Funding optimization can be achieved by applying good engineering practices that keep the building in optimal condition while minimizing the operational costs required to do so. How do you accomplish this? By making decisions based on accurate data based on the latest codes, standards, and building condition assessment.

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

This is where a Facility Condition Assessment (FCA) software comes in! It applies advanced algorithms that allows you to justify your renewal needs and make the best use of your funding, while helping you to balance your facility condition index (FCI) across all of your assets.

Furthermore, it gives you the capability to create unlimited funding scenarios for well-informed decision-making. You can create scenarios that best meet your needs, prioritize your facilities based on criticality, and build requirements that fit your budget.

1. Choose the right Facility Condition Assessment team with experienced professionals, including architects, engineers, and skilled technicians.
2. Use our state-of-the-art FCA software to simplify, streamline, and properly manage the FCA data collection process. The software also improves record consistency across your facility and inspection teams.
3. Review the financial records of your facility and compare current operations with past data.
4. Transition your focus from short-term operations to long-term strategies for your building.

By pursuing a comprehensive Building Condition Assessment and regularly updating the assessment data, you can build and optimize a building maintenance budget that both improves your bottom line and increases your profit margins.

Click to learn what type of Facility Condition Assessment is best suited for your facility!

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

How do FCAs help to increase 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.

FCAs play a critical role in providing facility condition and budget data for facility upkeep. While facility teams often perform FCAs for budgetary decisions, the social and environmental factors the building impacts should be taken into account.

Here are 3 ways a Facility Condition Assessment can aid in increasing sustainability:

1. Reduced Energy Consumption
If a building has many defects, energy consumption will be much higher than what is actually required. Facility Condition Assessments (FCAs) identify weaknesses in the equipment of a building. Maintenance is then performed to fix any deficiencies, thus reducing the excess energy consumption considerably.

While an FCA is not an energy audit, it can indicate the need to repair and replace critical building equipment. When equipment is maintained at proper intervals, it becomes, overall, more energy efficient.

1. Better Work Environment

FCAs can identify areas of improvement for a building, such as factors that can increase the comfort level of occupants. For example, having properly functioning HVAC systems and reducing heat radiance from lights can improve the temperature of a building. You save money and your employees gain comfort!

3. Stronger Social Relations 
The better the work environment, the better the productivity. When productivity increases, customer satisfaction rates increase. This can help you to grow your relationship with your customers and build better retention.

Conclusion

While FCAs aren’t commonly associated with sustainability, they can be vital in identifying areas of improvement in a building. After all, FCAs consider not only the architectural, mechanical, and electrical aspects of a facility–they account for economic, environmental, and social factors as well!

We’re always ready to make a difference! Call us at (905) 602-1850 or send an email to our Director of Building Sciences, Ashar Khan at ak@nadineintl.com, to ask about optimizing your facility.

Going for a Facility Condition Assessment? Find out which one is ideal for you!

Now, planning an FCA can lead to questions: How will you define the scope of your Facility Condition Assessment? How will you decide its length? Should it cover 1 year, 5 years, or 25/30 years?

Based on the purpose of your Facility Condition Assessment (FCA), you can choose which one is right for you based on the following:

• 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 be repair or replacement. In this case, the FCA you require is typically the 1 year report. A 1-year FCA report generally includes the Immediate Repairs/Replacement Table, which identifies any capital needs for 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 its exact condition so that you can deduct the maintenance cost from the price of the building. This is why you need to look at then broader picture when it comes to building acquisition. Consequently, you should go for a 5-year FCA.

A 5-year FCA report generally includes the 5-year requirements, a 5-year expenditure summary (Expenditure Chart, Expenditure Graph, Expenditure Table), an assessment summary (overview of site condition, mechanical/assessment systems, fire building information, etc.), a detailed system/requirement analysis (service life, actual age, Current Replacement Value, requirement justification, and strategy, etc.), the renewal needs, and the 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@nadineintl.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 for a building’s condition.

The FCI is calculated as follows:

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:

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 inspections, there is also a need for civil engineers, security consultants, heritage consultants, environmental experts, and others, depending on the 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 assessment. The consulting team should be very clear about the full scope of the project, and the roles and responsibilities should be assigned as per a 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.

