Building Information Modelling (BIM) for Facility Management (FM): Industry Survey of Building Assets

The purpose of this paper is to discover the current methods that facility managers use to manage and track assets and identify a set of attributes for Building Information Modelling (BIM) that can improve the efficiency of the current facility management (FM) practice. A survey of over 100 facility management professionals addressed demographics such as industry sector, number of buildings managed, and use of industry standards or internally developed guidelines for data management. This information is correlated with their current asset management strategies to identify minimum sets of attributes that may be used for an FM-specific BIM. In addition, the survey asked the FM professionals their opinion on the importance of specific asset attributes and data management information that could be included in a BIM for FM. The findings of this paper indicate that there is a consensus on basic information (asset type, unique identification, manufacturer, model number, serial number) needed for asset management, and that there is no generally accepted system on how this is done in current practice. FM professionals and software providers may use the information in this paper to establish baseline sets of data to include in BIM during the design phase of projects. This paper provides insight and data as to the current practice of asset management by facility managers. Understanding the actual needs of the FM industry will assist in future research to implement BIM for FM.