Developing BIM & Information Management Capability in a Facilities Management Organisation
Skanska Facilities Services (Skanska FS) is the facilities management (FM) arm of Skanska (a multi-national construction company). They were capturing large volumes of asset information from its portfolio of FM contracts; the business saw an opportunity to analyse the data, generate insights, and highlight areas for business improvement.
However, a quality check of the asset information revealed several critical issues:
- Non-standardisation of asset inventories
- Non-standardisation of how assets installed in a building were categorised
- Non-standardisation of how assets were uniquely tagged (identified) in buildings
- Non-standardisation of the IT systems used to store asset information
These issues meant that no reliable analytics could be carried out on a project, nor could similar projects be compared with each other. No reliable insights could be gathered, which meant that no business improvement initiatives could be identified.
The wider Skanska business had decided to adopt BIM and digitalisation as a new way of working on infrastructure projects. All divisions, including Skanska FS, were instructed to implement BIM.
BIM at the time, was focused on improving efficiencies in design and construction by using 3D modelling technologies. But 3D models weren’t helpful to the FM business at the time. Instead, the FM teams were still grappling with the basics, such as trying to receive good-quality asset inventories at building handover.
So, what was BIM supposed to look like in an FM business? How could BIM benefit FM teams?
The answer laid with the ‘I’ in BIM – Information! BIM would be used to improve the quality of asset information captured for handover to FM teams…
Read the full success story here.