Linking the Construction Industry: Electronic Operation and Maintenance Manuals: Workshop Summary (2000)

Public agencies, private corporations, nonprofit institutions, and other organizations regularly invest millions of dollars in acquiring buildings and other constructed facilities to support their lines of business. For this investment, the owner receives a complex structure composed of hundreds of separate but interrelated components, including roofs, walls, foundations, electrical, plumbing, heating, air conditioning, ventilation, fire, communication, safety, and architectural systems. These components and systems must all be maintained and repaired to optimize the facility's performance throughout its service life and to provide a safe, healthy, and productive environment for its users and occupants.

Owners and operators of facilities require as-built information from product data sheets, operation and maintenance manuals, design specifications, testing and balancing reports, and other construction submittal documents to manage a facility efficiently and effectively throughout its life cycle. Unlike the purchaser of a car, who receives an owner's manual that provides a maintenance schedule for all systems to optimize the car's performance, a facility owner receives a stack of product data and manuals for each component with little effort made to integrate the information at the system level. Coordination of operation and maintenance schedules to optimize overall facility performance could, however, result in significant cost savings. Consider that, for most facilities, life-cycle operation and maintenance costs will account for 60 to 85 percent of the total life-cycle costs, as opposed to design and construction costs, which will account for only 5 to 10 percent.

Computer experts have developed hundreds of computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) to help facilities managers organize and control the operation, maintenance, and repair of their building systems and equipment; however, for CMMS to function properly, considerable information about each piece of equipment must be identified in the manufacturers' literature and then must be manually entered into the database. In practice, the cost of collecting and inputting information into a CMMS database can be much higher than the cost of the CMMS itself, and the potential for data entry errors is high. One possible solution would be to have equipment manufacturers supply the required

information in digital form so that it could be read directly into an electronic database. Before this can happen, though, data input standards are necessary to overcome the problems inherent in the large variety of CMMS on the market and their many types of data requirements.

In 1993 the Federal Construction Council (now the Federal Facilities Council, or FFC) of the National Research Council¹ held a workshop titled “Developing Data Input Standards for Computerized Maintenance Management Systems”,² to examine methods for developing a standard electronic format for operations and maintenance manuals. The goals of the workshop were to (1) define the types of standards needed; (2) prepare a plan for developing the standards; and (3) obtain commitments to participate from key parties. Following the 1993 workshop, work on the project continued at the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS). ³

By 1999 a prototype “recommended practice” had been developed, under the auspices of the NIBS and the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC), to facilitate the provision of building information in a format that could be integrated directly with a CMMS database. The prototype practice is based on ISO 8879, Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML); ISO 12083, Standard Generalized Markup Language Document Type Definition (DTD) (see Appendix C); and NAVFAC Guide Specification 01781 (see Appendix D). Two prototype SGML DTDs have been developed: one for material that an architect-engineer (A&E) organization assembles into a comprehensive facility operation and maintenance manual and one for the product data supplied by manufacturers. The next step is to move into development and application testing prior to full-scale deployment.

In 1999 funding for demonstration or pilot projects became available through grants from the General Services Administration's Reinvention of Government Information Technology Program and from the Tri-Service Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Geographic Information System (GIS) Center, recently renamed the national CAD GIS Technology Center for Facilities, Infrastructure, and Environment. In addition, the NIBS Facility Information Council published the first version of the CAD standard, which is an important component of electronic formatting of information and graphics. In light of these developments, the FFC and the NIBS determined it would be useful to convene a workshop of building industry stakeholders to revisit the issue of electronic operation and maintenance manuals.

The workshop “Linking the Construction Industry: Electronic Operation and Maintenance Manuals” was held at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., on October 13, 1999. The key objectives were to (1) demonstrate the prototype practice developed by the NIBS and the NAVFAC; (2) identify the potential costs and benefits of electronic operation and maintenance manuals for the building industry; (3) identify potential barriers to implementation; and (4) develop strategies for implementation, including the identification of pilot projects. The workshop, planned and organized by the FFC and the NIBS, brought together an invited audience of building industry stakeholders, including

owners and operators from federal agencies and other organizations, building component and system manufacturers, publishers of building product data and maintenance manuals, and CMMS software developers (see Appendix A for a list of participants).

The workshop included presentations and demonstrations of existing and prototype systems for the automobile and building industries. These talks provided context for facilitated work groups (see agenda in Appendix B).

• Mr. Eli Katz, the founder and former Chief Executive Officer of Maintenance Automation Corporation, a producer of CMMS software, addressed the purpose and a vision for the electronic operation and maintenance manual initiative.

• Mr. Eric Jackson from the Atlantic Division of the NAVFAC described the prototype practice DTDs.

• Mr. Ken Poirer from the Tweddle Litho Company of Detroit discussed his experience publishing electronic operation and maintenance manuals for the automotive industry and shared his ideas about how this concept can be applied in the building industry.

