Performance-Based Building System Manufacturer Selection Decision Framework for Integration into Total Cost of Ownership Evaluations

Abstract

Facility managers are often faced with building system procurement or replacement decisions, requiring them to select a system from among competitive manufacturers. Total cost of ownership (TCO) criteria, informed by built assets in operation in the manager's portfolio, provides some information to select the right asset manufacturer. However, managers must also consider technical performance to complete a more comprehensive analysis. Performance can be calculated using asset parameters like condition, age, and variation in condition to aid in TCO assessments. Leveraging past research and approaches, performance is calculated using an additive model that scales each parameter using a standard normalization technique and employs weighting factors to account for decision-maker input. Data from 20 Air Force installations across the US and two asset types are analyzed, showing the utility of a performance metric. This analysis shows that as manufacturer diversity in portfolios decreases, performance increases for most of the asset types modeled. This paper presents a new performance metric that can be used as an additional criterion in TCO models to build a more robust decision framework.

Evaluating Climatic Influences on the Technical Performance of Built Infrastructure Assets

“…Manufacturer C only produces air handlers. This naming convention is consistent with that which is proposed in previous work that provides additional detail (Brown et al 2021). This analysis does not aim to provide definitive conclusions about which manufacturer, by name, an organization should procure.…”

“…A case study using observed, manufacturer-level infrastructure data was conducted to investigate the link between built infrastructure asset performance and climate. This case study builds upon the work of Brown et al (2021) in the development of a performance-based metric to quantify the performance of assets and link relevant climate data to investigate any trends that may exist. This analysis used built infrastructure asset data from BUILDER TM Sustainment Management System, an industryleading program used to track and manage infrastructure assets (BUILDER Sustainment Management System 2012).…”

“…A complete record of an asset's manufacturer, condition, and RSL must be available to calculate asset performance. An extensive explanation of this filtering and exclusion process has been covered in Brown et al (2021). For this climatic influence analysis, an additional filtering criterion was applied to remove assets that had an installation year before 1985 or an installation year after 2018.…”

“…This equation provides a way to quantify asset performance based on asset condition and informed by service life and variance. A detailed description of this equation and example calculations can be found in the authors' previous work (Brown et al 2021). This methodology generates one performance metric value for each asset in the analysis at every condition assessment point.…”

“…Efforts in the manufacturing industry have been made to include asset performance as a TCO model factor (Roda et al 2020). Using this research as a guide, modeling of the technical performance of built infrastructure assets to aid in manufacturer selection decisions has been completed (Brown et al 2021). Manufacturer selection is the idea of choosing one manufacturer over another based on some number of selection criteria, which can be factored into TCO models.…”