1. 2013 COBie Challenge Brian Lynch General Manager North America
NFMT, March 2013

2. Product description & User base
AcceleratorTM
users user count: facility count: public sector: private sector: customers name:
> 200,000
> 20,000
40%
60%
One of world’s largest energy companies
Two of the world’s best known sports leisure companies.
One of the world’s largest nutrition & health companies
Planon delivers an full-suite IWMS solution to the market.
This means that we provide a platform that covers the needs for real Estate professionals as well as for Facility managers including all hard-and soft services.
Our platform is used by a large and growing group of Service Providers as well. The user base is significant. we service around 1800 Accounts around the world.
We work for renowned international organizations. These types of organizations do not often grant their suppliers to use their logos, larger accounts for Planon are:
One of world’s largest energy companies (Shell)
Two of the world’s best known sports leisure companies (Nike, Adidas).
One of the world’s largest nutrition & health companies (Unilever)
NFMT COBie Challenge 2013 Challenge for Facility Managers 2

3. Tested product: COBieLite / Planon Enterprise Talk
Product name, version:
Planon Enterprise Talk
Planon R2011 / R2013
PC & Cloud
For this year’s challenge, Planon and bSa worked together to establish a first implementation of COBieLite.
Where the COBie standard uses Excel as information carrier, the COBieLite standard uses an XML based file format to transfer data.
Planon felt that the COBie implementation on Excel brings some drawbacks when one wants to automate data interchange between BIM systems and its own CAFM/IWMS systems: it involves additional programming to address the Excel sheet tabs and columns. Secondly, it requires the users to own excel product versions that are mandatory for data transfer. Finally, also the data structuring as provided by COBieLite is more suitable for the purpose of data exchange.
Why
COBieLite?
COBieLite (XML)
COBie (Excel) based on
Spreadsheet XML 2003
NFMT COBie Challenge 2013 Challenge for Facility Managers 3

4. Tested product: COBieLite vs. COBie
COBieLite is based on XML structured data transfer. XML is the industry-preferred technology for machine-2-machine communications. COBieLite data structure is hierarchical, allowing for easy parsing and processing. Checking consistency and testing of the processing itself is facilitated well. (advice: use the CAMed XML editor from the bSa website!).
First of all, COBieLite is based on a hierarchical data structure: Facilities ‘decend’ to floors, which ‘decend’ to spaces, and so on…
As we have experienced in our development sessions, it was quite easy to check system import results with the data as had been delivered in the COBieLite file: using the CAMed XML file editor, it was quite simple to search for data elements and inspect its hierarchical relations (e.g. spaces to floors).
Also questions like: ‘is a specific data element put available at all’? , was answered in seconds by just inspecting the COBieLite file.
In comparison: this is quite more tedious in the Excel file data structures.
Processing this types of hierarchical XML structures has become common-place in today’s IT industry so it provides little to no problems or overhead.
NFMT COBie Challenge 2013 Challenge for Facility Managers 4

5. Tested product: COBieLite vs. COBie
For Planon, it was a ‘natural fit’ with its Enterprise-Talk technology1. Planon worked with bSa to put COBieLite to a first production version. We want to express our gratitude to bSa but especially Angela Lewis, Bill East and Chris Bogen in working with us to establish this result. We expect COBieLite to receive revisions over time.
The ‘natural fit’ of COBieLite for Planon stems from the technology we selected to create the interaction with: Planon Enterprise Talk.
The concept behind Enterprise Talk is that it does data Extraction Transformation and Loading, based on what we call a ‘Chain of Workers’.
A ‘Worker’ is a little program, that performs a specific task: for example getting data out of an Excel file or transforming an XML structure and call a platform API (Application Programming Interface) to load that data in the system. One can ‘link’ those Workers to form a ‘Chain’: each Worker executes after the previous one terminated, taking up the result of the previous one and passing its results again to the next ‘Worker’.
Although supporting COBie on Excel was quite feasible too 5

6. Configuration Concept of ‘Workers’: BIM System
No direct (SQL) access to the database: all standard business logic applied automatically
Small programs, each performing a specific transformation
Workers can be linked into a ‘chain’
Standard ‘Workers’ available in a library
New Workers can be added with ease
An interface using Workers is configured in the system
Enterprise Edition Platform
COBieLite.XML
Planon Enterprise Talk BO
So, data as provided by a BIM system in COBieLite format is processed by two ‘Workers’: one Worker to retrieve the additional (namespace) COBie standard data with the XML file, one to extract and load the data as parsed in the XML file. Note that the COBieLite XML ‘tags’ (like COB.Facility and COB.Floor) point to the objects to be updated in the system.
Planon provides a library of ‘Workers’ and new ones are added on a regular basis: of those being the COBieLite ones anew.
EE Database
Bi-directional:
Not in the COBie challenge
but clearly a feasible option.

7. Challenge scope: COBieLite
information
COBie.Sheet
Imported
spaces and equipment
Space, Type, Component 
PM schedules
Job 
safety procedures
systems
System
materials, tools, training
Resource
associated documents
Document
replacement parts
Spare
space and equipment properties
Attribute
space zones
Zone
We expected high overhead for stabilizing the COBieLite standard. As a fact we have been iterating its implementation between bSa and Planon several times indeed before we jointly concluded this exercise.
In view of this, we up-front decided to limit our scope on the project, but adding that other data elements does not pose a problem to us.
We have prioritized on establishing a production version of COBieLite with bSa. Addressing all remaining data elements is well feasible.
NFMT COBie Challenge 2013 Challenge for Facility Managers

8. COBie value proposition: to the lifecycle?
Service provider
Facility management
Sustainability
Maintenance
Space management
Health & safety
Reconstruction
....
Contracting
(Performance based) pricing
KPI’s
...
Service
Level Agreement
Design & Engineering $
SAAS / Cloud $
Logistics $
Construction
Clear business case for BIM has been established for the design and construction phases of facilities.
So, why is BIM a topic of interest for the FM community? Since Facility Managers manage the lifecycle of the facilities, the BIM technology should provide benefit to be used over the lifecycle. We believe BIM can provide such value:
Using the Facilities' bill-of-material for maintenance (budget) planning – this is the first application of COBie!
Contracting: providing sound basis for scope and SLA agreements
Activity preparations: health and safety issues, tool requirements etc.
Space management simulations (space typing, occupational patterns in 3D showing occupancy of the full facility i.s.o. only on a per-floor basis)
Lower costs of reconstruction: all construction data available and existing model to work from, saving lots of time, costs and risks in future projects
NFMT COBie Challenge 2013 Challenge for Facility Managers

9. BIM offers tangible value for facility management.
Value proposition
BIM offers tangible value for facility management.
At the same time its lifecycle adoption in the industry is just starting.
COBie provides the means to manage consistency of information between
CAFM / IWMS and BIM.
Note that Planon believes that the way to go here is in ‘unattended two-way data exchange’ between the IWMS and the BIM systems.
data changes as made in the IWMS should propagate to BIM as well as BIM data propagating to the IWMS.
Unattended by means of either triggered exchange based on end use actions or exchange based on scheduled exports and imports.
The Enterprise Platform provides this capability, but it was not implemented for this challenge.
NFMT COBie Challenge 2013 Challenge for Facility Managers

10. NFMT 2013 - COBie Challenge 2013 Challenge for Facility Managers
Contacts
COBie support Marketing POC
Nelson Yan phone:
Brian Lynch phone:
Jos Knops phone:
Thank you for your attention.
NFMT COBie Challenge 2013 Challenge for Facility Managers 10