Canada
Our GM for North America, Kelly Widger, was featured in Canadian Facility Management & Design (CFM&D) magazine’s winter edition, discussing how increasingly accessible technologies like IoT, sensors, AI and BIM and helping alleviate P3 contracts’ increasing complexity.
Canada’s population is growing quicker now than it has in nearly 70 years, increasing by 3.2 percent to 40 million in 2023. To manage the growing demand, as the Canadian Urban Institute has claimed, the country must invest in more infrastructure, including schools, hospitals, public transit links, highways and bridges.
We already have one of the most active and successful public-private partnership (P3) markets in the world. To date, there are 291 active P3 projects, representing a total value of more than $139 billion.
Still, the world has changed since the first P3s began in the 1990s, and exponentially so over the past few years. Rising inflation is putting pressure on governments to be even more careful with taxpayer’s money. The pandemic has also forced people to re-evaluate where they live and work and how they use infrastructure.
Meanwhile, P3 projects face increasingly ambitious decarbonization targets, at both federal and local levels. According to the World Bank, around 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions emanate from infrastructure construction and operations, meaning infrastructure operators have greater incentive to hit deadlines, keep costs down, reduce their environmental impact, and improve overall operational efficiency.
This plethora of challenges is making an already-intricate P3 model, with its unwieldy legal frameworks, diverse stakeholder interests, and multifaceted financial arrangements, even more complex. So, how can P3’s proponents manage this growing complexity and ensure the model is fit for the third decade of the 21st century?
The basis for technology is that it makes our lives easier, and this is true for everything from the steam engines of the Industrial Revolution through to today’s AI tools. For P3 operators, there is a set of developing technologies, including IoT sensors, AI and digital scanning tools, that can add an unprecedented level of visibility, automate tasks, and improve decision-making.
More transparency
The internet of things (IoT) is by no means a new technology to facility managers. Current estimates put the number of connected devices in the world at just under 20 billion. These sensors are built in or attached to everything from industrial sized chillers to home fridges, and they can capture data on just about anything related to the performance or the condition of the thing to which they ‘connect’.
The most common uses for facility managers are asset management and maintenance, and environmental controls. Equipping building assets with sensors allows operators to detect factors such as stress, vibration and temperature. Environmental sensors, on the other hand, can monitor factors more closely related to the occupier or user experience, such as lighting, room temperature, and occupancy. These elements are no less crucial for parties responsible for the operational phase of public infrastructure, including transit hubs and hospitals, where people are likely to associate a poor experience with the value they are receiving for their taxes.
Understanding the condition of an asset and when it’s likely to fail, for example, leads to more effective maintenance schedules. If parameters on an asset’s condition are pre-set, a sensor can trigger an alert before the asset breaks down. With a growing bank of real-time data, a schedule can be also developed that results in less under- or over-servicing, minimal operational downtime, and savings on costs associated with engineers travelling to site to fix problems, a challenge that any operator working across Canada’s geography knows all too well.
As a result, sensors can provide visibility across the operational phase of a P3 projects, providing operators with a level of detail that helps them be more efficient, enhance the user experience, ensure service delivery meets key performance indicators and service level agreements, and discuss contract parameters with the public sector partner if real-time sensors identify issues with the pre-agreed specifications.
Enhanced decision-making and automation
Combining sensor data with AI is where a true transformation begins to happen, not just making users more accurate in their decision-making but also allowing them to transition from a preventative mindset to a predictive one.
In Sweden, we work with Jernhusen, a company that owns and manages railways stations and associated properties across the Nordic country’s rail network. Station management can be challenging, especially during the cold winter months. Snow and ice can present health and safety hazards and disrupt key assets such as elevators and escalators.
As a solution, we have developed and deployed an AI-powered IoT platform at a Jernhusen facility where sensors have enabled proactive, AI-driven predictive maintenance that makes fixes more accurate and helps the facility team avoid maintenance work during peak commuting times. The sensors provide the ability to drastically reduce breakdowns through real-time data on escalator run time, humidity, footfall and weather conditions. For example, grit is easily trampled into a station and is a common cause of escalator malfunctions as it gets clogged up in the mechanism. The software can monitor the weather forecast for the days ahead and when roads are likely to be gritted as a result, allowing Jernhusen to be better prepared for the eventuality.
Better lifecycle management
Another potentially game-changing technology is building information modelling (BIM) software. BIM enhances visibility of the building lifecycle by encouraging every stakeholder in the chain to share information simultaneously, with the end goal of creating one centralized location for all building data.’
While the use of BIM isn’t mandated in Canada for public sector projects like it is in other parts of the world such as the UK, more and more operators, both in P3 and non-P3 projects, are recognizing its value across the building lifecycle, including for long operational phases. As a key system for standardizing and sharing lifecycle data, BIM offers users the opportunity to view and export asset data, including model, manufacturer and the location within a building, which can then be imported into a CMMS (computerized maintenance management system) to create and pre-populate a comprehensive asset register and streamline maintenance activities. It allows contractors to virtually visit the site via a 3D BIM model, giving them a better idea of what to expect when they are there.
Fairer pay
A common pain point for operators and vendors in P3 projects is the payment processes. The lack of good data means it’s tricky for parties to allocate risk fairly at the beginning of a project or contract term, set the parameters and service level agreements accurately, and measure performance once work has begun.
Payment mechanism software helps provide reports and trend analysis of services failures, deductions and rolling threshold values. Integrating sensor data, AI and BIM with payment mechanism software adds a level of transparency that minimizes deductions by giving greater insight into impending asset failures, while ensuring fairness for all stakeholders. This combination of technology can trigger payments based on pre-determined parameters and automate payment calculations, minimizing human error or bias and leading to more accuracy overall. When integrated with AI-powered platforms, users can identify trends and forecast many factors – asset condition, maintenance schedules, market trends, project cashflows and other financial risks.
The P3 model can play a fundamental role in Canada’s future, as the country responds to the infrastructure demands that come with its continued growth. But governments, and P3 operators specifically, are facing a rapidly evolving challenges, putting pressure on them to deliver infrastructure that supports citizens and provides them with value for money. The role of technology, such as IoT sensors, AI and BIM, in streamlining processes, reducing costs, and increasing sustainability will only become more critical in ensuring the long-term success of P3 projects.