Construct IT Autumn 2005 Members' Meeting Summary
Day 1
The focus of the Autumn 2005
Members' meeting was on Facilities Information Management. Martin Brown of 4FM
kicked the first day off along a Harry Potter theme by looking at FM in the
"Mirror of Erised" - what you want to see. Looking at the future of
facilities management, he discussed what are the wild cards and/or disrupters
to our business as usual approaches, could the UK built environment information
systems cope with a rebuilding or reinstatement of facilities on the scale of
Katrina? Martin also provided an introduction to and overview of Shaping Tomorrow,
a futures portal that can assist make sense of emerging trends that will affect
the built environment, and enable informed decision making.
Martin set the scene for doing things differently - the facilitated workshop session that followed. Within the facilitated workshop, delegates explored the issue of facilities information across a number of themes pulling together a set of conclusions and recommendations for improvement and future development. Delegates were given the opportunity to explore the multi-dimensional information required by the different stakeholders to a facility, e.g. customers and visitors to a facility will require very different information to those designing, constructing and managing the facility, as will those occupying the facility or those owning or funding the facility. Is there a collective, collaborative approach possible to information management throughout the life of a facility? If we were starting from new, how would we start to structure and manage information, and how can we access/use futures for facilities information?
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Day 2
Professor Keith Alexander from the Centre for Facilities Management set the
scene for the 2nd day by providing a broad overview and introducing the key
concepts to which FIMS respond. nD modelling applied to FM was discussed addressing
the main issue of 'what are we modelling - the building or the organisation?'.
The session also addressed:
Paul Raynor from Taylor Woodrow presented the first of the sessions on the applications for FM. Paul gave a brief introduction to the COMIT Mobile Computing demonstration projects with an emphasis on the Taylor Woodrow Facilities Management implementation. The Taylor Woodrow mobile computing solution has been rolled out to Mobile Repair Technicians both in mobile and fixed locations, provides real time dispatch of work orders and real time updates from the field of job progress and job completion form TWFM Maximo/Oracle database via Taskmaster which is used to manage the FM operation. He discussed the lessons learned, in particular, how Taylor Woodrow managed the organisational and human issues associated with implementing a new way of working. The session concluded with a demonstration of the MRT Mobile solution.
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George Stevenson from Active Plan gave a further presentation on an application for FM. He discussed how ActivePlan has been working with British Land project teams to produce tools and processes that improve the early data capture, allow it to be validated and format the resultant asset data in a way that automatically populates Concept, their planned maintenance system. This saves the FM team up to a year in manual interpretation and data entry and also allow them to ensure warranties are not being breeched due to late delivery of O&Ms. Beyond this, George discussed how the BBC's equally functional buildings have caused their migration managers to use ActivePlan to expedite the moves. This allows them to report who is using what space, when and to what effect.
The afternoon began with Colin Thorns from the British Nuclear Group discussing the Site Asset Management Database (SAMdb) which was prompted by the need to capture details of condition, capability and / or performance gaps and shortfalls in the ability of plants, buildings and infrastructure on the Sellafield Site to meet current and future requirements. Initially these gaps and shortfalls were captured in MS Excel based Asset Management Plans. However, as the number of identified gaps and shortfalls/issues grew it quickly became apparent that this was only a short term solution, and that a database was the only viable long term solution. Development of SAMdb began in 2002/3, as part of the Site Asset Care Project, and over the next three years it evolved from a development database in MS Access to a SQL database with a Web-base front end. Functionality also grew to the point where today, the database not only holds the details of the many issues that have been identified, but also the asset management plans themselves and the work lists associated with the Site's Lifecycle Baseline (LCBL) and Near Term Work Plan (NTWP). Today the database is one of the site's key information systems and an important tool in the management of the sites assets.
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Martin Taylor form Impact Solutions presented how Response Maintenance & Building Services has revolutionised it's maintenance outsourcing service through the introduction of a mobile solution which has:
Paul Carder from the IPD Occupiers Property Databank took a view at who is driving stakeholders information needs, are there too many back seat drivers, too many passengers with no-one watching the road ahead? Paul used good practice examples from the OPD FM Benchmarking Group to illustrate how sources and requirements of corporate information can be wired together on a "dashboard" (like scorecards but here and now) allowing the Head of FM to drive.
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The meeting concluded with Professor Ilfryn Price from Sheffield Hallam University introducing the concepts of facilities visibility in the light of technological developments and addressing the question - is FM responding? He considered the opportunities and threats for stakeholders and identified the technology from its origins to current trends, including what the evolution of technology might do to the FM landscape. The session highlighted that the integration of technology in the formation of complex systems has fundamentally changed where and how people work with increased importance being placed on the knowledge worker.
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Evaluation
From the delegate feedback session held at the end of the event, delegates highlighted that: