Case Study: Facility Condition Assessment
The Challenge
The University of Alabama at Birmingham consists of 1.8 million sq. ft. of space on the medical campus and over 10 million sq. ft. of administration, classroom, and research space on the educational campus. The entire campus is comprised of approximately 145 buildings, some of which are dating back to the early 1900’s.
Advanced Technologies Group, Inc., was assigned with the task of completing a comprehensive Facility Condition Assessment (FCA) to accomplish the University’s long term planning goals and to assist in the elimination of deferred maintenance issues. The main stipulation of the project was that the resulting solution must serve to improve access to facility-related information for all levels of personnel throughout the entire UAB campus. The FCA project scope covered the entire medical center as well as approximately 3.5 million sq. ft. of academic space.
The Solution
In partnership with the management team at UAB, ATG along with its engineering partners initially conducted a thorough assessment of the campus buildings according to the objectives specifically defined by the UAB system. Utilizing the Facility Condition Assessment component of its back-end technology, ATG integrated the results of the FCA survey with the CAD files of the buildings. The web-based front end of ATG’s Enterprise Active Visual System™ was then used to provide authorized users with easy and intuitive access to the FCA information. The capabilities include viewing and querying the condition assessment data for a wide range of financial and facility management applications without requiring any knowledge of CAD or other proprietary software. The assessment covered the architectural, MEP, and structural elements of each building. Each deficiency with its corresponding cost estimate was also assigned a priority to allow a rational approach for capital allocation.
Authorized users can instantly access facility-related information and
run reports over the web without any additional software or hardware.
The Results
The unique project ID number assigned to each deficiency enables each specific project to be referenced, tracked, and monitored throughout any planning, budgeting, or management process. Through ATG’s web-based Active Visual System front end, all authorized users at UAB are provided with easy and secure access to drawing files and database information.
Access to drawing files includes the ability to view and print facility layouts or portions of layouts and various FCA reports that are generated intuitively from the web component of the solution. At the same time, corresponding digital photos of various systems and equipment are available directly from the CAD files. In addition, through a separate password access, authorized users can make changes to database records and update any of the existing data, again, from a web-browser interface.
In addition to the online FCA data, the final reports also include a narrative of each system to provide an overview of the system operation, exemplary or deficiency conditions, and recommendations. The digital photographs are combined with each narrative to provide a complete and clear understanding of the systems and their evaluation. The cost estimates are collected and used to create short term and long-term capital spending plans.
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