The age of facility managers' paper boxes is yet far from over

The first time I saw the top left image was July 2012 during a keynote speech by Dr. Bill East as part of the ECPPM in Reykjavik. I had then just started my doctoral studies and roughly outlined my research area as lifecycle-support building information management. Through literary sources such as the BIM Handbook, I had already noticed the urge for extending the use of high-end information technologies to the operation phase; but I still had an avid hunger for more insights and indications for finalizing my research topic.

The image at the top left shows a room where FM documents are stored - in a hospital if I remember correctly. The image conveys an uncomfortable reality about the status quo in the facility management sector: the information required for operating buildings and planning and executing maintenance tasks often needs to be dug out of piles of blueprints, brochures, manuals and contractual documents stacked in some shabby obscure room. The gist of Dr. East's talk was to unravel how inefficient, error-pone, sluggish and counterproductive this prevailing practice of information management is and a suggested approach to turn the tide.

In my first paper, 'Is the age of facility manager's paper boxes over?', the problem was addressed in detail, an alternative solution (FM:BIM) was disclosed through literature, and the major categories of obstacles to be lifted to truly leverage BIM for a more efficient FM&O sector were designated.

Since then, I have been constantly monitoring the subject area to ascertain the relevance of my research goal and gauge the possible need for updating or modifying the overall set up. Through hours of talks and discussions with professionals of different positions in both fields of FM&O and construction IT, attending seminars and observing practitioners, I can confidently conclude that the problem still prevails - even in such an IT-friendly country as Sweden.

The picture in the middle shows the construction drawings and operation documents of the condominium where I live, freshly handed over from the construction company to the facility management firm! All documents are, of course, accompanied with their counterparts in digital format; but these are the paper versions that are legally binding and will be used for daily operation activities. Moreover, the digital hand-over documents are, in the best case, PDF files and no original model or drawing in either proprietary or neutral format has been included; apparently because no such requirement exists in contractual documents which, in turn, is a result of lack of national legislations on digital hand-over requirements.

The strategic document 'BIM i staten' which has been procured by five Swedish public organizations and provides guidelines for open-standard information management in the AECO industry and other initiatives from BIM Alliance Sweden gradually paves the ground for filling the legal gaps mentioned above.

I took the picture to the top right the other day upon entering the pool where I usually swim. One of the staff was carrying a number of maintenance folders to the storage room in the basement. Apparently, the handover documents in paper format were still in use as the primary source of information for running the facility! In fact, FM&O information is currently stored in a broad range of formats as depicted in the diagram below ranging from blueprints and paper folders to cloud-based object-oriented repositories. The majority of FM&O firms are, nonetheless, still using the rudimentary formats that are demonstrated towards the left end of the diagram below.

Spectrum of forms and formats of FM&O information (Parsanezhad, 2014)

Technologies such as 3D-scanning could help speeding up the process of creating BIMs for older buildings or upgrading old-format legacy documents to more semantically-rich building drawings, models and databases. My third paper is, in fact, a critical reflection on one of such efforts (though not using 3D-scanning) for creating BIMs for pre-BIM facilities. The co-author was Johannes Dimyadi who I was lucky to bump into during WBC2013 in Brisbane. We described and analyzed the case of developing BIMs of 191 campus buildings in Auckland over 4 years. The models had then been coupled with a centralized database in an SQL DBMS and a number of APIs through a portal solution and deployed for optimizing their FM&O activities. I presented the work at CIB-W070 in Copenhagen last year.

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Keeping to my recent blogging tradition, below comes some anecdotes of the events I have lately attended:

23rd September - During our last departmental lunch seminar, Professor Hans Lind presented his recent paper on merits of vertical integration in the real estate sector. The term 'vertical integration' originates from the literature in industrial organization and refers to integrating complementary services into the core business activities of firms. The other alternative is outsourcing or buying in such services when necessary. Through this research, a number of theoretical propositions had been tested within four real estate firms in Sweden. Construction, acquisition, selling and operating facilities were the core and complementary business fields of the selected cases.

According to the literature, some examples of the rationales for vertical integration are: preserving the quality of services and products, entering the retail market, enacting more control over input resources and protecting corporational information. As an example, facility owners who also operate their buildings possess more bargaining power when renting out their properties and are less prone to making incorrect decisions such as selling their assets at the wrong time or at a low price. All in all, vertical integration provides firms with additional options. One common feature is that vertical integration increases bargaining power in markets with limited competition.

