Derek Clements-Croome, Shaomin Wu and Godfard John of the University of Reading School of Construction Management & Engineering have published a report entitled “High-Quality Building Services based of Whole-Life Value” (ISBN 0 7049 9886 6).
The report describes how whole-life value (WLV) can be used to evaluate building assets. It focuses on those assets which have the greatest impact on WLV, building services systems. Amongst others, it covers the following topics: The determination of whole-life value, Data management systems and The integration of building systems.
The importance of using the WLV approach is simply illustrated in the first chapter:
“Evidence from the Royal Academy of Engineering (Evan et al, 1998) and others (Wu et al, 2005a; Hugeses et al, 2004) defines the life-cost ratio as: X:Y:Z where X is the design and construction costs; Y is the maintenance and operating costs; and Z is the business operating costs.
This ratio can vary from 10:0.5:15 to 1:8:80 and 1:5:200 depending on the building.”
Clearly, design and construction costs are shown to be only a very small part of the total building cost over the whole life of the building. Effective room automation and building management systems will have a dramatic impact on the maintenance and operating costs of the building and will pay back many times over the building’s lifetime.
Copies of the report can be obtained from Gulay Ozkan at the University of Reading – telephone 0118 378 6254