What you can’t see can hurt you: Proactively manage risk using UVARA.cloud Platform

Every facilities owner, operator, manager and insurer understands that a constant challenge is to balance risk of future breakdowns and potential calamity with the associated cost of minimizing that risk. With an unlimited budget every system and component could be built in duplicate, providing a level of safety and security rarely experienced outside of an operating room built for replacing a human heart or NASA’s design of the systems required to land astronauts on a distant planet. For most, the struggle is to keep the facility operating within a modest budget and to do so knowing every piece of the puzzle has a finite life expectancy. Given time and budget constraints choices have to be weighed, priorities assigned, compromises made and thus we contend with risk.

Architects, planners, engineers and contractors design and build todays facilities to be functionally productive for a typical lifespan of 50-60 years. Actual life cycle durations vary wildly and the obligation of preventative maintenance and repairs increases exponentially as the facility ages. Components that can be seen and easily accessed, repaired or replaced present a low level of risk, but what about those systems that are not visible? Underground infrastructure, wiring, plumbing, framing, even roofing can be hidden from view. How old is it? What was its original life expectancy? Remaining life expectancy? Where is it located? How much of it is there? What would it cost to replace? Can a preventative maintenance program be put in place to prevent downtime, or worse – a disaster caused by ruptured water/sewer/gas lines, collapsed roof or an electrical fire? How do you even begin such an overwhelming task?

Let’s face it, a responsible owner and professional management team can only solve the problems they know about. The cost of maintaining the facility can (and must) be built in to the cost of doing business and therefore it is vital to understand what the actual costs are. To not understand is living with an unacceptable level of risk.

RISK MANAGEMENT

UsersSolano Community College DistrictCypress Lawn CemeteryCollege of MarinSan Mateo Community College District

PartnerCSW|ST2 Engineering Group, a UVARA partner providing award winning civil engineering services

ChallengeTo identify, manage and reduce risk throughout the continuum of a project lifecycle while capturing and preserving institutional knowledge

SolutionUVARA.cloud Platform

Result

Universally centralized viewing, analytics, reporting and archiving system for all utilities, networks and building groups in a virtual digital environment, clearly and intuitively displaying their elements over any base map on any device 24/7/365 days a year

The Challenge

Many facilities and infrastructure in the United States are beyond 60 years in age. Cost to replace entire buildings, campuses and utility networks is prohibitive, if your business is not as profitable as Google or Facebook. Maintaining existing properties is often the only option. But builders are rarely paid to document every component of a facility when constructing it and paper plans/blueprints get tattered, scattered, and lost altogether. Institutional knowledge seems impossible to capture, preserve and keep organized. Knowledgeable staff move on or retire. Facilities managers have more to deal with in today’s technical environment than ever before. Risk increases as documentation is misplaced and knowledge is absent or lost altogether.

Beyond maintenance, planning and design for remodeling, expanding or replacing facilities requires knowledge about what currently exists, its age, makeup, capacity, life expectancy and where it is physically located. Guessing about any of this is very risky.

And to build a new facility, expand an existing one or perform a major remodel without properly documenting every aspect of the project is akin to continuing a cycle of abuse. Even well intentioned professionals who work to organize and store boxes of paper plan sets or CDs are doing little to protect against future problems.

We reduce risk as we increase certainty. Knowing what exists, to the highest extent possible, is the key to responsible ownership, stewardship and future success. The technology exists to research, understand, document and organize the existing details for any facility and have that information at your fingertips 24/7. As we witness with PG&E in northern California, as infrastructure ages and calamities occur on a more frequent basis than ever before, it’s becoming an urgent matter to get this done.

The Solution

The group that founded UVARA.cloud Platform are hands-on engineers, technicians, property owners and managers. Serving a large client base with a myriad of facilities needs provided critical knowledge about the challenges faced by facilities owners and operators. Updating and expanding facilities is difficult enough as every project wrestles with unknowns, but construction projects are often delayed or worse due to the in-field discovery of unexpected underground utilities. According to the Common Ground Alliance, more than 500,000 excavation-related damages to underground facilities occurred in 2018, up from 439,000 in 2017. This is happening at a pace of more than 1300 times a day, 365 days a year. This is unacceptable.

UVARA.cloud PlatformUVARA is the easiest, most cost-effective Geographical Information System (GIS) on the market today. Designed by utility and facility infrastructure experts, UVARA delivers the features and functionality to plan, build and operate assets no matter where you are in the management lifecycle. UVARA creates rich, digital maps of all types of underground, surface and overhead assets supported by powerful visual-ization, analytics and archival technology.

We reduce risk as we increase certainty. Knowing what exists, to the highest extent possible, is the key to responsible ownership,

stewardship and future success.

The technology exists to research, understand,

document and organize the existing details for any facility and have

that information at your fingertips 24/7.