22nd September - An exhibition of the works by the students of architecture in Master Studio 4 at KTH was held at the new School of Architecture building designed by Tham & Videgård architects. The title for the exhibition was 'Another Earth' connoting temporary architecture for our future society. For me, it was also a good opportunity to take a look inside the new building which vividly stands out in the campus with its curvy façade comprising pre-oxidized rust-red corten plates and huge glass panes.

20th September - The Swedish Transport Administration (Trafikverket) had organized a public visit to their railroad bridge project as part of the new commuter train line in Stockholm. Citybanan is 6 kilometers long and stretches north-south, passing through the city center. The project will be completed by 2017. In construction of the Älvsjö bridge, modern techniques such as movable scaffolding system (MSC) have been implemented.

16th-17th September - Stockholm Business Arena was held at Stockholm Waterfront Congress Centre. The event includes tens of lectures and debate sessions on construction and regional and urban planning. Off to the side of the event, major actors in the field present their services at the venue. Due to other occupations at school, I only managed to be there half a day. Yet, I had intriguing discussions with representatives of architectural, construction, FM and real estate companies and attended a few sessions on smart cities, infrastructure and residential architecture.

	Right to left: Fredrik Brunes, Inga-Lill Söderberg and me

9th September , morning - As part of the breakfast seminar series organized by the Swedish Association of Architects, Michael Kazarnowiczs gave a speech on how social media could be deployed efficiently and professionally by architectural firms. 'Contents', 'algorithms' and 'people' were emphasized as the pillars of social media platforms where content is the fuel, algorithms are the catalysts and people are the engine. Different media employ different algorithms for customizing the contents. That of Facebook, for instance, customizes each individual user's interface according to her/his interests, previous posts, interest in the creator of the content, content type and recency of the post i.e. News Feed Visibility=IxPxCxTxR.

In Sweden, people at the age of 16 to 25 use the Internet the most. The highest number of Swedish Facebook users belong to the same age interval of 16-25; while the majority of Instagram users through the country are 12 to 15 years old.

9th September, evening - The seminar on virtual design and construction (VDC) was held at KTH. The organizer was the construction firm, Veidekke, and the main speaker of the event was professor Marin Fischer from Stanford University. He presented the basic principles of the Integrated Concurrent Engineering (ICE) method as part of the Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) methodology. A number of case studies were presented where implementing ICE had resulted in significant reduction of work orders and RFIs (request for information) and budget and time efficiencies.

Advocates of the VDC methodology regard BIM as just one single component of their more comprehensive solution which is formulated and practiced at a higher strategic level than BIM. This battle of terms reminds me of how researchers and practitioners in the field of 'adaptation' consider those affiliated with the domain of 'resilience' lacking strategic insight. While BIM is more tangible for designers and engineers, VDC sounds more intriguing and relevant for project managers. Both concepts could be developed further to also embrace the needs of the actors in the operation phase; whereas the term VDC needs to be rephrased to VDCO (virtual design, construction and operation) for this purpose.

P.s. I just discovered that an adept Florida-based team has already started using the updated term, VDCO! I got to know Birgitta Foster firstly through a former student of her, Francisco Forns‐Samso, whom I met at ECPPM 2012 in Reykjavik. Since I found Francisco's thesis an interesting piece of work, I reached Birgitta via a Skype interview in 2012. I also got the opportunity to meet and talk to her during the international BIM conference by BIM Alliance Sweden in 2014. She is a very passionate, charming, energetic and accommodating person with great ideas!

3rd September - Petra Blaisse, the textile designer and landscape architect, presented some of the works designed in their office ranging from interior projects to park designs in Qatar, the Netherlands, Taiwan, Italy, Germany, etc. 'Two eventful years' had been organized by the Swedish Association of Architects and held at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Elaborate use of forms and materials characterizes their work being surrounded by either an individual fully-designed structure or a large-scale urban district.

20th-21st August - Our departmental research and education seminar was held in a conference venue located to the west of Stockholm. Coordination of educational programs at our department, gender equality and pedagogic concerns were the central themes for the event. The corporational vision of the Department of Real Estate and Construction Management at KTH comprises research for a sustainable society, excellent engineering education, and collaboration with industry and society. Research at our department is linked to both policy and practice and covers a wide range of subject areas, namely, urban development, property/facility management, production and logistics.

Miscellaneous notes on recent events

23rd March

During the time I was communication officer at Stockholm's International Research Association (SIRAP), I got in contact with Stockholm's Academic Forum (Staf). In that regard, I was recently invited to Staf's inauguration of their new office at KTH main campus (Valhallavägen 79). This was a timely opportunity for meeting and talking to academicians from other universities around Stockholm. Staf's chairman, Moira von Wright, reported on recent developments including the initiatives for branding Stockholm as a world-class academic destination. She also announced that such efforts would thereafter be continued by the newly-born Stockholm Academic Network.

