says Dominic Thasarathar, construction industry programme manager at CAD market share leader AutoDesk.

“The construction industry has historically been pretty poor on productivity,” he says. “There’s an oft-cited statistic that up to 50% of building projects going over time or over budget.”“BIM offers greater efficiency in deploying men, machines and materials,” Thasarathar explains. “You can work out how to schedule the project, and you can get better insight into cash flow over the lifecycle of the project.”

Construction projects typically include a large number of organisations, and BIM also promises to improve collaboration.

According to Huw Roberts, marketing VP at construction software vendor Bentley Systems, the company’s BIM products are being used to co-ordinate Crossrail, Europe’s largest construction project. “Crossrail is a really a bunch of different projects,” he says. “There are station projects, tunnel projects, and more besides.

“The control of the information about those projects is all being done in our ProjectWise software,” he says. “It has a federated data model, so each project is modeled individually, but the models can be integrated so you can open them up as a whole and see how they fit together.

”Another benefit of BIM, Roberts says, is that it allows architects to build more sophisticated models of their designs, and therefore find novel solutions to architectural challenges. “Architecture firms like Fosters, Morphisis and Zaha Waheed are using BIM to explore shapes, structural systems and assemblies of materials that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to understand and simulate,” he says.

One example is the Park House development, a £100 million project to convert build a mixed retail, office space and residential site in London’s Mayfair. “They’ve maximised the amount of space that they can get on the site without impacting the neighbourhood by giving the building a very subtle but complex curved form,” explains Roberts.

Yet another application of BIM occurs after construction is complete, and the CAD files are handed to the building operators as documentation for the site. In fact, AutoDesk’s Thasarathar reports that handing over BIM files is an increasingly common contractual obligation.

Growing adoption

The use of BIM in the construction industry has rocketed in recent years. According to an annual survey by the Royal Institute of British Architects, only 13% of architects and structural engineers were using BIM in 2010. That figure shot up to 31% in 2011 (it rose more modestly to 39% in 2012).

In the latest survey, however, respondents were not unanimous about the benefits of BIM. Only 46% of BIM users agreed with the statement that “adopting BIM increases profitability” and only 55% agreed that “BIM brings cost efficiencies”.

Still, adoption looks certain to grow: 93% of all respondents said they that expect to be using BIM in five years.Architects and engineers are evidently coming under pressure from clients to adopt the practice. Just under three quarters (73%) of BIM users, and 49% of non-users, agreed that “clients will increasingly insist on us adopting BIM”.

One major client that will soon insist on BIM is the UK government. In its construction strategy, published in May 2011, it announced that all public sector construction contracts will be procured using BIM by 2016. This, it says, will help it to cut construction costs by 20%.

There are four “pathfinder” construction projects using BIM underway, including the Ministry of Justice’s redevelopment of Cookham Wood Prison in Kent. That project saw the MoJ become one of the first buying organisations in Europe to issue the BIM Employer’s Information Requirements with the contract tender, specifying what data it would need from the successful bidder and in what format.

The government has decided that it wants its building contractors to present BIM data in the Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBie) standard, which was developed by the US Army Corps of Engineers.

COBie is not so much a file format as a spreadsheet design that offers a pre-determined structure for non-graphical building data such as the carbon footprint of a given project or details of the contract.

Another BIM standard is called IFC, which is an open document format operated by an organisation called buildingSMART. In the BIM maturity model, use of the IFC format is considered an indicator of “Level 3” BIM, the highest level, as it allows “fully open data and process integration”.Interoperabilty is an important consideration in BIM.

Not only do most construction projects involve a number of different contributors, who may all be using different software, BIM documenta need to last as long as the building, without becoming obsolete.

Both AutoDesk and Bentley say they are supporters of open standards and interoperability, although Bentley’s Roberts says that not all the functionality of its software can be squeezed into these standards. “Anything that is designed to be a common denominator is going to be less complete than the innovation that is in our system, or in our competitors’ systems for that matter

.”In future, the addition of more and more data to building design software promises to bring some interesting analytical capabilities to the construction industry. Bentley, for example, is working on what it calls “multi-disciplinary optimisation”.

This, Roberts explains, is a utility computing service that will allow customers to define the requirements and aims of a project, and automatically simulate thousands of possible designs.

“Analysing just one of these options might take you 18 hours on your local computer,” he says. “But using cloud computing and massively parallel processing, we will be able to run thousands of simulations in a few hours.”

This may well lead to new and unusual building designs, providing yet another example of how data analytics is reshaping our environment.

Posted by Pete Swabey

What Will It Take for FM to Adopt BIM?

Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology is changing the way buildings are designed and built but having less of an impact on their operation and maintenance. This despite the facts that 90% of a building’s life cycle cost, and thus one could say 90% of its opportunity cost, occur after construction is complete; and that BIM, when used correctly, delivers significant life cycle cost and operational benefits. As beneficial as it may be, however, facility management (FM) as a whole has been slow to adopt BIM.

There are many reasons BIM is struggling to gain traction in FM, most of which are related to the overall business climate or long engrained business practices. For starters, “doing BIM right” requires an investment in technology and talent. Even with BIM’s typically short ROI and long term leverage it has been a tough road to gain needed investment approvals in many instances. Without a full appreciation of BIM’s advantages FM’s are often unprepared to make a compelling case for the required investment. From one FM’s perspective, here are actions FM can take to inform itself and speed the adoption of BIM:

Understanding the full breadth and depth of the BIM advantage will position FM as an intelligent partner. Being better informed will not only allow us to make a stronger case for BIM but will also increase the actual benefit yield as a result of knowledgeable implementation and use of the technology.

Acquiring BIM talent, including data management expertise will allow us to take full advantage now and throughout the building life cycle.

Recognizing that BIM is a long view activity helps establish a culture that recognizes the validity of long term investment in talent and processes, and the reality of long term returns. BIM is not something you do once – data must be kept current as the building lives its life. As-Built documents become less and less relevant over time. Keeping the BIM model current as changes occur, however, enables real time information on real time conditions.

Viewing BIM as an operational tool rather than only a design and construction tool opens the way to leveraging its advantages across the operational spectrum. Instant access to equipment and system documentation, life cycle cost planning, replacement specifications, and modeling energy efficiency in conjunction with business process operations are just a few of BIM’s operational advantages.

Designing business processes to maximize BIM benefit may be required in some organizations, especially those with strict linear design-bid-build contracting rules. Such rules inhibit 360 degree stakeholder involvement that encourages collaboration across the project enterprise, and robs the organization of the time, quality and cost benefits the strategic alliances that BIM fosters. Ironically, public entities including higher education and government, i.e. those with the largest projects and highest fiduciary responsibilities, and therefore the most transparency and oversight, are among the earliest adopters and strongest champions.

Don’t wait for your next mega project to start taking advantage of the technology. A good example of this strategy is the U.S. Coast Guard. Unable to redesign every structure in BIM they never the less decreed BIM as the standard for all new projects, regardless of size. By creating a BIM record for each installation and designing all new projects in BIM they have ensured that over time they will develop the culture and data required to take full advantage. At that scale the advantage is large indeed.

Lead the dialogue in your organization about the advantages of BIM and why adopting it makes good business sense. Learn the numbers and the story and be able to talk about the technology in the bottom line manner that the C-suite listens to.

The AEC community is rapidly adopting BIM as a de facto standard because they know the competitive advantages it offers. It is time that FM joined the party, influencing corporate leaders and becoming a full partner in the process.