EQUIPMENT
Therefore, it is essential to have
software that enables us to work transparently with the tools used by the rest of the project team; this ensures that the equipment is installed according to project requirements while resources are used efficiently. The efficiency of the process is very important, so we decided to review the most time consuming tasks in a medical equipment project and then to focus our tools search on those that could help us maximise our resources.
Monitoring the process The equipment installation and start up process requires intensive monitoring that entails performing certain tasks that use a number of resources. In a medical equipment project, contract management is mainly linked to managing inspection, transport, delivery of assets, deadlines, penalties, installation blueprints, services to be provided by the supplier, end user and technical staff training. At least 10 to 15 main equipment contractors are likely to be involved in a medium size project. It is therefore important to co-ordinate the activities of each contractor to avoid the overlapping of activities that they may be performing at the same time. The construction team needs the input of the equipment team at an early stage, such as when deciding the size of rooms or in order to get the right door width to access a particular room at the installation stage. Ensuring that the right power and water supply is available in each room for each piece of equipment must be done quickly at a certain point in the project to allow installations to be finished in time for equipment to be installed. An additional challenge is to recalculate needs based on changes or additions to the procured equipment. Finally, during the installation stage, confirming that all works have been completed as planned and dealing with any unplanned issues usually consumes a significant amount of time.
Although progress has been made
in numerous areas, the management of new buildings that include equipment or standalone equipment projects still require paper documentation. Furthermore, project managers are required to sign a document on completion of each stage as stipulated in the contract, such as reception, installation, start up and training. The documentation has to be
monitored in parallel and signed documents must be scanned or photographed before they can be added to the digital documentation record relating to the project. There should be a list of the equipment in each room. This is generally attached to the door or a free wall in the room and must include the brand, model, supplier in charge of the installation, scheduled date of the
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ADC - information about the location of the equipment in the selected room.
installation, installation completion dates and any other relevant information. In addition, the list must include enough space for the people providing the equipment to make notes to monitor the progress of the tasks performed in each of the project facilities. Controlling the snags that crop up in
each facility and in relation to each piece of equipment requires a log that can be used to generally or separately monitor it. Any identified issue must be prioritised, evaluated and communicated to the supplier for action. The aforementioned tasks usually cause equipment suppliers a number of problems. There is a belief that all construction management problems (including those that are equipment related) can be easily solved if BIM is implemented. A BIM tools analysis was therefore carried out to determine whether it was the right solution to achieve a smooth, organised and efficient ITC process.
Management tools BIM may be popular, but it is not a plug and play solution. In order to get equipment pre-installation data into any BIM environment (ArchiCad or Revit), some users develop their own complex importing and exporting procedures5,7 or use Dynamo to develop them, but still use Excel to manage their data. Others use external applications (for example, COBie), which transform the BIM model and all the information stored into spreadsheets.
The Revit families (old AutoCAD
blocks) that are now available from different suppliers create 3D models without any useful installation information and the information does not allow clash detection unless they are used with other tools, for example. It was also found that BIM models are developed (at least until now) with a focus on construction work and a nice presentation for the customer, but that development doesn’t go any further in relation to the use of the data for equipment maintenance management. We concluded that BIM is not the solution, although the concept is appealing as it is one of the most attractive ways to ensure equipment is integrated into a project. However, we still needed a tool to help us through the installation process that generated data the user would be able to use for equipment maintenance. We sought an off the shelf solution that
would allow us to control the installation process in a simple way. We wanted to put together information such as blueprints, pre-installation requirements, pre-installation, supplier data, installation lead times and the details of people in charge of works and to spend less time synchronising data collected on site with office data. We were already working with a planning tool called CodeBook Project Room Data Manager (PRD). Based on a classic tree structure, PRD aims to distribute a list of equipment in a given location. A new Codebook tool called Asset Data Collector (ADC) was released
ADC - plan view of the facilities where work is being carried out. IFHE DIGEST 2019
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