While the consulting team inspects a facility, all of the assessment data should be be collected, reviewed, and stored in one place. The consulting team also performs on-site walk-through inspections, taking digital pictures and  performing interviews with building staff to gauge the condition of the building components and challenges associated with working in the building. These interviews generally aim to answer some of the questions below:

• What major projects have been performed in the last 5 years?
• What are the ongoing projects, their scopes, and estimated costs?
• What are the in-plan projects and their scopes?
• Are there any recurring or high-maintenance issues regarding any of the systems?
• Are there any active leaks or infiltrations from the building envelope?
• Any other particular concerns?

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

The results of the building inspection play a critical role in creating the assessment reports and, consequently, should not be misplaced in any case.

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

The Executive Summary. The executive summary contains:

• 5 Year Requirements
• 30 Year Budgets
• 30 Year Budgets Based on Uniformat Level 4

The Introduction. The introduction contains:

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

The Assessment Summary. The assessment summary contains:

• 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

The 5-year Expenditure Summary. The 5-year expenditure summary contains:

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

The 30-year Expenditure Summary. The 30-year expenditure summary contains:

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

The Detailed System/Requirement Analysis. The detailed system/requirement analysis contains:

• System Description
• Service Life
• Actual Age
• Current Replacement Value
• Requirement Statement
• Requirement Justification and Strategy
• Implication of Requirement Deferral

The Renewal Needs and Facility Condition Index (FCI). This renewal needs and FCI section contains:

• Renewal Cost of the Building
• Facility Condition Index (FCI), which identifies the condition of the building

The assessment report needs to be thoroughly analyzed and taken into consideration for 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. The report is then reviewed by their peers to examine the data and to check for errors, if any.

In the final stage of the Building Condition Assessment (BCA) process, the assessment report is presented to management and the facility 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 reports, and that any decisions are taken accordingly.

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

A Building Condition Assessment (BCA) is the first step to maintaining the health of your building. A BCA exposes the defects in building a 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 tell you what you can gain from a detailed condition assessment:

1. PLAN for upcoming expenditures
   Building Condition Assessments help building stakeholders understand how well their buildings are fitted to meet the needs of the organization this year, next year, and in the upcoming three, five, and ten years. FCA data gives a comprehensive view of the physical condition and value of the building’s assets, as well as 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 crucial in making decisions about repair, renewal, or replacement of a building.
2. PRIORITIZE items for maintenance/renewal
   

   Prioritizing items for renewal and maintenance based on their current condition is key for any facility. This is where a detailed Building Condition Assessment (BCA) comes into the picture. A BCA evaluates your assets and places the most urgent or critical components at the top of your list, whether that means carpet replacement or HVAC repair. A prioritized list also clarifies which assets are primary to your facility and which are secondary.

3. PERFORM preventive maintenance wherever necessary
   Building Condition Assessments help you keep your assets in a good state of repair, reduce the likelihood of breakdown, and minimize 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 status of all of your assets.

   Additionally, BCAs help you better manage maintenance worker schedules by staggering work; maintenance costs are also reduced, as preventative maintenance is more cost efficient than replacement of broken-down equipment.
4. PURSUE a net-zero target
   Researchers are clear: to avoid worsening climate effects, 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 emission economy; this is in response to climate patterns indicating that carbon emissions need to be stopped entirely to protect the environment–simple reduction is not enough! A Building Condition Assessment indicates the necessary changes to become energy-efficient and achieve net-zero targets by gradually reducing the carbon footprint of your facility.

“A Building Condition Assessment gives you a much clearer image of the status of every component of your building. It helps you determine where to target investments. You may discover that replacing a whole set of sprinklers isn’t even required, and millions of dollars could be saved.” – Ashar Khan, Director of Building Sciences at Nadine International Inc.

The Key Takeaways

• It is critical to know how the buildings, equipment, and physical assets in your facility are performing.
• A multi-disciplinary approach will ensure that you have all of the information about your building components, so that you can make well-informed decisions that suit the needs of your organization
• BCAs provide easy-to-understand reports that can 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 optimize funding decisions.
• All of the hassle, equipment breakdowns, and emergency repairs you’ll avoid are worth the initial investment in your Facility Condition Assessment partner.

CONTACT OUR MULTI-DISCIPLINED TEAM

Call us at (905) 602-1850 or send an email to our Director of Building Sciences, Ashar Khan, at ak@nadineintl.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@nadineintl.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.