REDSTONE ARSENAL, Ala. – Senior leaders from the Army’s major commands will convene to prioritize funding for future construction and renovation projects during the Army’s annual Facility Investment Plan wargame, which will take place virtually from San Antonio, Texas, Sept. 25-29.
Valid prioritization, however, requires accurate information.
The key to the process relies heavily on data analytics compiled from constantly updated real-time facility inspection reports that not only identify current conditions, but also project future degradation and estimated repair costs based on age of infrastructure and equipment.
Pulling all the data together to extrapolate both a current assessment and long-term forecast is the Army’s BUILDER Sustainment Management System program.
“The BUILDER [Sustainment Management System] is a web-based software application developed by the Army Engineer Research and Development Center’s Construction Engineering Research Laboratory to help civil engineers, technicians and managers decide when, where and how to best maintain building infrastructure,” said Kristina McCarthy-Martin, BUILDER program manager with the Army Materiel Command Facilities Division.
BUILDER provides a database that inventories all major facility structural elements, systems, and equipment and delivers theoretical projections on when to repair or replace facility assets based on industry standards, added McCarthy-Martin. “It provides summary metrics to view the overall health of each building and system for benchmarking and prioritization purposes.”
Although the Army initiated the Facility Investment Plan, or FIP, in 2020 to provide focused infrastructure improvements in accordance with senior leader facility investment priorities and funding, last year was the first in which inspection details were complete in BUILDER.
“The information from BUILDER allows us to see Army infrastructure conditions more accurately and gives us forecasting ability — something we’ve never had before — to optimize investment decisions in support of Army modernization and readiness,” said Jordan Matthews, AMC G-4 facilities division chief.
The BUILDER process starts with the automated download of real property data, and then more detailed system inventory is collected which identifies components and their key life cycle attributes, explained McCarthy-Martin.
“From this inventory, condition index measures for each component are predicted based on its expected stage in the life-cycle,” she said. “Objective and repeatable inspections can then be performed on various components to verify their condition with respect to the expected life-cycle deterioration.”
With information about condition, functionality and remaining service life, short- and long-range work plans can be developed based on sound investment strategies, prioritization criteria and budget constraints.
“The benefit of the process is that the data allows us to make informed, proactive decisions based on an adaptive degradation model,” added Matthews.
That forecast helps identify requirements as part of the 10-year FIP cycle that AMC annually oversees with revalidation efforts and recommended changes and additions to enable the most efficient use of available funding.
FIP requirements for the Army’s active installations capture military construction, restoration and modernization needs as identified by those installations through senior commanders. These requirements are then prioritized by senior leaders with data analysis available through the FIP Wargame Analysis tool using several data sources including BUILDER at this month’s FIP wargame.
The AMC-led and Installation Management Command-hosted FIP wargame is a cyclic and evolving process to strengthen installation readiness for the Army of 2030 and beyond.
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