18th Mach

The workshop on BIM 360 Glue and Field was hosted by Cad-q. Joachim Dekker referred to the population increase in Stockholm as the driving force for a more accelerated construction pace. The increasing competition among current actors in the construction market and their international rivals calls for an increased use of more automated design and construction tools which are, at the time, concretized as BIM applications. BIM envisions an AECO industry with lower material and energy consumption, improved productivity and accelerated delivery. In the same fashion as previous decades since the emergence of the technology, BIM adoption level is the highest among architects and declines subsequently when it comes to engineers, contractors and owners; whereas it is the latter group who is assumed to benefit the most from BIM-implementation.

Pierre Gullander proceeded with a hands-on demonstration of Autodesk's BIM 360 products. The main objective of BIM 360 is to connect the design office to the construction site. BIM 360 Glue is intended for information exchange between the design and production units; whereas BIM 360 Field aims to coordinate the information from different production sources and sites and channel them into the hand-over documents.

BIM 360 Glue can interact with Navisworks and enables functionalities such as clash control, creating mark-ups, searching and filtering specific parameters and doing measurements in three-dimensional views. Using standard views instead of common navigation tools has proved to be easier on mouse-free tools such as tablets.

BIM 360 Field presumably facilitates tracking documents in combination with a model viewer, creating work orders and reports on issues on-the-fly during on-site inspection, assigning actor-specific tasks to work orders, automated management of inspection checklists, and monitoring overall status of the project and its progress rate. A number of early-adopters have already started using BIM 360 Field in their projects. Bravida is an example.

Rasmus Thomsen presented a brief demo of the under-development product of Autodesk, BIM 360 Layout. The idea is using a Total station for capturing the as-built model of an existing or under-construction structure and using the output for checking against the original design model and performing quality assurance and quality control procedures. However, the demo was focused on the point cloud capturing stage and did not include the comparison and QA/QC part. 

Andrew Bowles reported on the current state of implementation of BIM 360 Field in the UK. He referred to a project where using the application resulted in saving 9 hours of work per week compared with traditional methods. According to him, the implementation of the software also resulted in substantial reduction in claims from sub-contractors and other actors. This was realized by the ease of access to the required information in a consolidated and coordinated digital database. Site diaries, detailed reports and audit trail information are some examples of such types of information.

He also briefly presented projects where cloud-based information management facilitated direct transfer of building information from construction databases to the FM&O applications such as IBM Maximo. Such a cloud-based and file-import-and-export-free method is considered as the Autodesk's new paradigm for cross-disciplinary and cross-company information transfer. The vision is already realized for information transfer among Glue and Field applications. Yet, optimal work flows for benefiting such configurations and totally dismissing traditional building information registry and transfer methods need to be defined and widely implemented. 

Apparently, Autodesk is trying to add new functionalities to its software portfolio with the aim of providing a cradle-to-cradle package to design and construction firms. 

11th March

A breakfast seminar about Solibri Model-Checker for project managers was hosted by Graphisoft at their office in Solna (Sweden). Peter Dufvenberg, BIM-strategist at projektledarhuset, presented a number of cases of implementation of SMC in Stockholm. SMC is deployed for visualization, clash-control prior to and during periodical BIM coordination meetings and eventually minimizing the use of drawings. The models should, however, be visually checked before running SMC tools. In case of substantial losses of required information or inaccuracies, the model should be returned to the provider to be completed.

SMC has a specific plug-in for optimizing IFC files that are unnecessarily large. SMC also has now plug-ins for Swedish building codes such as different definitions of area calculation according to the Swedish standard, SS 21054-2009, i.e. BOA, BYA, BRA, BTA, etc. As common to all lectures on building information management, the potentials for benefiting BIM in the operations phase and relevant initiatives for this purpose such as the fi2xml format were also discussed.

4th March
In yet another lunch seminar at our department, Professor Hans Lind presented a critical view on the article 'A monstrous Hybrid’ which hypothesizes a shift from a regulated to a liberated Swedish housing market with the aim of relieving the housing shortages of the poor households. 

According to Prof. Lind, there has never happened such a phenomenon as a pure shift from a regulated to a liberated housing market. An evidence for this argument is that the rental prices in some suburbs of Stockholm such as Hanninge were market-driven already in 1970s. Apparently, forced rental reduction did by no means increase the poor household's access to the housing market in those suburbs.

