Funding optimization will be achievable by applying the practices that ensure the best health of the building while minimizing the operational costs to do so. This simply boils down to making the right decisions for the building backed by accurate and scientific data.

It doesn’t matter whether the building is residential, industrial, institutional, or commercial–all of these have common building components and equipment that have their own life expectancies. Determining the exact health of a facility’s components can help in their timely restoration and overhauling, keeping the overall facility in a good state of repair. This, in turn, will significantly cut the extra operating costs and help preserve funding for future maintenance of the building.

Now, with several buildings and respective stakeholders in place, it becomes even more difficult to make the best use of available funds. There is a real lack of flexibility in utilizing future funding expenditure.

This is where a Facility Condition Assessment (FCA) software applies advanced algorithms that help in justifying your renewal needs and make the best use of the funding, simultaneously maintaining a balanced facility condition index (FCI) across all your assets.

Furthermore, it gives the capability to create unlimited funding scenarios for better decision making in a scientific way. You can superimpose the scenarios that best meet your needs, prioritize your facilities based on the criticality, and build requirements that fit into your budget.

Here are some pro-tips to achieve the right budget for your facility –

1. Choose the right Facility Condition Assessment team having professionals like architects, engineers, and skilled technicians.
2. As you will be doing a lot of data collection, make sure to use state-of-the-art FCA software to streamline and manage the FCA related processes. The software will simplify the whole work process and improve consistency and efficiency within your facility team.
3. Thoroughly go through the financial records for the building/buildings in question and compare operations with the historical data.
4. Shift your mindset from temporary and short-term operations to long-term strategy building.

By pursuing a comprehensive Building Condition Assessment and regularly updating the assessment data, you can certainly succeed in creating and optimizing your building maintenance budget that improves your bottom line and increases your profit margins.

Know What Type of Facility Condition Assessment is Best Suited for you as per your facility requirement.

A Facility Condition Assessment (FCA) provides a complete picture of the condition of a facility to identify the capital budget needs for vital repairs and replacements for the upcoming years.

How FCAs help in increasing sustainability?

FCA decisions have a great impact on sustainability, whether it is financial, environmental, or social sustainability. The biggest challenge of a facility manager is to meet the facility needs of the organization and stay in alignment with the organization’s commitment to financial, environmental, and social responsibilities.

FCA plays a critical role in providing facility condition and budget data for the well-being of facilities. Even though a facility team generally performs an FCA to make budget-related decisions, these decisions have a straight-forward impact on the environmental and social factors associated with the buildings.

Here are 3 ways a Facility Condition Assessment helps in increasing sustainability –

1. Reduced Energy Consumption
If a building has a lot of defects, energy consumption is much higher than actually required. Facility Condition Assessment (FCA) identifies the defects in the equipment of the building. Following this, the operations required to fix those defects are also carried out. This, in turn, reduces the consumption of energy up to a great extent.

Despite the fact that an FCA is not an energy audit, it uncovers the very obvious need to repair and replace the critical equipment of the building. When equipment is preserved at proper intervals, overall it becomes more energy efficient.

1. Better Work Environment
FCA can identify the areas of improvement that help build better work environments, such as, improved comfort level for the occupants. For example, the proper functioning of the HVAC systems and less radiance from perfectly operating lights will certainly improve the amount of convenience that the occupants will experience, making the building a much better place to work in.

3. Stronger Social Relations 
The better the work environment, the more is the productivity of the work carried out within the building. When productivity is increased, the business automatically tends to achieve higher customer satisfaction rates. This, in turn, will build stronger relationships with the customers, as well as increase the chances of getting recurring business from them.

Conclusion

Although not commonly thought of as a major source of sustainability, FCAs provide great scope to influence our facilities in an economic, environmental, and social sense.

We’re always ready to make all the difference in optimizing your facility for the future. Call us at (905) 602-1850 or send an email to our Director of Building Sciences, Ashar Khan at ashar@nadine-test.weboapps.com.

If You’re Going for a Facility Condition Assessment? Know which one is ideal for you.

Now, many questions arise; how do you define the scope of your Facility Condition Assessment? How will you decide whether the assessment should be of 1-year, 5-year, or 25/30-year?

