Aramark tags equipment behind walls so its digital twins can feed work orders

Before the ceilings close on a project, Aramark Facilities Management sends a scanner through to tag the equipment technicians will need to find later: the fans, the belts, anything the team expects to inspect or service about once a year.

In an interview Facilities Dive published Oct. 13, Matt Judge, who serves as Aramark Facilities Management's senior director of facilities program development, said those tags explain why digital twins have started to earn a role in daily operations. Until a couple of years ago, he said, the technology was used mainly by real estate managers to lease space and by colleges to give prospective students and parents a virtual tour of campus. Providers and clients are now feeding operations data into the models. Judge said the models are shifting toward utilization, and that this use is beginning to spread.

Judge's company sells the technology, so this is the vendor's view. Still, it addresses the practical question for a facilities director weighing a twin: what turns a 3D walkthrough into something the maintenance team actually uses? Judge's answer is the data underneath the model, and the point in a building's life when that data gets attached.

TwinOptix at campus scale

TwinOptix, an asset and space management solution, is how Aramark Facilities Management offers digital twin capabilities. It merges lidar scans, documentation, asset information and operational data into a single shared digital model of a facility. According to a company spokesperson, Aramark has already built a sizable base.

On average, that works out to more than half a million square feet per client location, which fits the campus-sized use case Judge keeps coming back to. It also means the approach has been tried across dozens of sites rather than a single showcase building.

According to Judge, the main benefit right now is visibility for a large range of stakeholders. Operators on a large campus, for example, can use digital models as a single pane of glass for viewing every building they run. The models also cut the time facility managers spend walking a property to coordinate among contractors, vendors and designers.

The metaphor has some history. In a December 2021 Facility Executive article, Jason Pelski described a twin showing building health and sustainability metrics in a single pane of glass, and said a successful twin rests on two pillars: data and visualization. Aramark's day-one pitch leans on the visualization pillar. The tagging work described below is the data pillar.

Aramark's fact sheet describes something closer to a coordination toolkit than a viewer. Managers can leave digital notes for in-house maintenance staff or outside contractors, measure anything captured in the model, generate 2D floor plans and review 3D models of outdoor areas for condition assessments and planning. Judge listed lower travel, site survey and maintenance-time costs among the reasons twins are catching on. But he ranked stakeholder visibility first.

The order makes sense. Visibility is the benefit a buyer can see on day one. Maintenance savings depend on what the model knows about the building, and that depends on when the model was built.

Tagging the gear behind the drywall

Digital twins have usually been built during construction, and they have a reputation for not carrying over well as physical changes are made over a facility's lifecycle. Judge said Aramark fixes that problem by providing pre- and post-scans.

Judge said pre-scans happen before the walls and ceiling are closed and include operational data. Crews place virtual tags on maintainable equipment inside walls and above ceilings, covering anything the team expects to service about once a year, whether for an inspection or to change belts or fans. As a result, Judge said, the team knows exactly where each item sits and has all the information about it.

Pelski's definition shows why this step carries so much weight. A twin, he wrote, is not just a twin of the building but also a digital representation of every asset within its spaces. Equipment sealed above a ceiling is exactly the kind of asset a scan of finished rooms would not capture, so the pre-scan is where those assets enter the model.

That information can then go to the client's computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) through AIWX Connect, Aramark's Internet-of-Things tech platform. Inside the CMMS, it can generate work orders and build a database of asset details such as safety and repair instructions. "So now it becomes an operational tool," Judge said. He added that Aramark is also helping clients create virtual tours and cut the labor time needed to complete work orders. "We're changing the workflow process," he said.

In Aramark's approach, the tagging happens during the pre-scan, before walls and ceilings close over the fans and belts a technician will service once a year. After that, much of the model's value reaches the maintenance team through the CMMS, as work orders and asset records that carry location and service details.

Timing is the practical consequence. For an owner with a new building or a renovation underway, the pre-scan has to happen before the walls and ceilings close.

Larger owners are tying twins to construction schedules too. Matterport's facility management guide points to Dublin Airport, which in 2024 announced a $1.8 billion modernization program in which more than 140 projects will use the Autodesk Construction Cloud platform, and which is piloting Tandem, a digital twin platform for managing its assets, spaces and systems, as part of that push. Building the twin alongside the construction work suggests the same timing logic, applied at airport scale.

Why construction models stall at handover

The handover gap Aramark is working around has a long paper trail. In a February 2025 article for Health Facilities Management, Jacob D'Albora wrote that building information modeling has become the professional standard in design and construction but has not yet delivered its full value in operations. Tools that solved problems during design often miss the concerns of a facilities manager or CFO when carried into operations unchanged, he argued, and the mismatch can make teams distrust the technology itself.

The article opened a three-part series for health care facilities managers, and it starts from the operator's side of handover. Once a site becomes operational, D'Albora wrote, the facilities manager assumes full responsibility for its performance, regardless of unfinished punch list items, missing record drawings or incomplete equipment information. Aramark's pre-scan goes after the last item on that list, for the equipment that will be hardest to see once the building is finished.

D'Albora traced the root cause to people and process, calling it a "square peg, round hole" problem, and his fix was to cut the model down to the parts operations actually needs. Aramark's pre-scan rule, which tags only equipment someone will maintain, suggests the same thinking. The twin carries what the maintenance program will use and leaves out the rest of the construction data.

Payback that takes its time

Judge spoke openly about why some operators hesitate. Operators who don't use twins, he said, tend to miss the use case, have trouble with the transition or can't figure out how to measure the payback. In his view, those holdouts can't see how they would earn back the investment or put a number on the return.

He added that the payback is not always financial in the form of operational savings, and that running a facility from a twin can take a while before savings show up. The return grows as the model is shared with the people and partners who work on a site, he said, and the payback increases when it reaches the wider community and the industry players a company works with.

One return came from an unexpected direction. A university president told Judge the school had spent a couple of years struggling to get donors into its buildings. "Now we don't have to get them to our buildings," the president said. A facilities model ended up helping the fundraising office.

The slow build matches an older argument. Pelski's 2021 article said a twin's value grows as it collects data over time, with machine learning filtering out nuisance alarms so managers can focus on the events that matter. The longer the model runs, the more useful it gets.

That is also the strongest case for caution. The reporting includes no independent savings figure, and the returns described most concretely are time and visibility, as reported by the vendor. A CFO who needs a dollar figure in year one will find a slow, compounding return a harder sell, and Judge's own list of adoption barriers says as much.

Judge's focus is utilization. He said Aramark tries to embed the twin into the client's program, which drives utilization, and to share different use cases with different clients until they start to use it. "We're trying to understand their needs," he said.

That method lines up closely with D'Albora's prescription for the handover problem: engage operations teams, define their specific problems and identify which technologies, or which parts of them, genuinely improve their workflows. For a facilities director comparing providers, the plan for getting technicians to use the twin could matter as much as the scan itself.