ICMSCosts

The built asset industry covers real estate and infrastructure – throughout the life cycle of an asset – from planning, design and construction through to operations, maintenance, renovation and demolition – as well as critical related services, such as financing and insurance.

The industry needs data throughout the asset life-cycle, but there’s a problem across the sector – data is inconsistent, non-existent or scattered across multiple incompatible sources, rendering performance benchmarking difficult.

Those holding budgets – those with accountability – those carrying out valuations – often lack the information required to make good decisions, oversee project performance, or demonstrate good value-for-money.

When it comes to cost and carbon reporting, ICMS has become the widely accepted international standard, providing a harmonised framework for reporting cost and carbon data for real estate and infrastructure. The ICMS Coalition started at the International Monetary Fund in 2015 and is now made up of 49 organisations from around the world, working together to create one shared standard.

ICMS provides the opportunity for greater transparency – for the benefit of those owning, delivering, managing or investing in assets.

What has not happened – until now – is the emergence of an independent body, trusted as custodian of the supporting data, to provide the benchmarking and transparency that client organisations seek to demonstrate value-for-money and save tax-payer money.

ICMSCosts has been created by built asset professionals to provide independent cost benchmarking to client organisations. With ICMS as the foundation, ICMSCosts is able to provide data comparisons that have never before been possible – locally, regionally and internationally. Certain projects – particularly large-scale infrastructure projects – are one-offs which can only be benchmarked globally.

The ICMSCosts team draws on decades of expertise in the built asset industry, cost management, cost reporting standards and data product development.

ICMSCosts data has numerous use cases:

• Performance benchmarking – assess the capital and operating costs of your project against similar projects, on an apple-for-apple basis, overcoming the traditional problem of different users having different standards.
• Estimating costs – determine the estimated cost of your next project by looking at how much similar projects have cost in the past, with appropriate adjustment for inflation and differential cost of construction around the world.
• Valuation / reinstatement costs – determine the appropriate reinstatement cost of your assets for valuation or insurance purposes, by tapping into our database of similar assets, with appropriate adjustment for inflation and differential cost of construction around the world.
• Tendering / procurement – our database can support across multiple departments by providing consistent cost and project data at key decision points.
• Data management – the ICMSCosts team will work with you to align your existing data with ICMS, the starting point for cost benchmarking.

ICMSCosts has been set up with the following principles and features in mind:

• Free cost benchmarking service to government entities providing data for our core service – we don’t want to create barriers to the sharing of data by stakeholders.
• Transparent business model – self-funding achieved through data being made available to the wider supply chain on a subscription basis – to contractors, service providers, technology providers, suppliers.
• Collaboration at its heart – by sharing project data, client organisations gain access to reliable benchmarks from peer organisations.
• Independent from industry – not tied to project delivery, not a user of asset data, not offering professional advice around asset data.
• International by design – global cost benchmarking – based on the international standard, ICMS – since best practice and efficiency recognise no borders.
• Infrastructure as well as real estate – coverage of all classes of built asset.
• Asset life-cycle data – not just construction costs – providing clients with real data to assess value-for-money at all stages of an asset’s life.
• Accessibility – ability to search for comparable assets by location, date, or asset attributes (such as type / size / quality).
• Secure – all asset data is held in line with industry standards – and while we encourage openness by client organisations, appropriate data security protocols are of course applied.

If you would like to find out more about ICMSCosts and how we can help you, please contact us.