Based on the purpose of Facility Condition Assessment (FCA), we have explained the three types of FCAs, and which is one is ideal for you:

If You’re Selling a Building

If you’re selling a building, you need to conduct a pass-through inspection to know which parts of the building need immediate attention, whether it is repair or replacement. In this case, the FCA required is typically for 1 year. A 1-year FCA report generally includes the Immediate Repairs/Replacement Table, which identifies capital needs for the failing or damaged building systems, life safety issues, and code violations.

If You’re Buying a Building

If you’re buying a building, you need to know the exact condition of that building so you can deduct the maintenance cost from the price of the building. This is why you need to look at a broader picture when it comes to building acquisition. Hence, you should go for a 5-year FCA.

A 5-year FCA report generally includes 5-year Requirements, a 5-year Expenditure summary (Expenditure Chart, Expenditure Graph, Expenditure Table), Assessment summary (overview of site condition, mechanical/assessment systems, fire building information, etc.), Detailed system/requirement analysis (service life, actual age, Current Replacement Value, Requirement justification, and strategy, etc.), Renewal needs, and Facility Condition Index (FCI).

If You’re Maintaining a Building

If you have a building that needs to be maintained, you need to understand and evaluate the physical condition of your assets, build capital budgets, and prioritize the assets. And, the most important thing you need to do is secure the right amount of funding to keep your buildings in a good state of repair.

In order to do so, you need to have a 30-year or 25-year Facility Condition Assessment in place. A 30-year FCA will provide a more thorough accounting of the material components of each system, usually in the form of inventory tables. Because a 30-year FCA is designed to serve as a functional tool to maintain the facility over time, it will usually have more detailed estimates for the repair and replacement of systems and equipment than those you would find in a 5-year or 1-year FCA.

A 30-year FCA report provides both short and long-term information over a larger planning horizon, which will help in making strategic decisions regarding the fate of the asset. The long-term outlook will help you in deciding if short-term renewals are really necessary considering the long-term outlook of the building and to adjust the scope of the renewals.

A 30-year FCA report provides a similar kind of details as a 5-year, but with the flexibility to increase or decrease the funding while maintaining the assets in good condition.

The Conclusion

In conclusion, different types of FCAs serve different purposes. We at Nadine understand that each project is unique and has specific requirements. That’s why we develop a unique and dynamic response to our clients’ requirements and provide custom solutions as per their planning needs.

We’re always ready to make all the difference in optimizing your facility for the future. Call us at (905) 602-1850 or send an email to our Director of Building Sciences, Ashar Khan at ashar@nadine-test.weboapps.com.

Also, check out our step-by-step definitive E-book on Building Condition Assessment.

This assessment is often expressed in a Facility Condition Index (FCI), which is an industry-standard metric that provides a benchmark of a building’s condition.

FCI is calculated as:

For a Facility Manager, knowing the appropriate process is the first step towards a value-driven building assessment.

Here are the 5 steps to conducting a successful Building Condition Assessment:

1.  Site inspection by a multi-discipline engineering team

The first step of a Facility Condition Assessment is to do a preliminary preparation for the inspection. This includes the mobilization of the consulting team of engineers and arranging site access for them. The consulting team should include architects, a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, a structural engineer, and a cost estimator. In some inspection, there is also a need for civil engineers, security consultants, heritage consultants, environmental experts, and others, depending on nature and existing condition of the building.

While selecting an FCA team, make sure it has the most knowledgeable and experienced people required to undertake a detailed and comprehensive building inspection. The consulting team should be very clear about the full scope of the project, and the roles and responsibilities should be assigned as per the project-specific briefing. The team should be given the flexibility to bring in creative and innovative ideas to address the unique aspects of the individual project.

2. Collection of assessment data

While the consulting team inspects a facility, all the assessment data needs to be collected, reviewed, and stored at a place – drawings, digital pictures, documentation, contact information for all project stakeholders, etc. The consulting team also performs on-site walkthroughs and interviews with the building staff to gauge the conditions and challenges of working in the building. These interviews generally aim to answer some of the below questions:

• Major projects performed in the last 5 years
• Ongoing projects, their scopes, and estimated costs
• In-plan projects and their scopes
• Any recurring or high-maintenance issues regarding any of the systems
• Any active leaks or infiltrations from the building envelope
• Any particular concerns

This interview data, too, need to be listed somewhere in order to keep a tab of all the conversations that happened with the interviewees. Some consulting teams also use specific apps to take notes of all these findings so that all the information is collected properly.

