Digital Twins Aren't Science Fiction

You’re on the Starship Enterprise, when suddenly, you’re hit by enemy torpedoes! Quickly, you pull up a hologram of the entire ship to see which quadrants are damaged and which doors can be sealed to prevent further damage. Right from the hologram, you give the order to seal the necessary doors - crisis averted.When people hear “digital twin,” they often think of Building Information Management (BIM), Revit, and full-blown

Digital Twins Aren't Science Fiction

You’re on the Starship Enterprise, when suddenly, you’re hit by enemy torpedoes! Quickly, you pull up a hologram of the entire ship to see which quadrants are damaged and which doors can be sealed to prevent further damage. Right from the hologram, you give the order to seal the necessary doors - crisis averted.When people hear “digital twin,” they often think of Building Information Management (BIM), Revit, and full-blown 3D modeling. They tend to picture a completely digital representation of the facility through which you can control the real thing - like something straight out of science fiction. In reality, there’s no right or wrong answer to the question, “what is a digital twin?” You could argue that any iteration of mapped building data is a digital twin of sorts. If you really wanted, your digital twin could be a hand drawing scanned into a PDF document. But it can also be so much more. Digital twins exist on a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum is interacting with a building virtually by going into the digital twin in VR and pulling on a lever to turn a valve off out in the field. On the other end, a digital twin could be a simple map of all the asbestos in your building based on a recent inspection. They can be whatever you need them to be and include whatever information brings value to you.

BIM and Digital Twins Aren't the Same Thing

Before we go any further, let’s take a moment to clarify that BIM and digital twins aren’t exactly synonymous. They definitely have similarities, but BIM is more suited to the construction process, while the digital twin takes BIM one step further and provides additional information necessary for operations.BIM is a 3D model with metadata. It brings so much value during construction - especially for clash detection. But the second the construction company turns over that 3D model to the building owner, it starts becoming obsolete. Your building begins to degrade on day one, but your BIM never shows degradation - it’s just a 3D model of what the building looked like when it was constructed.To be an effective building operations tool, a digital twin must be more than just a 3D representation. It should let you attach documentation like O&M manuals, warranties, and YouTube videos. Plus, it should connect to your building automation controls and live sensor data streams. A digital twin should allow you to take actions that affect or are directly fed from data inside your building.

4 Components of a Digital Twin

1. It’s an Intelligent Solution that Delivers Real Data

A digital twin can integrate with your building’s data systems and sensors, providing you real-time information. It can also enable you to associate documents and data streams to a specific asset or group of assets. Imagine the convenience of having the manufacturer’s instructions at your fingertips while you’re troubleshooting a piece of equipment in the field.

2. It’s Plan-Based and Locational

At a minimum, a digital twin should have objects associated with locations. It should contain the assets you care about validated, mapped, and in a digital environment where you can add more data and then interact with it. A digital twin makes it easier to know where all your assets are, what you’re maintaining and tracking within your building, and where any piece of data you need is located.

3. It Identifies What’s Upstream and Downstream

A digital twin shows you what’s upstream and downstream from each piece of equipment in your facility. Knowing exactly where you need to go and what the impacts are of the action you’re taking can save you valuable time and money. Say you have a water leak in your building and every minute that leak continues is another $10,000 worth of damage. A digital twin can help you quickly identify which water shutoff valve is upstream from that leak so you can turn it off.

4. It’s Not a One-Size-Fits-All Technology

Every building is different - and not every facility needs the same level of sophistication in their digital twin technology. Take a college campus. The biomedical facility contains lab samples that support multi-million dollar grants. So it’s vital to have building sensor data connected to a digital twin to ensure temperature and humidity remain stable and don’t damage the valuable samples. On the other hand, the campus chapel has three radiators that only need to be turned on and off as the seasons change. In that instance, the digital twin probably only needs to contain the location and maintenance history of those assets. This is just one example, but it illustrates once again that a digital twin can be as complex or as simple as your facility requires.

