The year for FM

Blog post by Duncan Reed , thinkBIM Ambassador

This year seems to have been widely touted as the year that FM joins the BIM roadshow, or something to that effect. But it’s definitely seems to have become a high priority now in the construction industry, whether its the setting up of the BIM Task Group supported BIM4FM Group or Kath Fontana’s BIMMIE winning presentation at BIM Show Live that I was fortunate enough to hear.

If nothing else FM has now joined the BIM debate and not just with designers and contractors scratching their heads to understand FM or trying to find a practitioner to engage with on the subject.  So in the light of all this, and in an attempt to understand what the FM industry actually does with IT I went to the Facilities Show at the NEC last week. 

They’re a diverse lot these FM people with stands offering to sell me litter bins, fire extinguishers and pot plants but in an amongst all these were the fabled practitioners of CAFM – Computer Aided Facilities Management. And just like our beloved and multifarious BIM Execution Plan formats it seems there are many ways to ‘do’ CAFM. From businesses offering to digitise 2D documents to create a searchable database through to powerful stand alone FM databases and even server or cloud based solutions with a model as the front end interface tool there were organisations offering lots of solutions but very little, with one or two notable exceptions (that I saw), that would take and use our data rich as-constructed models (assuming we have managed to create one of these I grant you!!) and put them into their CAFM systems.

But what did come out of my conversations with these businesses is there are pockets that are realising what BIM can offer to the FM  industry  and they are working hard to provide that seamless link between the software solutions. But to make this work effectively the design and construct businesses need to engage and understand the FM needs and requirements, and vica versa. As ever, BIM is just the handle for doing construction better – it’s not all about the software, though as ever it will have a part to play. 

And this links nicely to last months thinkBIM twilight event where Liam Brady, from Manchester City Council also spoke persuasively over the need to engage with the FM team so that the best model, for FM, was created in the design and construct stage. We are looking forward to the teams from BAM and Bond Bryan continue this theme at next months event – based on their experiences on the Bradford College project.  And finally July will see the welcome return of Deborah Rowland to present on GSL (not GSD but I’m sure that will have its place too!) and we are joined by members of the BIM4FM Group as well as hopefully delegates from BIFM too. 

As ever it is only by coming together in these sorts of events that common ground can be found and solutions created. Mr Morrell’s words ring out again

“Integrate you bastards”