All these findings during the building inspection play a very critical role in creating the assessment reports, and hence should not be missed in any case.

3. Building the assessment report 

The consulting team provides you with a detailed report of the assessment. This generally includes:

Executive Summary: The executive summary covers the below information:

• 5 Year requirements
• 30 Year budgets
• 30 Year budgets based on Uniformat level 2

Introduction: The introduction covers the below information:

• Terms of Reference
• Project Team and Documentation
• Limitations
• Assumptions
• Asset Details

Assessment Summary: An assessment summary consists of the below information:

• Overview of Structural Condition
• Overview of Architectural Condition
• Overview of Heritage Character
• Overview of Seismic
• Overview of Site Condition
• Overview of Vertical and Horizontal Transportation Condition
• Overview of Mechanical Systems Condition
• Overview of Electrical Systems Condition
• Overview of Fire Building Information
• Regulatory Testing Compliance
• Code Compliance Summary
• Overview of Environmental Issues
• Compliance with Accessibility Standards
• Overview of Project Grouping

5-year Expenditure Summary: The 5-year expenditure summary consists of the below details:

• 5-year Expenditure Chart
• 5-year Expenditure Graph
• 5-year Detailed Expenditure Table

30-year Expenditure Summary: Similarly, the 30-year expenditure summary consists of the below details:

• 30-year Expenditure Chart
• 30-year Expenditure Graph
• 30-year Detailed Expenditure Table

Detailed System/Requirement Analysis: The report also gives a detailed analysis of the different systems in the building:

• System description
• Service life
• Actual age
• Current Replacement Value
• Requirement statement
• Requirement justification and strategy
• Implication of requirement deferral

Renewal needs and Facility Condition Index (FCI): This section of the report gives the renewal cost of the building, as well as the Facility Condition Index, that tells the condition of the building.

4. Analysis of the report

The assessment report needs to be thoroughly analyzed and taken into consideration for building future plans regarding the replacement/renewal of the building.

This is generally done by the facility managers and the other facility executives who are actively involved in the FCA process. Post this, the report is also reviewed by the peers to examine all the data and check for loopholes if any.

5. Presentation of the report to decision-makers

In the final stage of the Building Condition Assessment (BCA) process, the assessment report is presented to the management and the decision-makers. The ultimate purpose of a Building Condition Assessment is to make data-driven decisions about the facility and ensure that the budgeting needs are in line with the projections being made. The management and decision-makers of the facility need to ensure that accurate inference is drawn from the report, and a decision is taken accordingly.

Ultimately, Building Condition Assessments can only be accomplished with the right planning and course of action. To know how to perform a full-fledged BCA backed by scientific data, check out our step-by-step definitive E-book on Building Condition Assessment.

Building Condition Assessment (BCA) is the first step in achieving the right health of your building. It exposes the defects in building and its system components and helps in deciding the maintenance/renewal activities that have to be carried out.

Here are the four P’s of Building Condition Assessment that’ll help you determine what you can achieve from a detailed condition assessment –

1. PLAN for upcoming expenditures

Building Condition Assessment helps the building stakeholders to understand how well their buildings are fitted to meet the needs of the organization, this year, next year, and in the upcoming three, five, or ten years. The FCA data gives a holistic view of the physical condition and value of the building’s assets and determines the probability of physical assets running into issues. This invaluable data is the key to making critical decisions about capital budgets.

Accurate capital funding is the key requirement to make any decisions about the repair, renewal, or replacement of the building.

2. PRIORITIZE the items for maintenance/renewal

Across the building portfolio, prioritizing the items for renewal/maintenance on the basis of their current condition is very important. This is where a comprehensive Building Condition Assessment (BCA) comes into the picture. A BCA evaluates your assets and places whatever is most urgent or crucial at the top of your list, whether it is replacing carpet or repairing an HVAC. Also, it becomes clear which assets are critical and which are secondary.

