Happy Earth Day! We're celebrating by discussing the intersection of Infrastructure, Climate Change, Facility Management, and the Built Environment.
This Year's Earth Day theme is "Together, we can Restore Our Earth"!
This year, the official Earth Day 2021 poster was created by Speto, an acclaimed Brazilian street artist from São Paulo.
Speto created this original artwork for Earth Day 2021 in his style of folk art style reminiscent of “Cordel Literature”. His piece features young people, symbolizing the hope they represent for our future, working together in harmony while cradled in the benevolent antlers of a strong stag. (Image: Earthday.org).
What is Earth Day?
Earth Day is a global event held annually on April 22 to show support for environmental protection. It was first observed on April 22, 1970, when 25-year-old graduate student, Denis Hayes, organized the very first Earth Day. The success of that event, which brought together 20 million Americans, helped to spark the modern environmental movement.
Today Earth Day consists of a wide range of events coordinated globally by EARTHDAY.ORG including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries.
Why are Facility Management, Facility Condition Assessment, and Capital Planning software relevant to Earth Day?
Designing and maintaining buildings that are truly sustainable and resilient means taking into account the potential side effects of climate change.
With a profoundly heightened sense of how vulnerable we and the planet really are, it is especially meaningful to celebrate this milestone by talking about how healthy infrastructure is an environmental issue.
The health of our buildings and infrastructure directly impacts the well-being of humans and the environment. In this way, maintaining the built environment—our buildings, dams, bridges, power grids, and transportation systems—is absolutely crucial.
As a New York City-based company, we are champions of cities. The efficiencies that the urban landscape offers are clear: public transportation, tall buildings, walkability. Yet the stress that the built environment puts on the natural world is still a concern.
It is in our environmental interest to regularly maintain and improve our infrastructure so that we can boost sustainability and thus better protect our natural world.
The Impact of Infrastructure on the Environment and Climate Change
Potholes, water main breaks, power grid failures, and collapsing bridges are only some of the potential catastrophes that happen when infrastructure breaks down. Unfortunately, society tends to focus on infrastructure only when there is a discernible disaster.
This is why strategic planning around routine maintenance, preventative maintenance, repair, and long-term capital planning is essential.
Investing in and maintaining the built environment is an important aspect of ensuring the health and sustainability of the natural world. This extends to planning for climate resilience for facility managers across all industries: K12 Schools, Corporate Real Estate, Infrastructure, Colleges, and Universities.
Meeting this growing need is no simple feat. Hospitals have limited budgets for daily upkeep and find it difficult to make modernizing improvements as it is. This scarcity of funding means that hospitals simply don’t have the excess budgeting necessary for what was historically unexpected but is now increasingly anticipated—the damage and destruction of infrastructure due to extreme weather events.
Maintaining the health of buildings and physical assets is vital for creating a sustainable built environment
The most crucial part of climate resilience is planning. Our FOUNDATION software platform has proven to help facilities in many industry sectors, and it can assist your organization in preparing for weather destruction. FOUNDATION is consists of 4 major functions:
- Conditions: enables users to gather onsite inspection data directly on a mobile device, create real-time reports, and drive deficiency-based renewal and replacement planning.
- Needs: analyzes data collected through Conditions to track and prioritize deficiencies across the entire network of buildings and grounds.
- Projects: automatically scopes, estimates, and schedules facility management and capital planning projects.
- Plans: integrates with enterprise financial systems to provide real-time views of commitments and spend.
How can Intellis help?
It is our mission to empower facility executives with software that makes collecting data for facility condition assessments and capital planning a whole lot easier. Our leading facility and capital planning software is your tool for smart, confident decision-making.
Schedule a demo with our experts to learn how we can help you improve facility planning.
Our solutions are developed to help facility professionals who work on these critical plans, which aim to protect the life-cycle of physical assets that make up the complex facility portfolios that they manage. The extent to which the plans are able to maintain quality building operations, in turn, contributes to the future of not only the built environment but also the natural world.
Learn how Intellis can help you plan for the future of your facilities and physical assets.
Using FOUNDATION enables facility managers and capital planners to assess property conditions, determine which needs must be addressed, define the scope of projects, and build robust plans that will ensure facility safety and compliance. Planning for the future with FOUNDATION will enable the facility management team to identify key savings and stay within budget.
At Intellis, we're excited about the future!
With our capital planning and facility management software, we are disrupting the way facility executives manage and improve both the built environment and the natural environment.
Intellis was founded in 1996 with the mission of enhancing and elevating the human experience of the built environment through the development and implementation of innovative technology solutions.
Our history is firmly rooted in cutting-edge data collection, and we made our name by transforming the way organizations collect and analyze information related to physical assets during critical Facility Condition Assessments (FCA). We created the first configurable mobile platform to identify, document, rate, and collect data on deficiencies. For organizations and firms with multiple sites, regions, and requirements, that technology was—and is—integral to efficiency and accuracy.
In celebration of Earth Day, we are continuing our commitment to our original mission by developing new and innovative ways to manage facility condition assessments and planning with software and emerging technology like Building Information Modeling, so that we can empower facility executives to better support sustainability, improve energy efficiency, and in turn better protect our planet. #WeAreIntellis
Schedule a demo with our team of experts today and learn more about our easy-to-use facility condition assessment for capital planning software.