Building Your Own Digital Twin: Where to Start

So what’s stopping you from making a digital twin? Many people are stuck in the thinking that a digital twin has to be like the hologram on the Starship Enterprise we talked about earlier. That’s impossible to ever achieve, so why even start, right?But remember, digital twins can exist on a spectrum. You don’t have to have a fully interactive 3D model right off the bat (or even at all). Start simple. Just knowing what assets you have and when you need to replace them can lay the groundwork for a great digital twin.

A facilities management tool like AkitaBox makes a great digital twin platform. We take all of your assets and floor plans and put them into a Revit model for you. From there, you can attach photos and documents to each asset and track all your reactive and preventive maintenance. That makes for a solid beginner-level digital twin.Here’s a sneak peek at how we create location-based asset mapping for you.

If you’re ready to get control of what’s going on in your facility, let’s talk about bringing your digital twin to life.

hbspt.cta._relativeUrls=true;hbspt.cta.load(2095256, 'eb5d37b7-db84-4ee6-8eb7-fd80e30aaf68', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Read Next:4 Steps to Transforming Your Facilities Management ProcessesRevit's Role in Your FM Tech Stack

In a perfect world, your facilities budget would be flush with money and you’d have all the resources you need to keep your campus facilities competitive. But here in the real world, we have to make do with less - a lot less, in fact. Gordian and APPA’s 2022

In a perfect world, your facilities budget would be flush with money and you’d have all the resources you need to keep your campus facilities competitive. But here in the real world, we have to make do with less - a lot less, in fact. Gordian and APPA’s 2022 State of Facilities in Higher Ed Report shows facilities investment shortfall to anticipated demands is approaching 40 percent. In other words, facilities teams are only getting about 60% of the funds they need.Overcoming a 40% budget deficit is one tough homework assignment. So we’re sharing 3 ways you can more strategically manage the budget you DO have to make it go further.

If your organization is researching building management software solutions, it’s more than likely that you’ve come across many acronyms in your search: CMMS, CAFM, IWMS, EAM — and the list only gets longer! Keeping these terms straight is one thing, but actually choosing the right building management software solution for your organization

If your organization is researching building management software solutions, it’s more than likely that you’ve come across many acronyms in your search: CMMS, CAFM, IWMS, EAM — and the list only gets longer! Keeping these terms straight is one thing, but actually choosing the right building management software solution for your organization is an entirely different challenge.

Paper is great for airplanes, plates, journals, even origami. One thing it’s not good for? Facility condition assessments. Your typical FCA report binder contains 1-2 pages for each asset that includes photos

Paper is great for airplanes, plates, journals, even origami. One thing it’s not good for? Facility condition assessments. Your typical FCA report binder contains 1-2 pages for each asset that includes photos of the asset and the data collected on it. There’s also usually a summary report that highlights the main things you should spend money on. The entire report could be well over 20,000 pages long. There’s so much useful data - but how are you supposed to navigate it? Imagine trying to find the page for a single air handler among all that information. The majority of the data is inaccessible because it’s so difficult to sort through, making it ultimately unusable.Here’s the dirty secret of paper FCA reports - most people only look at the capital expenditure recommendations. The remaining thousands of pages in those binders just sit on the shelf as a shrine to all the hard work that was done. The binders are like a status symbol - the more binders, the more expensive the FCA must have been. Sure, FCA providers may use digital tools like Excel, Word, or other programs to create the report, but the end result is still a printed end product that becomes a paperweight - and eventually ends up in the trash can.At the end of the day, printed FCAs aren’t all that helpful to anyone. The architect or engineer conducting the capital needs assessment has to re-do all their work from scratch every time a new assessment is needed. Meanwhile, the building owner is left without much usable data or insights.Read More: Facility Condition Assessment Checklist: How to Index Your Building

Deferred maintenance. It’s a beast right up there with Smaug, Drogon, and the Jabberwocky. A real dragon.Especially in healthcare - where an asset failure can literally mean life or death for a patient - that dragon can strike fear into the hearts of even the bravest facility managers. Between tight budgets, limited

Deferred maintenance. It’s a beast right up there with Smaug, Drogon, and the Jabberwocky. A real dragon.Especially in healthcare - where an asset failure can literally mean life or death for a patient - that dragon can strike fear into the hearts of even the bravest facility managers. Between tight budgets, limited manpower, and the reality of how busy healthcare facilities are, you’ll most likely never completely clear out your deferred maintenance backlog.You may not be able to fully vanquish your deferred maintenance dragon (it’s just the nature of the beast). But you can still win by keeping the monster under control and too weak to endanger patient safety.

