19.03.13
Digital facilities management in hospitals: the future is almost here
Kath Fontana of BAM FM sets out an innovative development that will change the way our hospitals manage their facilities.
Hospitals are complex buildings. How their facilities are managed is critical to patients’ wellbeing and has a direct effect on the hospital’s success. And yet, arguably, facilities management within them could be managed a lot better.
When we buy a new car, or anything complex, we expect a manual telling us how best to operate and maintain it. I’d be lost without mine. But this isn’t usually the case when we buy a new building, which can be infinitely more complicated. No more so than the energy and plant rooms inside a hospital. Yes, information and data about the building is handed over, but as estates and facilities managers will recognise, it is not unusual for this to be disjointed, incomplete and inaccurate.
Despite our best efforts, there has been a long-term disconnect here between the construction industry, the clients they build for, and the teams who provide facilities management. Into this Bermuda triangle the data disappears. But the risk of all this data being less than perfect is borne by the customer. And it is this that we are on the cusp of changing forever.
At BAM, we develop, design, build and manage facilities. That gives us an integrated understanding and a very holistic view of this situation. It also means we are well-placed to develop a proper answer for our hospitals and to test it.
The solution comes through the application of building information modelling, known as BIM, which is mandated to level 2 by the Government for the development of all public sector buildings by 2016. There is currently lots of excitement about the potential for BIM to change the way we design and build facilities. The data that BIM extracts from the construction process has far-reaching potential for understanding our built assets, and to transform our management capabilities.
With BIM, gone are the PDFs, CD-ROMs and nigh-indecipherable spreadsheets that have made it hard to locate assets within a building, to know who supplied each one, to work out its maintenance programme and optimise its usage before ultimately replacing or repairing it in a cost efficient manner.
BIM starts with fundamentally accurate asset information and with each incremental data drop during the life of the construction project, it refines this further. It can provide a comprehensible budgeting model and a benchmark for whole life-cycle costs.
This permits facilities managers to become involved with the building before it is even constructed. The needs of the FM elements of a building can therefore be properly factored into its value engineering, its delivery and the fabrication and profiling of its assets. Most fundamentally, FMs can take a lead role defining data drops and attribute date that needs to be captured. The benefits are tremendous.
With an accurate cost and asset model, earlier tendering for facilities management can take place. Risk is driven out because there is greater certainty about the costs involved in managing the assets. Pricing and decision-making become easier. The cost of tendering (and later re-tendering) itself should reduce as the need for resurveying is eliminated and the pricing of risk is reduced.
The engineer who needs to open up a wall or a ceiling to try to locate a source of heat loss or water seepage will be able to access it via his iPad and fix it faster and more economically.
Running costs stand to reduce substantially as intelligent and informed decisions become easier. BIM’s adoption into the FM component of our buildings will take the after care model of construction into a new realm.
But there is a missing link: the process to take data from the construction model to the FM system.
And so we are creating it.
Together with FSI and Autodesk, BAM has formed a research project to create the BIM model for facilities management – BIM in 6D. Between us we are building a link between FM data and visual information. We have designed the digital data transfer process, pulling data automatically from our 3D model into our FM workflow systems. In itself this is moving the theory of the existing debate into practice. But we are now moving to the next step, which is actively to apply the processes we have developed in a live environment.
We intend to test in both the public and private domains within the next few months. We don’t think anyone is as far forward, and change is literally months away.
(Image: The plant room at Aneurin Bevan Hospital, Gwent, built recently by BAM)