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Facilities managers in commercial real estate (CRE) oversee complex portfolios of aging assets, regulatory burdens, and operational demands. While you have many tools at your disposal to effectively run operations, few are as valuable as an accurate facility condition assessment (FCA).
FCAs are not process exercises; they are foundational to strategic facility asset management. When correctly integrated into an operational & maintenance strategy, FCAs allow you to take a proactive approach to maintenance, facilitate risk mitigation measures, and ensure efficient resource allocation. And they are essential to enacting any kind of predictive maintenance strategy.
However, none of that can happen unless you start with precise, comprehensive existing conditions data - aboveground and below – that informs your team, stakeholders, and other decision-makers to act, rather than react, in planning, upgrading, retooling, and managing facilities. This proactive approach is scalable and can be applied to one facility or hundreds because it is built on data standardization and accuracy.
Transitioning from Reactive to Proactive Maintenance
Reactive maintenance is often described as “run-to-failure” because you do not act until trouble arises. On its face, it may appear to provide short-term cost effectiveness, but in reality, it leads to higher long-term operational costs and increased exposure to unplanned asset failures. It is more like trying to close a gaping wound with a Band-Aid. You patch, and reallocate, and patch again, until the dam breaks and so does the system. Then you’re facing large-scale, rolling breakdowns that result in expensive emergency repairs, tenant dissatisfaction, code violations, and shortened asset life cycles, not to mention the damage that can be done to your reputation.
The reactive model keeps you racing to make up for resource inefficiencies and limits your ability to forecast realistic capital needs. Plus, it’s just simple common sense to realize that it requires a lot more effort to run from disaster to disaster than it does to have plans & processes in place to manage disaster before it strikes.
Proactive maintenance, in contrast, uses the data you gain by adopting an FCA to guide scheduled interventions, optimize part replacements, and extend the service life of physical assets. Facilities managers who adopt a data-informed maintenance strategy are positioned to significantly reduce lifecycle costs and better align operational budgets with actual asset performance requirements. This could enable your budgetary needs to gain priority because you are able to present a measured, data-backed case for funds, rather than approaching those holding the purse strings, hat in hand, with your hair on fire thanks to the latest facility or asset failure.
What is the Difference Between Proactive Maintenance and Predictive Maintenance?
While both proactive and predictive maintenance are forward-looking strategies, each has its own processes, level of data dependence, and execution.
Proactive maintenance is a broad spectrum, preventative approach that aims to prevent infrastructure and asset failures before they occur by utilizing existing conditions data, historical trends, manufacturer recommendations, usage intervals, and scheduled inspections and servicing to attack root causes and systemic problems with a goal to reduce wear and tear, avoid unplanned downtime, and extend asset life.
Predictive maintenance can be considered a subset of proactive maintenance that strives to continuously monitor conditions in real time to analyze and anticipate failures before they occur. It is highly technology-driven, relying on sensors, software, and IoT devices to track everything from electrical load and vibration to temperature, and beyond. While predictive maintenance is considered “real-time,” it also gives you an additional infrastructure to manage – that of your data capture devices – which also require their own maintenance plan.
Whether you utilize a proactive or preventative approach, a well-executed FCA provides quantified asset condition metrics such as a Facility Condition Index (FCI), remaining useful life (RUL), and deferred maintenance backlogs. These inputs are essential for creating an intelligent maintenance regime that prioritizes interventions based on criticality, performance degradation rates, and the projected impact of inaction.
Definition of Terms:
Facility Condition Index – To find your FCI, you aggregate the complete cost of any necessary or outstanding repairs, retooling, or renovation requirements against the current replacement value of your infrastructure and building components. Your FCI then becomes a benchmark by which you can differentiate conditions among any facilities group, and is often applied to governmental facilities organizations.
Remaining Useful Life – This term means exactly what it says; it is a determination of how much time you estimate an asset can continue to effectively run prior to requiring significant repair, replacement, or it becomes unusable. There are multiple ways to calculate RUL, but most require you to factor in equipment history, environment, and maintenance records, as well as the asset’s use cadence.
