Arkansas Children’s Hospital- How A Fully Populated, Digital Facilities Maintenance and Operations Plan was Achievable on Day One

Arkansas Children’s Hospital opened a new freestanding 233,000 square feet hospital in February 2018. The state-of-the-art pediatric care facility in Springdale, Arkansas, provides care for over 200,000 children in the region. To ensure a smooth transition from construction to handoff, the hospital wanted a fully-populated computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) to empower the facilities maintenance and operations team with the tools needed to start building operations on day one.

Prepare for Facilities Management Before Construction Even Begins

The team chose BIM 360 within Autodesk Construction CloudTM to create a common data environment for design, project coordination, collaboration, field management, and construction handover.

Using BIM 360 throughout the entire project, the team could capture asset data at every stage and publish it into one central location, a selling point for the facilities management team.

“Our goal was to create a central data collection point for the building information so that data could be easily pushed into our CMMS later. This helped ensure the availability of comprehensive as-builts on day one.”
– Chet Howard, Facilities Operations Director

A Common Data Environment Provides Shared Access to Information

Achieving the goal of comprehensive as-builts and fully operational facilities maintenance and operations system on day one required a plan from the outset of the construction project. The team created a facilities management data specification as part of the project specifications, which included assets, attributes, collection procedures, delivery dates, and the person responsible for collecting every piece of data.

With BIM 360 serving as the central repository for data collection, the construction, and building commissioning teams collected the asset details, importing and exporting data in one place enabled the entire team to participate throughout the process and publish the complete asset data to BIM 360.

BIM 360 was used by the hospital departmental managers to assist with transitioning the hospital from construction to operations. During the five-month transition to operations, the Arkansas Children’s Hospital’s leadership team used BIM 360 to identify issues in their spaces. They created tickets with photographs and assigned them to the general contractor. The general contractor could then fix these punch list items in the unoccupied space. Identifying punch list items before patients were present made it easier for the crews to fix the defects, which helped the schedule and resolved them before patients entered the space.

Facilities Maintenance and Operations Goes Smoothly from Day One

On opening day, ACNW had over 2,700 assets in BIM 360, with make, model, location, and area served. Systematically collecting asset data from the beginning allowed the facilities team to focus on maintaining the building rather than spending months trying to gather information into a CMMS program. Maintenance history was already in place from the contractors, and the preventive maintenance plan was in effect from day one. The hospital estimates that having the asset data in BIM 360 saved them almost 2,100 staff hours during the first year of operation.

By incorporating facilities maintenance and operations planning into preconstruction and using a common data platform from the start, the Arkansas Children’s Hospital created a seamless construction handover and ideal operational environment for how construction handovers can impact the facility’s entire lifecycle.