Facilities these days aren’t getting any younger. In fact, the average age of buildings in the U.S. has increased to 53 years. Keeping aging facilities running smoothly is a vitally important task for today’s building owners and facilities managers. One of the most valuable tools for

Facilities these days aren’t getting any younger. In fact, the average age of buildings in the U.S. has increased to 53 years. Keeping aging facilities running smoothly is a vitally important task for today’s building owners and facilities managers. One of the most valuable tools for doing that is the facility condition assessment (FCA).

No matter the age of your building, an FCA provides an accurate picture of where your assets are in their useful operating life. This data helps you make smarter, more cost-effective decisions to support your building’s physical longevity. 

Let's dive in!

Think back to when AutoCAD, 3-D modeling, and BIM were new. The firms that were early adopters of these technologies continue reaping the benefits today - while those who took a “wait and see” approach are still playing catch up.Facility condition assessment software is another tech tool that can bring long-term benefits to your

Think back to when AutoCAD, 3-D modeling, and BIM were new. The firms that were early adopters of these technologies continue reaping the benefits today - while those who took a “wait and see” approach are still playing catch up.Facility condition assessment software is another tech tool that can bring long-term benefits to your firm. So if you aren’t using it yet, this is one bandwagon you should definitely jump on. Here are 6 ways you could be losing money by not using FCA software.

In the competitive, quickly changing world of facilities management, spreadsheets and PDFs aren’t cutting it anymore. You may have good FM processes, but chances are they’re disjointed, paper-based, and you’ve been doing them the same way since the Ice Age. 

In the competitive, quickly changing world of facilities management, spreadsheets and PDFs aren’t cutting it anymore. You may have good FM processes, but chances are they’re disjointed, paper-based, and you’ve been doing them the same way since the Ice Age. 

Digitizing what you’ve always done isn’t going to help you reduce costs, improve occupant experience, or keep the C-suite happy. You need to rethink your processes with a transformative mindset.

In this article, you’ll learn the difference between digitizing and truly transforming, discover the powerful benefits of transforming your FM processes, and find 4 key steps for starting your transformation journey.

Digitizing means putting your existing paper processes into a digital format. AutoCAD is an example. 

Before AutoCAD, you had to hand draw every line in a floor plan - and heaven help you if you made a mistake, because you’d have to redraw the whole sheet. AutoCAD replaced, or digitized, hand drafting. But it isn’t an example of transformation. Why? Because AutoCAD digitizes the manual process without changing it. You still have to choose two points and draw a line between the two. It just mimics on a screen what you used to do by hand. 

Transformation, on the other hand, looks for ways to better integrate processes and actually change the way you do things. BIM and 3-D modeling are good examples.

With BIM, you don’t have to select four points on a screen to draw a wall in a floor plan. Instead, you choose a wall object and the program draws the thousands of lines needed to represent a wall for you. That’s transformational use of technology versus simply digitizing an existing process. 

“Hey, what do you mean? My clients are already using the FCAs we build them!” Of course they are. But now that we have your attention, it’s time for a truth bomb. Today’s FCAs are static snapshots of a facility at one moment in time. They’re outdated as soon as they’re published because the facility continues to change after the data collection is completed. Building

“Hey, what do you mean? My clients are already using the FCAs we build them!” Of course they are. But now that we have your attention, it’s time for a truth bomb. Today’s FCAs are static snapshots of a facility at one moment in time. They’re outdated as soon as they’re published because the facility continues to change after the data collection is completed. Building owners use them once and then shelve them until it’s time to do another one.