Deferred Maintenance Backlog – Sometimes also referred to as simply the maintenance backlog, it is the aggregated list of all postponed maintenance & repair tasks. It is often helpful to define why the needed repairs were postponed (budgetary constraints, approvals needed, etc.), so that you can prioritize and estimate long-term cost potentials for future budgeting needs.
Risk Mitigation as a Facilities Management Imperative
Commercial facilities carry significant inherent risks: structural, environmental, regulatory, and operational. An FCA serves as a pre-emptive diagnostic tool to identify vulnerabilities like deteriorating electrical systems, outdated HVAC components, or subsurface utility conflicts before they evolve into expensive, disruptive, or hazardous events.
By systematically mapping facility deficiencies and potential failure points, facilities managers can implement tiered response frameworks and emergency preparedness protocols. FCAs also support regulatory compliance by documenting inspection results and providing evidence of due diligence in risk management practices. This capability is particularly valuable in reducing insurance premiums, expediting permitting processes, and shielding ownership from liabilities arising from unsafe conditions or noncompliance.
The Role of Accurate Existing Conditions Data in Facilities Management
The functional value of an FCA is directly proportional to the integrity and accuracy of the data that informs it. Incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate documentation of existing facility conditions can lead to misaligned planning assumptions, cost overruns, delays, and construction rework. The complexity compounds when you realize that you need to assess more than your visible architectural and mechanical systems - you also need to consider the location and condition of critical subsurface infrastructure like water mains, electrical conduits, and sanitary & storm sewer lines.
Accurate spatial and performance data, captured using Building Information Modeling (BIM), LiDAR scanning, 3D photogrammetry, and subsurface detection technologies, mitigates these risks. Ground penetrating radar and electromagnetic utility locating methods can yield exceptionally accurate maps of subsurface networks, when performed by SIM-certified professionals, that can greatly reduce the risk of utility strikes and excavation delays.
Aboveground, 3D laser scanning coupled with BIM integration can deliver precise documentation of spatial geometry and system configurations, enabling informed decisions about renovations, space utilization, and load-bearing constraints. These comprehensive datasets can be rendered as a 3D point cloud, CAD drawings, or fully integrated above and below-ground BIM models to foster interdisciplinary collaboration among facility teams, architects, engineers, and contractors by providing a unified reference model throughout the lifecycle of an asset.
Implementation Considerations
To leverage FCAs to their fullest potential, facilities managers must embed assessment practices into a broader data management and planning framework. This includes standardizing inspection protocols, digitizing legacy records, adopting interoperable asset management software, and ensuring cyclical reassessments that account for degradation and environmental impact factors. GPRS’ industry-leading, GIS-based software solution – SiteMap®, is how we deliver our comprehensive utility locating surveys, maps, and aboveground reality capture data to our customers – providing them with a single source of truth for their entire facilities team – whether they manage a single campus, or hundreds of manufacturing plants nationwide.
There should be particular emphasis placed on capturing and updating subsurface utility data as part of each assessment cycle. The consequences of neglecting this component are substantial: inaccurate subsurface data can compromise new construction, delay permitting, and dramatically inflate capital project timelines.
Facilities Management Teams Should Prioritize:
- Structuring FCA outputs to integrate directly with Capital Improvement Plans (CIPs) and Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS)
- Aligning FCA frequency with asset criticality and local regulatory cycles
- Incorporating sustainability metrics to evaluate energy performance and compliance with decarbonization mandates
- Training personnel on new diagnostic technologies and data interpretation methodologies
A Facility Condition Assessment is not a static report: it is a living, strategic asset for your facility. Accurate, comprehensive existing conditions data informs proactive maintenance policies, streamlines capital planning, and mitigates operational and regulatory risks. Above all, it empowers facilities managers to deliver cost-effective, reliable, and compliant environments for tenants and stakeholders alike.
That’s why GPRS Intelligently Visualizes The Built World® for facilities nationwide.
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