Streamlining Facility-Condition Assessments

By Dan Geldermann and Don Sapp

For real property managers who handle large, dispersed portfolios, determining facility conditions and deferred-maintenance (DM) requirements using traditional methods is a significant challenge and major expense. The approach of estimating DM by inspecting facilities and creating detailed job plans with estimated costs for observed problems has remained relatively unchanged for decades. Now, however, there exists a more-efficient method of performing condition assessments and estimating deferred-maintenance needs over traditional methods.

Current Problems
Recurring assessments are a prudent way to benchmark and stay abreast of facility conditions, and they are a building block for developing a needs-based maintenance program. Unfortunately, there are problems with traditional condition assessments:

• They are expensive and time-consuming, with inspection costs ranging from 8 cents per square foot to $1.50 per square foot, depending on the level of detail and degree of sophistication.
• In an effort to reduce assessment costs, many organizations have increased the amount of time that passes between facility inspections by up to 5 years. Stretching the inspection intervals has mismatched the timelines for comparing facilities and installations within a large portfolio.
• From a field perspective, the unknown use of data by headquarters and a lack of any visible funding impact from submissions have fostered a lowering of priority on updating existing data.
• A significant downside to developing detailed estimates for all deficiencies is the limited shelf life of these job plans. After several months, most estimates require a review to incorporate changes that may have occurred; also demoralizing to estimators is the number of completed job plans that are never funded.
• Assessments are not consistently performed from installation to installation - they may be based on differing methods, intervals, and qualifications of personnel performing the assessment. All of these factors leave the headquarters manager and auditors with questions about the validity and timeliness of using available condition data for comparisons between installations.
• To further call into question the usefulness of DM for allocating resources, field inputs have become suspect at headquarters as resource requests for DM seem to ebb and flow with funding climates. When available funding is perceived, DM numbers quickly rise at installations anxious to get their share. Conversely, installations suddenly become well if potential closures are rumored. This has led to a credibility gap of reported results and an uneven playing field between field activities vying for the same resources.

A New Approach
Large agencies should consider another method for accomplishing condition assessments that will return credibility to assessments and reduce the costs necessary to accomplish them. In a successful new approach that addresses condition-assessment problems, the Washington, D.C.-based National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) facilities organization - which is responsible for 44 million square feet of space contained in 5,300 facilities with a current replacement value (CRV) of over $25 billion - worked with Alexandria, VA-based consulting firm Plexus Scientific Corp. to develop a rapid, low-cost, consistent facilities condition system that resulted in a set of useful metrics, including a DM estimate; leveled the playing field by eliminating any biased installation reporting; and reduced the number of detailed cost estimates that are prepared and never used. This assessment method has been developed and refined over several years of field work and independent reviews, and is now used to assess the condition of NASA facilities worldwide.

This approach has been compared against other more-detailed methods by the U.S. Army's Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL), located in Champaign, IL, and reviewed for economic viability by Whitestone Research (with offices in Washington, D.C., and Santa Barbara, CA). CERL confirmed that DM results on test groups were within 10 percent of other more-expensive assessment methods. Whitestone Research provided positive feedback:

• "The primary purpose of the NASA Deferred Maintenance Model is to provide a general measure [of] the condition of individual facilities and an estimate of the current work needs for a large inventory of facilities (based on their conditions). Based on this comparison study, the NASA model performs these functions accurately and efficiently. Because of the high-level assessment focus, it is quick and inexpensive to implement up front. It is an ideal tool for agency planners to create defensible budgets and allocate resources to the installations level. If budget creation is the primary objective of an asset-management plan, then the NASA DM model satisfies this requirement completely." (Engineer Research and Development Center, Construction Engineering Research Laboratory [ERDC-CERL], February 2004).
• "The DM methodology is a promising approach for estimating NASA deferred-maintenance requirements. Its data-collection process and cost-estimation procedure represent significant improvements over established procedures (such as the U.S. Army ISR [Installation Status Report]). The consistency of its ratings in repeated trials is impressive and well documented. The cost-estimation procedure is conceptually sound." (Whitestone Research, July 2002).

The NASA Method provides an appraisal of the general condition of all facilities and an estimate of DM (or recapitalization) costs using a parametric estimating method that costs NASA 2 cents per square foot for each inspection cycle (4-times less expensive than the next most-recognized assessment method in widespread use). The NASA Method was designed to provide consistent, auditable deferred-maintenance estimates at the agency and center levels, and to provide an assessment of the general condition of facilities at the system and facility levels. Each year since 2002, 5,300 NASA facilities around the world have received annual on-site condition assessments during a 60-day period. Intended as a facility-performance metric that can be compared to and trended against other commonly used facility metrics, the assessments have begun to provide performance trends for evaluating the overall effectiveness of facility-maintenance programs. This model is now used to support NASA's annual Accountability Report and to build and justify the agency's annual budget. As an added benefit, the 100-percent review of each facility identifies real property inventory (RPI) record data that appears unusual or incorrect (and that could adversely influence the model results). This has also provided NASA with an on-site review and verification of RPI records, along with a photographic record of its facilities and any significant problems.