Automated Facilities Audits Drive Bottom-line AEC Benefits

If you’re with a full life-cycle Architectural, Engineering, & Construction (AEC) firm, you might view facility condition assessments (FCAs) as a boring but necessary evil.

Whether designing new structures to fit an existing campus, slogging through backlogs of deferred maintenance or planning capital budgets, full life-cycle engagements can’t be done correctly without an accurate, current assessment of existing assets. That’s where your FCA comes in.

Yet FCAs are no simple matter. While they start with tripod crews in visibility vests taking field elevations, there’s much more. They need to include all systems and components from HVAC to exterior facades to fire doors, drainage, and structure. These audit reports include detailed assessments of each asset’s condition and future replacement costs, on a room by room basis

There are three major challenges to FCAs. The first is that they don’t happen every day. While some organizations audit a portion of assets every year, FCAs are more often done on a reactive or episodic basis. The audits might be triggered as part of discovery for of a major new project, or the kickoff of a once-in-a-decade capital fundraising drive.

The second major FCA challenge is the diversity of what’s audited. Due to the wide variety of different building and system types audited, naming/labeling can be haphazard, making it hard to have data that’s consistent enough to support sensible analysis. With audits happening sporadically, people of varying skill levels can become involved, and the senior skilled people needed to provide quality assurance oversight may not be available to bring things back on track, especially when they’re in different locations and on different schedules.

Then there’s the third major challenge, which is that AEC firms perform these occasional audits manually, or with the simplest possible automation tools like Google Sheets and iPhone photos. While that’s a step in the right direction, those home-grown processes can still be too slow and fail to the inconsistencies mentioned above.

There’s good news, though, in the availability of affordable tools for automating this critical part of your AEC practice. A purpose-built auditing tool can enhance your firm’s adoption and benefit from your broader set of digitized property and construction management suite. By adopting an automated facility auditing tool, data can be quickly imported and managed as part of your building information modelling (BIM), providing databases and 3D models which give designers the insights and tools they need to create the most accurate, helpful and insightful plans and designs.

Imagine the impact to your bottom line of speeding up data collection by 50% on an overall project with FCA contributing 10% of the cost. Reducing the time and labor hours by 50% could eliminate 5% of the overall cost of delivering for the client. That could mean an extra 5 points of margin to your project, or the ability to invest that 5% into areas that the client will place a high value on.

Think of automated FCA data collection as a silent partner, an internal tool, a resource that helps you focus on the aspects of what your client cares about: saving money, aligning facilities with mission and getting projects done on time. Being the master of all that facility data can also increase your client’s level of dependency on your A&E firm, resulting in greater client retention.

While a better tool for FCA data collection is not glamorous, having a reliable automated solution can help your A&E business become more competitive, delivering faster and more accurate project speed.

Tags: AEC, Bartlett, Construction

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2019 at 2:26 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.