In 1990, the government ceased to subsidize the interest rates for housing loans. Since then, the construction sector in Sweden has received no subsidy from the government at all; while no alternative governmental housing policy has been introduced either. This does not imply that current housing market is totally liberated; but that the real estate market policies have been left to municipalities rather than the market or the state. In such a situation, the decision-making power is distributed among local alliances - sometimes - with environmentalist agendas and the not-in-my-backyard groups and individuals. The result is often a stronger influence for those who try to reduce the costs of the municipalities.

A more concrete consequence of this trend is that the market has less influence on the pace, quality and quantity of construction; new actors can not survive in the market and established actors' strategic policies become the most influential force. The regional agents, who are expected to supervise municipalities, are quite often nominated and influenced by the municipalities themselves and are therefore neutralized. The excess of the supply of housing which adds to the bargaining power of the poor, is not realized under such circumstances.

27th February

It was May 2013 during the 19th CIB World Building Congress in Brisbane when, for the first time, I noticed that the increasingly popular concept of sustainability had been overshadowed by the notion of 'resilience' presumably in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and its devastating consequences for the U.S. cities.

The Coastal Resilience Seminar was organized jointly by KTH Center for a Sustainable Built Environment and City of Stockholm. Gunnar Söderholm, the head of Environment and Health Administration in the City of Stockholm, opened the session with addressing some interesting facts about Stockholm: the city was designated as the first green capital in Europe in 2010; Stockholm is growing at an accelerating pace; according to Vision 2030, by 2020, Stockholm will accommodate 250'000 new residents, will possess 140'000 new dwellings and will become a notably denser city. A sustainable urban growth will therefore gain even more importance.

Map of flooding risk in central Stockholm

The carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of the city per capita in 2015 has been estimated as 3,0 tonnes. This demonstrates a forty percent reduction since 1990. According to the vision document, Stockholm will be a fossil-fuel free city by 2040. While the requirements of ecological sustainability are not far from being met, global warming keeps to be a constant threat to the city in the meanwhile. Like many other metropolitan areas around the world, Stockholm too is now exposed to the risk of flooding. While the Hammarby Waterfront and the Royal Seaport projects were primarily marketed as sustainable urban planning initiatives, the reconstruction of Slussen has a strong focus on handling the consequences of the sea level rise. The municipality is nowadays concerned the most with the question of how to make a dense - and presumably sustainable - city also resilient.

Green islands

The next speaker was Guy Nordenson, Professor of architecture and structural engineering at Princton University. He presented a number of design alternatives for coastal resilience and climate adoption. Examples were taken from New York, Palisade Bay and Yangtze River Delta Project.

According to him, merely controlling the coastal lines using heavy engineering fortifications such as the ones erected in Saint Petersburg and Dutch cities is no more considered as a viable solution for flooding. A more plausible solution is confronting waves and hurricanes at three different zones: on the edge, inland and on the water. Constructing soft edges and allowing the water come in and managing it
inland has now gained a wider acceptance. In this approach, public spaces, landscape features, elevated roads, canals, green areas, raised houses, amphibious suburbs and areas of refuge located in high places are integrated components of an overall strategic plan for flood management. Different arrangements of elements as such are combined to serve different scenarios for hurricanes and the see level rise and the consequences are studied with the aim of identifying the best holistic design alternatives.

New Slussen: the Water Plaza

Monica Granberg, the executive director at the City of Stockholm, was the next speaker who talked about the project of reconstruction of Slussen. Since inauguration of the first lock, the Queen Kristina's lock, in 1642, Slussen has been reconstructed app. every 100 years: the Christopher Polhelm's lock was built in 1755 which was replaced by the Nils Ericson's lock in 1850. The latter was in place until 1935 when the current lock, Slussen, was constructed. Existing facilities and infrastructure at Slussen are in a very bad technical condition now. Improving the structural and spatial qualities of the area is, however, not the only objective of the project.

There are many facilities, cultural sites and agricultural farms located around lake Mälaren. Flooding could therefore cause drastic consequences for more than two million people such as pollution of drinking water and economical losses. The new Slussen is designed to cope with the worst case scenario of the see level rise - which is estimated as one meter by 2100. The locks between the lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea in the new design will increase the drainage capacity of lake Mälaren up to five times the current facilities and reduce the risk of flooding.

As the final speech of the seminar, Zahra Kalantari, the functional manager at ÅF presented some general facts about Stockholm's by-pass project, the East Link project for high-speed rail lines and the 'Blue Green Solution' initiative. The seminar was rounded up by a panel discussion moderated by Gunnar Söderholm.