Reduced Site Visits and Travel Time by 80% with Remote Oversight: Vancouver Area Municipalities Expand Use of 3D Digital Twins to Save Time and Money

Engineering services firm Kickstart Technologies helps growing municipalities see numerous points of savings with 3D Digital Twins throughout the full building life cycle and during daily operations.

For metro Vancouver-Area cities and municipalities, upgrading and maintaining millions of square feet of properties across multiple sites means involving numerous stakeholders, service providers, consultants and city staff, resulting in time consuming site visits, back and forth review, and significant man hours to oversee everything from major construction projects to day-to-day maintenance and repairs. To help improve the municipalities’ short and long-term operations management processes, engineering services firm Kickstart Technologies is developing an ongoing virtual management system with Visual Plan as the municipalities’ new central facilities maintenance and visual data hub.

Incorporating Visual Plan’s 360 capture and platform into the workflow is allowing Coquitlam and area municipalities to gain scalable, comprehensive virtual oversight of their buildings and public facilities, allowing for more effective and selective integration of more costly LIDAR and BIM technologies where needed. With 360 photogrammetry as the foundational visual record for each site, Kickstart Technologies has optimized the cities’ management processes by leveraging Visual Plan’s integrations with third party platforms, like IBM Maximo for work order and asset management and Gordian VFA for asset capital planning. Other visual data like 2D blueprints, BIM, CAD, GIS data and LIDAR scanning are also imported, organized and available for equipment management, construction progress monitoring, maintenance tracking, and more effective quote solicitations, saving countless hours of time.

“The immediate money saver for Coquitlam will be to reduce back and forth review by service providers who need to view the site and assess needed maintenance or repairs. They are now able to figure out what needs to be done, where the repair needs are located, and what equipment will be necessary before the service provider or an employee even gets in a truck.”

– Doug Suddaby, Founder, Kickstart Technologies

Key ROI & Outcomes

Increase in efficiency through visualization translates to significant tangible cost savings. For the City of Coquitlam Base Operating Plan budget of $263 million:
Labor (43%), Contracted Services (16%), and Asset funding (10%).
1% increase in operational efficiency through visualization = $1.81 million in savings.

Challenges: Inefficient Facilities Management due to cumbersome in-person oversight and site visits

The city of Coquitlam is growing rapidly, driving significant construction and maintenance across all their buildings and properties ranging in age from new construction to 30+ years old. To better manage short-term and on-going maintenance, city officials were looking for methods to maintain buildings synergistically with all the various consultants meeting their mechanical, repair, painting and contracting.

Contracting these services out results in multiple internal and external agencies in need of streamlined data sharing, decision making and oversight capabilities.

The major challenges include:

• Lack of comprehensive and efficient data sharing of visual information
• Data silos hinder progress: different visual data is stored in different locations (GIS, CAD, BIM, LIDAR, 2D CAD, jobsite photos for construction, asset photos for facility condition assessments. Access to accurate information is a challenge. 
• Ineffective method to organize site and asset photography, and understand the spatial relationship between the imagery to CAD and building orientation
• Challenges with accurate capital planning and capital forecasting due to incomplete or inaccurate asset information
• High cost of 3D visual data capture, implementation of a comprehensive BIM program and scan to BIM
• High cost of trucks rolling to site for onsite visits 
• Time wasted by facility operations searching to find information onsite or directing service providers where to locate things
• Inability to frequently and accurately update building and asset information

To create long-term success for the municipal areas, KickStart Technologies identified a central goal for their approach: to deliver comprehensive visualization and data interaction between 360 photogrammetry, AutoCAD, hard copy drawings and LIDAR, building and asset documentation on an ongoing basis, facilitating maintenance and oversight from a single visual data hub.

Solution: Enabling Remote Oversight and Comprehensive Visual asset Management from A Single Data Hub

Kickstart Technologies immediately saw the value of capturing the municipal properties with the Ricoh Theta Z1 camera, and utilizing the Visual Plan’s 360 capture app and SiteView visual data hub into their deliverable set, as the data the city agencies already own can be readily imported into the application.

Every stakeholder – from government officials to, municipality engineers, service companies, architectural and engineering firms, and daily maintenance crews – can incorporate their annotations, still photographs and documentation reports along with 2D CAD, BIM, and 360 photogrammetry of each site, yielding a comprehensive single-source record of the current and as-built conditions of each facility.

For the City of Coquitlam, their existing GIS system was able to map out facility locations but lacked the ability to offer internal visualization of the buildings. With the implementation of Visual Plan’s streamlined capture, processing, and accurate spatial alignment of 360 photos of the building interiors, stakeholders can now gain visualization for internal drill downs, oversight and streamlined asset tagging.

Kickstart Technologies has helped the city of Coquitlam integrate Visual Plan and 360 photogrammetry into their facility and site maintenance processes, including with the Parks Department and Aquatic Centers, saving time and money by streamlining oversight and prioritizing the need for more expensive capture technologies where they are required.

Critical Features for Success

As Kickstart Technologies and the City of Coquitlam continue to see benefits from implementing Visual Plan into their workflows, the central theme for their success has been establishing their comprehensive data hub. The teams can easily capture their facilities, gain virtual oversight, integrate multiple forms of visual data, communicate effectively, and streamline decision making all from a single source: the Visual Plan SiteView platform.

Critical Benefits:

• Visual Plan as a data hub with BIM, LIDAR, and CAD import
• Third-party integrations with asset management platforms
• Virtual walkthrough functionality to enhance remote oversight & decision-making
• Barrier to entry was low regarding the capital investment
• Easy import, scale, and alignment of floor plans to GIS via Import Floorplan Wizard
• Simple auto and manual orientation of 360 imagery to CAD to enhance understanding
• Intuitive organization of 360 photos across levels, areas, and spaces (accelerated via the Visual Plan Capture App)
• AI spatially and accurately aligned the panos automatically
• Intuitive organization of 360 photos across levels, areas, and spaces (accelerated via the Visual Plan Capture App)
• Intuitive interface and functionality
• Helps eliminate BRAIN DRAIN (Employees retire or move on and so does all their knowledge)

“LIDAR is very expensive and time intensive – a lot of our clients don’t need that level of accuracy across an entire site, or don’t have the budget to do that level of detailed work. Visual Plan fills that niche – giving our customers what they really need – visualization of everything at a site and LIDAR on the critical structural elements where required.”
– Doug Suddaby, Founder, Kickstart Technologies

“Digital Twins are an absolute equalizer for new contractors to pre-plan their job before arriving on site. Being more knowledgeable through visualization makes the service provider even more valuable, as the available data lets the incoming crew know more about the building than even the owner.”
– HVAC Service Provider for City of Coquitlam

For the greater Vancouver area municipalities, utilizing Visual Plan as the visual data hub at the center of their municipal maintenance strategy has resulted in tangible cost savings from reduced site visits and expedited site capture, all with lower capital investment costs.

“With 3D Digital Twins, different departments and stakeholders are able to see various details when looking at the same data – this is the power of the Visual Plan platform because you are capturing everything. It’s the power of collaboration, the group being able to look at the problem from different perspectives, different points of view and to have the conversation to get to the best results.”

– Gary Ponting, General Manager, Kickstart Technologies