The modern building owner faces new challenges every day, hindered by siloed legacy workflows that cause costly miscommunications and delays throughout the project lifecycle.
Wherever they happen in the process, the fact is disjointed teams and incompatible systems mean less revenue in owners’ pockets.
The key to maximizing the value of your assets, time, and money lies in increasing visibility. Unlocking that visibility requires leveraging project data across teams and workflows. Better insight leads to better investments – because how can owners provide checks and balances when they are left in the dark?
Key challenges for building owners
Fractured or siloed teams
Many organizations lack a unified approach to AEC building workflows. The greater the size of the organization, the more distributed their teams and approach. Valuable data is lost during the handoffs between the planning, design, building, and operations phases.
Accurate forecasting
Incomplete information and loosely defined scopes make it difficult for owners to accurately budget years in advance. Since building owners often take the biggest financial hit when projects are over budget, accurate forecasting is crucial to project success.
Quickly recalibrating when priorities shift
Project goal posts are constantly moving. Since most owners typically have multiple projects running at any given time with a lot of moving parts, agility requires a way to easily communicate across teams.
Sharing project data
All these challenges are made more difficult by the inability to easily share, find, and access complete building data. Software toolkits are often a patchwork of old technology without any consistent data management system, leaving stakeholders in the dark.
Why now?
Acceleration of digitization
The Covid-19 pandemic has sped up the pace of digital transformation by seven years — with companies acting to implement these changes 20-25 times faster than expected.
Aging infrastructure
The effort and costs that go into operating and upgrading older buildings are increasing, with 72% of current U.S. buildings being more than 20 years old and built with little to no concern for energy savings. With renovation, reuse and retrofit work at an all-time high, owners are relooking at their portfolio mix to maximize operational performance and asset resiliency.
Sustainability
Owners are being driven by the environmental impacts of construction, and given that buildings are responsible for roughly 40% of a city’s carbon footprint, they need to look for ways to optimize their assets to reduce climate impact and consumption of power, heat, or water. Owners are also concerned with their aging portfolio infrastructure, so having more resiliency in how they adapt and manage risk using data insights is critical.
Solution: BIM + cloud based common data environment = total project visibility
The first step to total project visibility is moving project designs from desktopbased applications to a “common data environment” (CDE) in the cloud – a digital space where all project-related data lives. A CDE makes that data accessible to the entire team throughout the project lifecycle, giving owners the insight they need to find constructability problems, reduce risk, and deliver better projects.
Within the CDE, building information modeling (BIM) data can be referenced anytime by everyone on the project team. Instead of juggling emails and spreadsheets, teams communicate directly through the CDE, creating a truly connected experience.
Unified data management means that a detailed digital record of every component of a completed structure — including information on the process that structure underwent throughout construction — can be passed to the owner, increasing their understanding of the built asset they now own and empowering them to make better decisions while enabling more predictable and profitable outcomes.
This is true project visibility… and it all starts with a cloud-based common data environment.
Here are 5 benefits of powering decisions with insight.
01 Connected teams
Improve project handover through collaboration
02 Risk management
Identify and manage risks via accurate forecasting
03 Cost savings
Reduce redundancy and increase revenue
04 Schedule savings
Streamline processes and avoid costly delays
05 Better asset performance
Maximize value throughout the entire building lifecycle