BIM – based approach to Building Operating Management: a Strategic Lever to achieve Efficiency, Risk-shifting, Innovation and Sustainability.

In a historical context where economic budgets continue to tighten, companies are facing the urgent necessity to contain their expenses, while ensuring, and possibly improving, the quality of services provided and the preservation of their own goods; thus, the only feasible way to achieve costs reduction is to avoid squandering resources, hence increasing operating efficiency, innovation and sustainability. In Buildings Operations and Maintenance, often one of the most expensive building-related operations, this means preventing ineffective decisions by properly capturing and using building-related information, making them standard and interoperable through the whole asset’s life. Such a critical target can be achieved by the means of Building Information Modeling (BIM), a process involving the generation and management of digital information related to the physical and functional characteristics of a facility, enhancing their fruition and fostering the cooperation between all actors involved in both Building Design and Operation. BIM can be therefore used as a support to final-use-oriented Building Design or to efficient and effective Operations planning, monitoring and control, enabling externalization of services to private specialized organizations, a procedure which is particularly advantageous for Public Administration, as it allows to decrease risk, costs and ensures quality. BIM systems are also easily entrustable to external providers, overcoming main difficulties met in their implementation, which is to find economic resources to afford it and to deal with its technical complexities. In this paper, a specific implementation of a BIM in Building Operating Management is presented and discussed through the introduction of the eniservizi (a company of eni, Italian leading operator in the area of petroleum products and energy) case study, where a particular BIM layer related to Site Compliance, the body of activities related to legal and regulatory aspects, and to Vendor Compliance, has been created, generating a procurement control system for monitoring compliance of service contractors to contractual obligations, right from the very initial pre-qualification phases, through the service provision steps, to the conclusive financial phases. Eventually, future developments will be presented, illustrating how effective could be the use of BIM to simulate Building Operating conditions at the very early stage of Building Design, also presenting the results of an existing project.