UVARA is a valuable tool for everyone on your team, both internal and external:• Capital and master planners• Operations and maintenance• Architects• Engineers• Construction crew• Public safety and disaster preparedness professionals

A cloud-based platform, your maps and data are accessible 24/7/365 on any web-enabled device – desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile phone.

UVARA was created to transform the way you see your utility infrastructure and important network assets. As an end-to-end asset mapping and management solution, UVARA assists owners and operators like you with identifying, managing and reducing risk throughout the continuum of a project lifecycle while capturing and preserving institutional knowledge. UVARA universally centralizes viewing, analytics, reporting and archiving for all utilities, networks and building groups in a virtual digital environment, clearly and intuitively displaying their elements over any base map on any device. The UVARA Cloud Platform improves infrastructure intelligence by simplifying information enabling managers to make informed and rapid response decisions that maximize the asset’s value. It allows you to clearly see the location, extent, age and replacement costs for your entire facility infrastructure.

UVARA reduces risk and greatly increases efficiency by providing you with more knowledge about your infrastructure than you ever thought possible.

Results: Forward Planning

Solano Community College District, Fairfield, California (SCCD)Solano Community College District is a public community college in Fairfield, California with additional centers in Vacaville and Vallejo. The college is part of California Community Colleges System. The District consists of a main campus in Fairfield and two centers: one in Vacaville and another in Vallejo. The 192-acre (0.78 km2) main campus in Fairfield was completed in 1971. The Vallejo Center opened in 2007 and the Vacaville Center opened in 2008. Currently the three campuses have approximately 11,000 students taking on-ground and online classes.

As part of their Facilities Master Planning project in 2012, and preparing for the placement of Measure Q, a $348M Facilities improvement Bond, SCCD deployed (what is now known as ) UVARA Cloud Platform for its 3 campuses, Fairfield, Vacaville and Vallejo. The Master Plan architect understood that the normal planning process for this situation would mean having an engineer gather up old plan sets and piece together a new plan set showing where the infrastructure is supposed to be located and calculate existing capacities for such. They immediately saw the value of UVARA in providing all of that information and much more.

Once Measure Q was passed by the voters, a Bond Manager was brought on-board and pre-construction planning began. The District’s Bond Manager, Leigh Sata, began utilizing UVARA as a tool to plan for the new facilities program. Having information at their fingertips about where their underground utilities were located, what size they were, how old they were and existing capacities was invaluable. Because UVARA is able to interact with AutoCAD, predesign was much easier

“The UVARA program made the Facilities Master

Planning process much more efficient and also identified specific needs

for upgrades to the infrastructure that would

have otherwise been missed.”

Rob Barthelman, Measure Q Facilities Master Plan Architect

to accomplish. Planners were able to look at alternative routing for utilities and quickly determine the length of the runs, the amount of materials needed and the associated costs. Efficiency was being optimized.

One of the first steps in initializing a construction program is to Phase the pro-gram, i.e. determine the order in which various projects will be constructed. Nor-mally this is a multi-week endeavor, but Mr. Sata confirmed that using UVARA he was able to accomplish the task in one day! In addition he had solid back-up documentation to justify the phasing order.

A few weeks later the UVARA implementation training team was at the Fair-field campus demonstrating the UVARA program to the facilities staff when the Facilities Manager received a call on his radio, a contractor working on site had uncovered an unidentified pipe during excavation. Excavation had stopped and the contractor was waiting for guidance from facilities. The UVARA team went right to the contractor’s location and quickly identified the pipe as a drainage line connected to the downspout of a nearby building. Within 30 minutes the mystery was solved, construction back on track!

During the construction phase of the Measure Q program a new building was be-ing planned for an open area on the Fairfield campus, the building having been designed as part of a previous bond program but on hold until funding allowed it to move forward. The building was phased to be constructed in the early stages of Measure Q and was being fast-tracked because the design was shovel-ready. Bids were in and construction scheduled. During a final design review session the building was placed on the UVARA model to look for conflicts and it became obvious why that area of the campus had been left undeveloped: it was the loca-tion of a major utility corridor! If construction had begun in that location, main util-ity lines could have been damaged and the entire campus put at risk. Ultimately the project was put on hold again and the building relocated.

Results: Project Design

College of Marin, Kentfield and Novato, CaliforniaThe College of Marin is a public community college in Marin County, California, with two campuses, one in Kentfield, and the second in Novato. College of Marin has been in operation since 1926. Each semester, about 10,000 students are enrolled.

College of Marin in 2016 successfully passed Measure B, a $265M Facilities improvements bond. A major concern during the design phase for several of the new and updated building projects was the existence of an underground network of piping associated with their campus geothermal system. One such project, the installation of a Tesla Energy Powerpack energy storage system, required navigating around some 900 geothermal wells the college uses for heating and cooling.

