Coming Soon: Practical BIM Implementation for Facility Management

By Luke Carothers 

In August, Civil + Structural Engineer Magazine will be debuting a series of articles titled Practical BIM Implementation for Facility Management.  This five-part series focuses on a new framework to improve BIM implementation throughout the entire lifecycle of a building.  This year’s series will be authored by George Broadbent, Dr. Eve Lin, Dr. Jeff Chen, and Kai Yin.  This year’s series focuses on a discussion about the traditional level of detail (LOD) in BIM management, and advocates for a move towards an AM/FM concept.  

The first part will be titled “Beyond Level of Detail into AM/FM.”  It will discuss the nature of information in building management as it relates to individual responsibility.  In turn, this installment addresses the question of the data people need to consume.  In both conceptual and practical ways, this article discusses how a properly developed LOD can be implemented into the dashboard/CMMS platform to benefit all facility managers and operators.

The second installment in the series is titled “Modular Data Analytics and Reporting in Facility Management”, and it introduces an additional modular design concept.  The team defines five essential modules that need to be highlighted: space, energy, safety, operations, and maintenance. On top of defining and creating a road map for each module, this article also shows how their interactions and aggregations can provide decision-making support for executives and practical interpretations for facility operators.

Up next is Part Three of the series, titled “Scoring Systems for Facility Health Assessment.” This part explores the question of, “how do I know my facility is healthy?” By using modular data analytics and reporting, facilities are free to perform quantification analysis on each of the focus areas such as space, energy, safety, operations, and management. This provides an accurate accounting of any predefined area of a given facility via the scoring system. This article will also disassemble each facility’s health category into sub-credits, present a high level picture of the scoring system, and discuss its collaboration with the AM/FM LOD.

Part Four will be published in November, and it is titled “Sustainability in Facility Management.” With sustainability at the forefront of conversation around the industry, particularly at the project delivery stage, it makes sense to also highlight it during the operational stage. It deals with concepts such as how we define and sustainability from a facility ownership perspective. It will present the mapping between various sustainable criteria and their interactions with defined assets and systems. 

The final installment in the series is titled “The Center-Hub of Data Integration”, which is a culmination of overarching questions posed by the previous parts of the series. Part Five will be published in December. It discusses the promising integration of BIM, AM/FM LOD,  modulization, data analytics and reporting, and sustainability into one platform. 

To read last year’s series, please click here.

Luke Carothers is the Editor for Civil + Structural Engineer Media. If you want us to cover your project or want to feature your own article, he can be reached at lcarothers@zweiggroup.com.