“A Building Condition Assessment gives you a much clearer picture of every piece of equipment within your building. It helps you determine where to target investments. You might discover that replacing the whole set of sprinklers was not even required, and millions of dollars could be saved.”

Ashar Khan

Director, Building Science at Nadine International Inc.

3. PERFORM Preventive maintenance wherever necessary

Building Condition Assessment helps you keep your assets in a good state of repair, reducing the likelihood of their breakdown, and you ultimately have less downtime throughout the life of the asset. A detailed condition assessment helps you focus your preventive maintenance where it’s most needed, by identifying the exact health status of all your assets. Moreover, it helps you make more economical use of maintenance workers due to working on a scheduled basis instead of a crash basis to repair breakdowns. The overtime costs are reduced, too.

4. PURSUE net-zero target

The researchers are clear: To avoid the worst climate effects, the carbon emissions will need to drop by half by 2030, and reach net-zero around 2050. A number of countries are committed to moving to a net-zero emissions economy. This is in response to climate science showing that in order to control climate change, carbon emissions have to stop; just reducing them is not enough. A Building Condition Assessment helps with the required inputs to make energy-efficient changes, and achieve net-zero targets by gradually reducing carbon footprint in your facility.

The Key Take-Aways

• It is critical to know the extent to which the buildings, physical assets, and equipment in your building are performing.
• A multi-discipline approach will make sure you always have accurate information about your facility’s ability to meet your organization’s needs.
• You also have an easy-to-understand report to show decision-makers at your facility why you need to replace what you need to replace.
• Having accurate and scientifically-backed data on all assets enables Facility Managers to determine the potential opportunity for funding optimization.
• All the hassle, equipment breakdowns, and emergency repairs you’ll avoid are worth the initial investment on a Facility Condition Assessment partner.

Engaging with a perfect partner for your Building Condition Assessment (BCA) is the key to successful evaluation and ultimately a better-decision making for your building. Moreover, having one partner involved from starting to end cuts down on inefficiencies and budgets.

CONTACT OUR MULTI-DISCIPLINE TEAM

Need assistance and expert advice for planning your next building project? Talk to our expert team at Nadine International Inc. We have been providing Building Condition Assessments (BCA) for over 35 years and are also lending in the integration of net-zero strategies in BCA.

Call us at (905) 602-1850 or send an email to our Director of Building Sciences, Ashar Khan at ashar@nadine-test.weboapps.com.

As the maintenance needs increase with a building’s age, building managers across the globe are surrounded by some difficult questions –

• Are the inspections completed on time?
• Are the critical items being included in the renewal?
• Can facility condition assessment data be maintained live?
• Can I generate custom reports?
• How quickly can I justify my capital budget requirements?
• And the most important, is there a way where I can find answers to all these questions in one place?

While the facilities team may work on expecting the unexpected, other departments might not be as proactive. Definitely, building managers want to put an end to these worries. But how can they do that?

Clearly, paper trails and spreadsheets make things harder. This simply brings in the inability to focus on big-picture issues and no matter how much time and effort the teams put in, badly organized data can take a toll on the decision-making process.

The Solution

It’s time to toss your paper reports!
All of your facilities-related challenges can be solved with a state-of-art Facility Condition Assessment solution. The software enables you to manage your single as well as multi-site building assessments; right from criticality assessment, funding optimization, asset tracking, facility condition index, code consulting, work order fulfillment, preventive maintenance scheduling, reporting, and analytics.

Let’s see how:

1. Better Criticality Review

The facility condition assessment reports, generally, are extra lengthy and require a lot of deep digging to access the most critical information.

An FCA software has the unique capability of providing its users a better and summarized building inspection report of the condition of the building, typically in one or two pages. The color-coded heat map makes it easier to visually understand and prioritize the maintenance or renewal needs. This also gives you an extra edge in terms of business case development, project justification, investment analysis reports, etc.

In short, there’s no more need to read lengthy reports. One map explains it all!

2. Optimized Funding across the assets

With several buildings and respective stakeholders in place, it becomes more difficult than ever to make the best use of available funds. There is a real lack of flexibility in optimizing future funding expenditure.

