Implementation of ActiveFacility begins with gathering together all the existing data about a building or group of buildings, as follows:

• as-built drawings – usually the original drawings (or copies of the originally supplied as-builts) handed over following construction of the building. These drawings generally don’t include changes to the building since hand-over.
• Drawings for each floor of a building typically include:
  • an architectural drawing
  • an electrical drawing (lights, power, low voltage systems)
  • a mechanical drawing (air-conditioning and ventilation), and
  • a piping drawing (hot and cold water, gas).
• specifications - documents that describe the materials, finishes and performance characteristics of the building. These performance and material specifications often are not consistent with the as-built drawings.
• operating manuals - documents that describe procedures for operating and maintaining equipment installed within the building.
• data in other operational systems provide valuable tools and functionality in managing part of the building information:
  • accounting systems that manage the value and costs associated with assets
  • human resources & contracting systems that manage information about the people associated with the building
  • facility management systems that manage information to co-ordinate the planned and corrective maintenance of equipment
  • building automation systems that monitor and operate support systems within the building.

As ActiveFacility manages all data associated with a building, the system is designed to identify overlapping data that is stored in many of these existing operational systems.

All the above data is collated by the client and collected from a nominated client representative by ActiveFacility staff.

Data Sources

Information for the Unified Building Model is sourced from three types of document sets.

1. Hard copy as-built documents (drawings, manuals, specifications).
2. Digital data in machine-readable formats.
3. IFC compliant data (which the ActiveFacility system loads automatically with significant time and cost savings).

Scanning

Existing paper building-related documents are scanned to PDF files for on-line storage in the ActiveFacility system.

Existing digital files remain in their current format and are copied and stored.

Following scanning, copying and loading into the ActiveFacility servers, the original documents are returned to the client’s nominated representative.