Liberating built asset information to achieve organisational objectives

The white paper called ‘Liberating Built Asset Information to Achieve your Organisational Objectives’ was written by industry leaders, who are passionate about improving the ability to make critical decisions at all phases of an assets life.

Digital transformation is the key to unlocking better and more sustainable living spaces and this paper signposts a pathway to making it a reality

Its purpose is to summarize the problems faced by executive decision-makers today, discuss new approaches to asset management through digital transformation and the use of open standards, and it presents case studies as examples of what is currently being achieved by two leading owners to drive optimal results from both their capital and operating budgets.

[Asset Management (AM) is an industry recognized term meaning a systematic process of developing, providing, operating, maintaining, repurposing, upgrading, and disposing of assets in the most cost-effective manner, including all costs, risks and performance attributes. It is defined in the ISO 55000 series.]

In order for the implementation of Asset Management systems to be successful; better collaboration, digital adoption, documented information exchange requirements and openBIM standards are required.

The requirements definition for digital transformation need to come from the user community. Those are the people in the owner, operator and AEC industry.

?A challenge of this scale has to be resolved through massive collaboration and information sharing. It requires an international collective of will and ability with a common sense of purpose to transform the industry and provide a future world that we can all live in. An international community that transcends political and national boundaries, that overcomes the commercial competitiveness to pool knowledge and provide a combined effort to deliver.

The focus must be on information sharing for better decision making. Information that is relevant at the right level, at the right time, and in a format that can be accessed reliably and forever.

buildingSMART International has created such a community and the community is creating solutions. Open, neutral digital standards that are enabling information sharing across company boundaries, within supply chains and within organization governance hierarchies. The ecosystems of connected data will enable capital project teams and operational teams to share the same core values and, for commercial benefits to be synchronized with environmental sustainability goals.

The challenges

?Asset owners are facing ever higher expectations from stakeholders and shareholders with regard to the outputs and outcomes from their assets. In addition to lower cost, higher returns, higher resilience, and improved safety, there is increasing awareness of the impact of assets on an ever-warming planet and other important social outcomes. On the global scale, the manner in which organisations operate will affect the ability for the world to have future living spaces and smart cities that are sustainable for a growing population and increased urbanisation.

Adopting digital asset information management has the potential to unlock tremendous value for organizations to:

? maximize the return on capital investments, optimise cost benefit and commercial impact and increase operational cost savings

? improve performance and resilience of the asset portfolio

? deliver a positive impact on environmental challenges (producing less waste, reducing energy consumption and fewer carbon emissions)

? enhance social outcomes (accessibility, wellbeing, empowerment, inclusion and sustainability)

?Quite simply, “it is a recurring problem that industry stakeholders struggle daily to locate the comprehensive, accurate and timely information they need to make critical decisions” particularly pertaining to operations and/or maintenance and/or repairs and/or modifications to the built assets they are responsible for.

It is also a problem to obtain the correct data from the operations and wider ecosystem of usage to inform the bigger strategic decisions regarding what to invest in next.

?It is unfortunate but true that data management can be seen as an additional, perhaps unnecessary cost and the departments responsible for CAPEX and OPEX often work in different regimes. Asset management thinking acknowledges the benefits of a systems approach however a systems approach to digitisation is also required. The holistic evaluation of total expenditure and risk is complex.

Having a TOTEX view of all expenditure (CAPEX + OPEX) can not only provide leaders and organizations with greater transparency into operations and project delivery, but helps to provide more opportunities to realise better commercial and sustainability results.

The rapid and diverse ways that the world is changing requires an approach to asset management that can keep pace and use the developing technologies in agile ways. As well as increasing population size, climate change and extreme events, our industry needs to take a proactive approach to managing these social responsibilities.

?Effective whole life asset management relies on being able to have structured, accurate and timely information at all levels of the organisation. A clear line of sight from the organisational objectives through the asset plans to the operations of actually designing, building, operating and maintaining the assets is very desirable but until now not really achievable.

Existing assets are a huge challenge for asset owners. Aligning approaches to exploit value from historical data and project information trapped in legacy formats is a significant task. How to retain and access the value of legacy data while at the same time adopting new approaches and technologies is a very difficult problem to solve.

By way of example I once told the story of how difficult it is for a single home owner to get sufficient information to make the right home insulation decisions. Multiply the struggle one home owner is having by 19 million homes. And that’s just one small island. Multiply the problem across Europe, then the world. Then transpose this debate into the board rooms of large real estate owners, into the facility management teams, into the construction projects, hospitals, offices and transport terminals.

The built asset environment contributes 39% of the greenhouse gases and therefore, aligned, shared and reliable data is an imperative for effective societal planning and adaptation to climate change and resilience to the demands of an increased population.

Open data standards for data sharing

?The use of open data standards, supported by different software solutions, provides a pragmatic and affordable strategy for data collection, aggregation and sharing that can support lifecycle asset management.

openBIM standards will allow the information / data flow that is crucial to a successful asset management strategy and more broadly across multiple domains and the industry supply chain.

buildingSMART openBIM standards support the efficient management and interoperability of data as the key enabler.?To accomplish this, buildingSMART provides the IFC Schema, the buildingSMART Data Dictionary, Building Collaboration Format BCF, openCDE, and an Information Delivery Specification methodology.

More generally the paper explains that with openBIM it is possible for connected data to serve all players in the supply chain, at any point in an assets lifecycle and at each level of asset type. This so called ‘golden thread’ will allow the right information to be available at the right time to make those critical decisions.

?Although this white paper is really focused on assisting executive leaders instill a decision making capability within their asset portfolios, it also references the progression to even more holistic circular economy (or circular carbon, if you will) decision making.

Ultimately, open digital workflows, and connected data, will contribute to providing the world with the quality living spaces that an increasing population is going to need. That is, improving the existing stock and new build that will significantly contribute to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development goals.

?Conclusions

Our paper makes the following EIGHT conclusions about what is required:

????????Executive leadership that is well-informed about the possibilities of better data and confident that technology exists to bring about eventual positive outcomes, needs to set the agenda.

????????A strategic management plan for built asset information that works with software agnostic solutions, is a critical aspect of any building or infrastructure owner’s portfolio.

????????Whole-life asset management continues to mature and further adoption of the use of open data standards will unleash additional value.

????????Evolving open digital exchange standards is a key enabler to allow multi-disciplinary and inter-organizational teams to collaborate efficiently on all phases of an asset lifecycle.

????????Contractual arrangements and the legal aspects are a very important dimension of this discussion and should not be ignored. [These will also be addressed in more detail in a following white paper.]

????????Data is the enabler to value and will thrive with open data workflows and competencies.

????????Building organizational capability is essential for success. To be successful requires strategic planning, measurable goals, performance incentives, executive leadership, adoption of open data standards, deployment of new technology, education, and training.

????????Adopt digital workflows company-wide by leading from the top to engage all departments and recognising that this is not something to be merely delegated to functional groups.

What next??

White paper number two will elaborate on the standards and technology that are available and share some best practices on how to apply them. Various standards and methodologies (including ISO 19650, ISO 8000, IFC, BCF and bSDD) that provide guidance on the development of suitable management systems and approaches will be explained.

?White paper number three will be more forward looking and discuss emerging technologies that will provide positive benefits such as IoT (Internet of Things) sensor capture, AI for simulation and predictive analysis and how Digital Twins can be utilised.

?Read the white paper here

Grateful thanks to fellow authors: @ramnath