The facility condition assessment FCA software applies advanced algorithms that help you justify your renewal needs and obtain funding, and maintain a balanced facility condition index (FCI)  across all assets.

Furthermore, it gives you the capability to create unlimited funding scenarios for better decision making, in a scientific way. You can superimpose the scenarios that best meet your needs, prioritize your facilities based on the criticality, and build requirements that fit into your budget.

Funding optimization, after all, can’t be more simple than this!

3. Improved Asset Tracking and Management

Tracking the assets via spreadsheets and manual analysis can be extremely daunting and time-consuming, especially for a business with assets in various locations.

An automated Facility Condition Assessment software (FCA) comes along with the most important feature of managing and tracking different assets spread across various locations. On a basic level, this feature helps to track the progress of all the critical equipment across your buildings – their actual age, current health status, the due date for renewal, and much more. By doing this, you can benchmark and compare the condition of your assets in real-time.

Applying technology gives you more flexibility over building management and asset handling of maintenance and contractual responsibilities.

 4. Work Order Fulfillment

Being one of the facility managers, there come several occasions in the day in and day out of your schedule when you run to an office desktop to complete time-sensitive work orders. And, this might have definitely left you wondering, Will my life become much simpler if all this gets automated, simplified, and controlled with facility condition assessment software?

The answer, of course, is, Yes.

Work order tracking allows you to schedule and provide the team with a planned job to ensure smooth work without delays or interruptions. Work orders can be submitted and tracked easily, allowing you to quickly gauge the costs associated with repairs/renewals of your assets.

Also, with automatic email alerts, facility teams never miss out on a scheduled inspection or preventive maintenance. This allows them to take full control of their tasks and constantly make improvements with facility condition assessment.

Go beyond just managing the work!

5. Preventive Maintenance Scheduling

Downtime and failure rate of your equipment maintenance can be much higher than you would expect, especially if you work in a reactive or ‘firefighting’ scenario.

Preventive Maintenance feature of the facility condition assessment FCA software allows you to streamline every aspect of your preventive maintenance program, including development, scheduling, and tracking. It enables you to generate meter-based PMs and set up PM schedules, which prevents any future failures and reduces the overall downtime.

Why all the fuss? Increase your profits by cutting maintenance costs.

So, Let’s Recap

No matter what industry your business belongs to, managing your critical assets and maintenance needs is a requisite to keep your business running optimally. And, this is only possible via right planning and course of action. A Facility Condition Assessment (FCA) software not only helps you prioritize your assets for maintenance/renewals but also reduces the cost of your operations; all because of a data-driven and scientific approach.

After all, why not trust data over instincts.

To know more, get in touch with our expert team.

Buildings with Care Occupancy or Retirement Homes, Homes for the Aged, and Homes for Special Care with more than ten residents must have their sprinkler systems updated by January 1, 2025.

If you want to get your facility up to regulation before the deadline, don’t hesitate to call us at (905) 602-1850 or email us at info@nadine-test.weboapps.com.

For more detail on the regulations, you can read them here.

The key requirement of Nadine International’s design was to develop a solution to facilitate the detection of moving and stationary fires along 44 km of conveyors travelling at 600 feet per minute. The fire detection system had to be reliable, accurate, provide early warning of a possible fire condition, meet various industry Codes and Standards, withstand a harsh environment, and require a minimum amount of maintenance.

After extensive research and testing, Nadine International designed a new and unique fire detection system using a fiber optic linear detection system in an application, which was the first to be installed in the world. This cable can detect a fire within one meter of accuracy anywhere along the 44 km of conveyor systems, can provide early warning of a possible fire to the operators, and can automatically activate a water suppression system within the fire area.

Fibro-Laser Installation on an Outdoor Conveyor

In July of 2007, Nadine International witnessed the Final Commissioning of this innovative technology, which has been operating successfully since installation, much to the satisfaction of the Client and regulatory agencies.

The use of this technology in detecting a fast-moving fire will save lives and reduce personal injuries; will reduce air, soil, and water pollution; and will minimize property damage and business interruption.

In 2008, Nadine International won the Ontario Consulting Engineering Award of Excellence for this system.