Following the presentations, workshop participants formed professionally led work groups designed to identify:

• stakeholder perspectives on the costs and benefits of the prototype practice.

• the audience and market for this technology.

• technological and economic barriers to the implementation of the prototype DTD as a recommended industry practice.

• potential applications for existing buildings.

• methods and strategies for overcoming identified barriers.

Mr. Joel Orr of Joel Orr Consultants began the afternoon session with a presentation on emerging technologies and a vision for the future. His address was followed by facilitated sessions in which the participants were asked to identify potential implementation strategies, pilot projects, and next steps.

A summary of the key points from the morning and afternoon facilitated work groups is followed by summaries of the formal presentations.

A standardized electronic format could bring significant benefits to building owners and operators. Maintenance management information could be more easily available at diverse locations, rather than through one or two paper copies of manuals, which are often inaccessible. In the nonautomated environment, information is quickly lost, and warranties are not maintained. In the electronic format, information could be entered only once, but used many times. This could eliminate the expensive and frustrating process of entering information repeatedly. Data would have greater longevity, would be more consistent, and more easily updated. An electronic manual could help maximize resources and significantly increase reliability and performance levels, while lowering operating and ownership costs.

An electronic standard could provide for interoperability, making the use of information more flexible. The ultimate reduction of costs could also help offset cuts in funding for maintenance, repair, and operations. Benefits to manufacturers could include cost savings on hard-copy manuals, fewer requests for technical information, increased reliability of equipment, and a capability to meet a growing demand for electronic manuals.

A number of obstacles to the successful introduction of electronic operation and maintenance manuals were identified. The effort will require extensive education of project owners and facilities managers to generate the return on investment, or payback, for such projects, since there are few pilot projects in progress that could be used to demonstrate such payback. Although there is pressure today to reduce costs, owners may be reluctant to make up-front expenditures in return for long-term payback. Maintenance staff may resist change for two reasons: (1) they would have to learn new procedures and (2) they may feel a loss of control over their operations because financial executives would have direct access to information about results.

Supporters of this initiative should acknowledge that everyone involved in building a facility may not share the same goals. By involving the operation and maintenance staff from the beginning of a project, their particular concerns, including the associated documentation requirements, can best be accommodated and incorporated into the project. The construction industry is not well positioned for changes in information delivery. Every building equipment and component manufacturer will not have the resources to provide information in SGML, so updating information can be a challenge.

Participants agreed that it will be difficult for everyone in the industry sectors—A&E firms, construction firms, owners, and manufacturers —to agree to one standard. Some level of flexibility in the standard itself and in the way information is input will be needed.

It was suggested that any pilot project should cut across the many system types and materials in a building, including all electrical and mechanical systems, to demonstrate how the systems information would come together in a building manual. A pilot project should bring in as many stakeholders as possible and have measurable outcomes, particularly labor savings. A project should also have a broad constituency, such as an office building or health facility, in order for the results to be meaningful to the largest number of people. Also, a project plan should be established for a pilot project, stating what is to be achieved and how. Examples of objectives include lower maintenance costs over a fixed period; reusability of data; labor savings, such as reduced data entry time; and lower cost of performing maintenance tasks.

There was general agreement that pilot projects should be a mix of new construction and retrofit projects. Maintenance costs of new buildings could then be compared to those of older buildings; the comparison should account for the quality of commissioning and staff training.

Return on investment could be defined incrementally. Some participants thought a pilot should be a small project in order to show early success and so that the maintenance cycle could be quantified in terms of its past and future performance. Also, advocates or sponsors should be identified inside various agencies and companies. It is important to find a manufacturer willing to participate and make its data available on the World Wide Web.

Several specific pilot projects were suggested by the work groups as follows:

• Develop a tagging dictionary to tie together SGML and DTDs. A statement of work will first be required. The second step will be to identify existing tagging dictionaries and such initiatives as aecXML (Extensible Markup Language) to determine their implications for this effort. The last step will be to make a recommendation regarding these efforts and proceed to develop an industry standard.

• Apply the prototype practice to a building under construction. The purpose will be to legitimize what has been developed and identify areas that need to be modified. The building owner should be involved in identifying the information needed from an owner's perspective. Possible sites for this pilot project are four Internal Revenue Service facilities scheduled for completion by 2004.

• Apply the prototype practice to an existing building. It would be useful to have a system with an SGML document already available so that the manufacturer could put it on a Web site for operator review and downloading. Data could also be converted into the prototype SGML DTD. Potential sites include Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals, where there is high visibility because of the critical nature of the equipment and the institution. Also mentioned as possible sites were Department of Energy laboratories that have employees experienced in CMMS software.

• Develop the contract language and text for a construction specification that will require the contractor to provide operation and maintenance data in the appropriate electronic format.

Choosing from a variety of projects will allow stakeholders—manufacturers, owners, and A&E firms—to begin efforts in parallel, converge, and then learn from each other as they progress.