Utilizing the UVARA platform, designers were able to understand where the system is located and design a pathway around and through the complex piping network. This system is expected to save the College about $150,000 per year in utility costs. Needless to say, the design and installation process was made much more efficient because UVARA was available.

“Without the use of this GIS technology we would have spent far more time

and experienced hundreds of thousands of dollars in

unnecessary planning and construction costs.”

Leigh Sata, Measure Q Program Manager

“Looking at last year’s bill, I can already tell the battery

system is doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing... It’s going to save us about $150,000 a year in utility costs, which is not

insignificant.”

Greg Nelson, College of Marin’s Vice-President of Finance and

College Operations

San Mateo Community College District, San Mateo, CaliforniaThe San Mateo County Community College District is a community college system in California with three institutions: College of San Mateo in San Mateo, Cañada College in Redwood City, and Skyline College in San Bruno. The district serves more than 30,000 students each year.College of San Mateo had just completed construction on a new aquatics center, including two swimming pools covering more than 15,000 square feet, and a massive concrete pool deck when it was discovered the pool heaters were not working properly. An investigation determined that the gas line feeding the heating units was leaking somewhere under the new pool decking. The idea of jackhammering the new concrete decking was unthinkable, but there was no efficient way to route a new gas line to the heaters from any other direction. A suggestion was offered that a directional bore could be made underneath the decking to connect the heaters with the existing gas line away from the pool deck but how could they avoid the pools and other utilities buried under the deck? With UVARA the task was possible and quickly a solution was designed. The replacement gas line was successfully installed and the pools were back in service soon afterwards.

Results: Operations and Maintenance

College of Marin, Kentfield and Novato, California; San Mateo Community College District, San Mateo, CaliforniaAt both of these Districts proposals were requested to upgrade the parking lot lighting to accommodate more energy efficient systems. The rough estimates for cost savings combined with PG&E incentives made the decision an easy one. The difficult aspect was the Districts had to provide detailed information about what lighting currently existed and put into place an identification system for each light pole and fixture, details that were needed for an RFP and construction bidding. Given that some campuses had more than a dozen parking lots the task was daunting.

Fortunately UVARA had already mapped every light pole on each campus making the task very simple. UVARA staff were able to provide detailed mapping and a numbering system for each campus so that not only the bidding process could be done efficiently but the progression of upgrades could be documented as each fixture was replaced! At the conclusion of this project the UVARA program was updated to include information about the new lighting fixtures – invaluable for future operations and maintenance projections.

“UVARA helped us make this important repair with a minimum of disruption and at minumum cost. I can’t imagine having to cut into our new pool deck as soon

as it was finished!”

Karen Powell, Facilities Manager

“The lighting project was made much easier thanks

to UVARA. I’m not sure how we would have moved

forward without it!”

V-Anne Chernock, Director of Modernization, College of Marin

Cypress Lawn Cemetary, Colma, CaliforniaCypress Lawn is located in Colma, California and is home to arboretums, century-old chapels, lakes, fountains, gardens, and the final resting place of many notable Californians. Founded in 1892 the facilities and grounds cover hundreds of acres and includes state-of-the-art facilities.

The cemetery business relies heavily on planning - having an understanding of existing as well as future uses for land, facilities, and infrastructure is vital as cemeteries should be forever. Cypress Lawn implemented the UVARA program to assist with several issues: to better understand existing infrastructure to reduce maintenance costs, provide a snapshot of existing facilities conditions and assist with forward planning. One of the challenges for a cemetery is maintaining the extensive irrigation system. Location of piping, valves, sprinkler heads buried underground often resides in the maintenance staff’s memory so relies heavily on institutional knowledge. UVARA allows management to know what they have, where it’s located, what its age is, capacities, replacement costs… not to mention being able to locate isolation valves when they have a break or leaky pipe.

Other highly useful functions of UVARA at Cypress Lawn include assessment and planning for future land uses, scheduling of long term maintenance, even assessment of rooftop wear on existing buildings and other structures. Operating and maintaining hundreds of acres of property is very challenging and UVARA is making some tasks much more manageable.

UVARA allows stakeholders to redirect important resources away from lower value activities such as hunting through a plan room for the most current set of blueprints or potholing the campus in search of the broken gas line and toward higher-value activities such as infrastructure analysis and data driven decision-making. UVARA brings to life those otherwise hidden assets to reduce the risk of daily operations.

“UVARA’s visualization analytics and archival

technology address the challenges of managing

aging infrastructure and the costly, unforeseen problems

that arise when there is no visual understanding of where assets are located.”

Bob Gordon, President & CEO,

Cypress Lawn Cemetery

Association, Colma, CA