A standard for Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is being developed by APPA (APPA: Leadership in Educational Facilities) which is a recognized American National Standard Institute, ANSI, Standards Development Organization. Why is this important to ISO/TC 59? Because the APPA TCO standard is based on its ISO 15686 Service Life and links to ISO 55000 Asset Management, an effort of ISO/TC 251, and ISO 41000 Facility Management, the work of ISO/TC 267.
While the APPA 1000 TCO standard is the United States implementation of ISO 15686, the standard also outlines for the facilities and infrastructure industries how the many disparate pieces fit together.
Not only does the APPA 1000 TCO standard connect the above ISO standards together, it also links TCO to BIM, a potential significant resource of TCO information. How, you ask? This connection occurs because of ISO 15686-4 Service Life Planning using IFC based Building Information Modelling and ISO 16739:2013 Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) for data sharing in the construction and facility management industries from ISO/TC 184/SC 4. Since ISO 15686 also mentions COBie, and COBie is linked to CSI OmniClass, then the connections really do a tremendous job of bringing all the key elements together for the facilities and infrastructure industries.
Having comprehensive financial metrics in place through TCO/Service Life will help support far better decision-making in the facilities and infrastructure industries as well as provide a stronger argument to populate the “I” in BIM.
Couple this with the product libraries efforts such as BIMObject, which was recently incorporated into Autodesk Seek, and now you have the tools to begin populating the information models needed for both BIM and TCO.
All this provides the foundation to bring profound change to the facilities and infrastructure industries, but that will not happen without a significant amount of education and training as culture change of this magnitude will not be easy to accomplish. However, since the reward is so great, change will certainly come and ISO/TC 59 will be at the heart of the transformation.