Appendix C
Engineered Management Systems and BCI
Engineered Management Systems
The U.S. Army’s Engineer Research and Development Center, Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (ERDC-CERL) has developed Engineered Management Systems (EMS), a family of tools that aid in assessing the condition of facilities and allocating funding. Each EMS provides a functional manager with automated procedures and tools to support the planning, programming, and budgeting of infrastructure facilities maintenance and repair. The fundamental idea of an Engineered Management System is sustainment, including timely repair or replacement of system components, to meet the design or expected service life, thereby avoiding untimely and excessive recapitalization costs.
The Navy has used EMS PAVER for many years to manage all naval airfield pavements, and the system is being put in place to manage roads and parking lots. The EMS ROOFER and RAILER are in use at some activities to manage roofs and railroad tracks.
EMS BUILDER and WHARFER, which will be applied to buildings and waterfront structures, respectively, are in development and beta application testing. EMS UTILITIER is planned for eventual development. All EMSs provide a procedure for calculation and use of condition indexes to assess the condition of the facility components and systems.
The EMS condition index is mathematically determined from identified distress types germane to the component section being assessed. Distresses are objectively defined flaws in the component section. Deduct values are amounts deducted from the theoretical component condition index of 100 for a given type, quantity, and size of distress. Deduct values for each EMS distress type have been determined through research.
Building Condition Index (BCI)
In BUILDER the CI for buildings is developed from a roll up of system component sections1 to component, to system, and finally to the building’s Condition Index (BCI). The CI provides an equivalent granularity to the traditional FCI in that the roll-up BCI is applicable to a single facility or structure.
The BCI is an objective rating of the condition of the component, system, or facility and is not influenced by the personal bias of the individual inspector who specifies the scope of a corrective action. The disciplined nature of the distress survey requires the inspector to identify observed distresses from a finite list of well-defined possibilities. The inspector records a severity and density range for each observed distress from the appropriate list of predefined possibilities. The EMS determines the condition index from the sum of the modified deduct values associated with the observed distress. As a result, EMS condition indices are consistent and repeatable with little variation among trained inspectors and are not influenced by subjectively determined corrective action costs.
The EMS BCI also provides the needed metric to assist in maintenance planning. Quality maintenance planning requires knowing where and when to make a sustainment, restoration, and modernization (SRM) expenditure and how much money should be allocated. EMS directly calculates a BCI and then estimates costs for SRM expenditures as a function of component replacement or repair cost and BCI. Building components are inventoried and cost models are assembled from industry standard sources. Based on research-derived algorithms using BCI, estimated costs for component-section repair or replacement are calculated according to work rules as a percentage of component-section replacement value or predetermined unit costs.2 EMS uses a family of cost calculations that are specific to facility system, component, or component-section. Using these costs, BUILDER identifies a list of work items. Each work item is associated with an EMS-calculated component-section BCI. Each inventoried component-section that is below a user-defined standard condition is a candidate for corrective action.