By Steve Rizer
Building information modeling (BIM) “is something that facility management, as a profession, has to embrace.” This is one of the first comments International Facility Management Association (IFMA) President Tony Keane made after christening the organization’s inaugural “BIM Conference for Owners, Facility Managers & Service Providers” last Monday in National Harbor, Md. “A lot of people in the facility management industry are still trying to really understand how [BIM can] help them and how it can impact them. The funny thing is that the architecture and design community is still asking some of those questions as well, so it makes it even more complex and more complicated for the facility management profession.”
In addressing conference attendees, Keane acknowledged that “we have to understand when it is right to use BIM and how it helps us in terms of operationalizing a lot of our maintenance programs, our design programs, and how it impacts the workplace…. How we embrace new technology, how we embrace new practices, and how we bring these types of topics into IFMA is very, very important to our profession globally.” He noted that about one-quarter of IFMA’s 24,000 members are located outside of the United States.
Complicating matters for the facility management community is something that conference speaker Robert Keady, author of “Equipment Best Practices for Owners and Facility Managers: Standards, Strategies and Best Practices,” pointed out to attendees during a session entitled “BIM Strategy.”
“On the facility-management side, most of our data standards are self-generated. It’s rare in the industry for us to have OmniClass, MasterFormat, UniFormat,” or comparable standards, Keady said. “The vast majority of users have self-generated systems in the facility management side. We all develop our own standards and [believe] our standards are special, and they’re not.”
In quantifying the problem, Keady cited a National Institute of Science and Technology estimate that the loss of information between the construction of buildings, their operation, and maintenance costs facility owners approximately $15.8 billion every year.” He believes a “universal data format” could help resolve the problem.
The ConstructionPro Network member version of this article includes information about the estimated financial benefits of BIM for facility management, some advice that a representative from the construction consulting firm MBP offered to conference attendees, and exhibitor briefs.
