Virtual design and construction by Trimble Sketchup

3. Facility Management Model

In the past, the owner would receive a long list of paper based construction drawings after a construction project was finished. They (Construction drawings) were less in detail and difficult to change as time goes by.

In the past few years, Building Information Modeling or BIM has been applied to manage buildings and facilities just like Facility Management (FM) tools. This BIM software has proven to be very useful. However, because of the difficulty to implement, BIM and FM softweres were not famous in today work place.

I am trying to use this simple 3D Modeling program (Sketchup) to integrate with operation and maintenance information of the wastewater treatment. The result is the Facility Management Model. The technique is quite simple. Firstly, embed data which are required of operate and maintenance work. This information is mostly informed by the owners and operators. The wastewater treatment operator will used this easy-to-use 3d modeling program integrated with Google Drive to manage the system.

In one of our wastewater treatment plant. There are several wastewater pumps.

Only few clicks in Sketchup model, the operators will reach to the information of the wastewater pumps.

In the mean times, the operator can see the sizes and specifications of all fittings that are connected to the pumps.

The dimenstion of the pumps can measure directly from the Sketchup model.

Information of the pumps are embed into the pumps components, the operator can update these information as often as they want to or as the facility manager requires.

The specification of the pumps that is stored in the Google Drive.

The facility manager can see what is happened to the pumps anywhere anytime in Google Drive by only few clicks at the pump components in Sketchup. This is very useful when the time passing by, for example, it take the operators half a minute to see what parts of the pumps were changed 5 years ago.

The facility manager can walk through the wastewater treatment in virtual environment in Sketchup. This application file was created by a plugin named WALKABOUT 3D.

An example of how to walk through a wastewater treatment plant in virtual environment. The facility manager can use this application to analyze problems or present the plant to others when he/she is away from the plant.