Leveraging Automotive Industry Strategies to Define a New Paradigm for Construction-to-Operation Information Handover

Turnover of information from contractor to the owner of a facility is a critical step in the lifecycle of a project. While various research efforts have defined strategies to turnover design and construction information for owners, these strategies have not substantially improved building operation. This motivated the authors to explore how information is turned over in a different, but related, industry. The authors use owner manuals generated in the automotive industry as a paradigm for refining and organizing construction information and submittals for building owners because these manuals are generally understood by most people. To accomplish this aim, the authors identify common patterns of information structure and the manner in which specific information is provided in car owner manuals. Then they defined analogous building systems and submittal types that would transfer building-related information in a similar manner. For example, they looked at categories of information in the owner’s manual like “Safety & Security”, and suggested CSI specifications that serve a similar purpose in the building realm. They also looked at the format of information provided in those categories and suggested submittal types traditionally used in construction to facilitate information transfer in a similar manner. Once the analogous information and submittal types were identified, the responses were compared for instances of agreement. Complete agreement between individuals was recorded on 17 occasions, and partial agreement on 13. Then, overall consistency in responses was analyzed using Krippendorff’s alpha co-efficient (KALPHA). The KALPHA co-efficient of 0.2 indicates low overall consistency, but considerable agreement in responses for specific systems suggests the potential to organize certain types of construction information according to this alternative paradigm. For sections in which there was little or no agreement, results suggest that car systems may not have analogous building systems. This work demonstrates the potential for structuring building information using an alternative, but commonly used, paradigm from the automotive industry that may be universally understood. Future work will assess the perceptions reported by building owners and usability of this mode of information turnover to assess its viability in actual projects.