October 2021
Innovative Database Development
The MUHC is a construction project started in 2010 and completed in 2014 that brings together five hospitals: The Royal Victoria, The Cedars Cancer Centre, The Montreal Chest Institute, The Montreal Hospital and The Montreal Children’s Hospital as well as the McGill University Research Centre.
The site includes 500 patient rooms, 26 operating rooms and several hundred different clinics.
The complex, built in a public-private partnership by SNC Lavalin and Innisfree, covers 337,000 square meters and is located at the intersection of Highway 15 and 720 in Montreal.
In 2016, the board members agreed, following the complete commissioning of the site, that a complete inventory of the site was necessary and mandated the GISM team to do so.
Data Management Development
Thus, an association was born with a Montreal start-up (Hexacode) for the implementation of a digital asset management system (AIMS).
The AIMS lists all 13,000 rooms of the site and includes each wall, every piece of equipment, the conditions of use of each room, its surface area, the name of the occupant and every related drawing. The platform is also able to manage the inspection reports of the assets in order to evaluate their condition.
Collaboration for success
A team including engineering and architecture students, an inventory management specialist and an inspection specialist was created. For seven months they traveled full-time around the site in operation to collect all information related to the assets.
With the support of Hexacode’s lead programmer, the team has extracted data from 86 different REVIT models and other CSV files in order to create the database. It allowed them to collect, update, and produce reports on all the project data, as well as to provide access to all the site plans using an iPad, whether connected or not.
How it works
The Hexabrowser tool from Hexacode allows Vercity and the team to make links between assets. That is to say that by querying, for example, an electrical outlet, we can know the location of the electrical panel that supplies it and so on up to the primary source, i.e., the electrical power line. The same goes for the 36 ventilation systems of the complex and all the other electromechanical systems, in just a few seconds.
During the process we optimized the tool to allow us to take pictures of each part and each asset by including the technical and purchase data of each asset. This information is made available to the customer for consultation in real time.
Finally, the tool allows the production of inspection reports for each asset, which allows to establish the condition of these assets and to predict their lifespan and to produce detailed lifecycle reports.
The project has allowed us to develop and implement an active, fast, easy to use and efficient database to manage:
- The inventory of the 13,000 rooms including their 250,000 walls and their related equipment
- The condition of the 36 HVAC
- The condition of the 1800 electrical panels and the condition of all the other MEP systems.
A database of more than 800,000 assets. All of this at the user’s fingertips from an iPad.
What’s your route to value? Vercity Asset Managers can work with you to optimise your real estate assets for success.
Roger Robillard, FM Compliance Manager, Vercity Canada
