With growing urban populations and increasing electricity usage, there’s more demand than ever for innovation in facilities management.
Facility managers have a challenging job, which includes managing efficiency and comfort within budget constraints, negotiating legacy building systems, and meeting the ever-changing demands from the business.
One of the most interesting shifts within the industry is a more concentrated effort toward usage and adoption of occupant engagement. Increasingly, businesses want to align buildings and capital investments with the commercial mission of the business. This requires focus on different types of outcomes beyond reliability and efficiency.
More importantly, there is a greater demand in the industry for the implementation of Artificial Intelligence, IoT, natural language processing, automation, and newer digital technologies that enable facilities to be more efficient.
With Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques, it is possible to analyze building and physical asset data. These technologies offer facility managers a much more holistic approach to monitoring and fine tuning the entire building and asset system.
Performing building analysis with AI and ML can help facility managers with the continuous improvement of their workforce, asset health, and sustainability savings. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques draw patterns and useful analogies from the disparate data that enable facility managers to better understand peak-hour demand and useful lifecycles of equipment and physical assets.
A unified IoT platform powered by AI and ML can provide actionable insights into facility deficiencies. Further it is possible that the building systems managed by facility professionals will get smarter as the data for analysis increases, and this will lead to making better predictions and maintenance cycle decisions. Therefore improving efficiency for facility managers.
The benefits of automation are boundless. Rather than relying on tenants or facility team members to constantly monitor temperature levels, the influx of work orders, or switching off the lights, a centralized Building Automation System (BAS) will seamlessly and automatically monitor these key facility functions.
Furthermore, because these systems continually collect data, managers are able to optimize physical assets based on real-time insights. This gives the facilities management team the ability to analyze usage patterns, which in turn give you the power to develop strategies for saving money and improving efficiency throughout the entire asset portfolio.
IoT-integrated buildings have opened new ways for efficient management of resources with real-time data insights. Building systems of the future will leverage data from interconnected systems to enhance the building occupant experience. This is such an important departure from the goals of the current building stock because with the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) there will be even greater connectivity between systems.
For example, sensors—either built-in or retrofitted—collect and record data constantly. That data feeds software systems and when connected to services, allows you to more effectively harness and interpret that data to gain better insight and ultimately find and fix problems before they happen.
The impact of IoT and connected devices in future occupant spaces will evolve the occupant experience beyond improved energy-saving measures. IoT enables managers to control the built environment from one centralized location and give managers deep insights into the operational performance of every physical asset in the building portfolio. This means that managers will have the ability to truly optimize all facility functions to the highest degree.
IoT has simplified the management of multiple aspects of building facilities. Systems can be controlled and monitored on a single platform such as a web application or a mobile app. The single platform makes a huge difference in a company’s bottom line and also to the environment because it makes facilities management far more efficient.
Conclusion
We predict that in the coming years the Facility Management industry will experience a major digital transformation. By taking advantage of optimization solutions that have expanded to also focus on enhanced asset performance and maintenance management, your facilities team can save money, lower risk and improve efficiency.
Read our guide to the facility optimization revolution.
Organizations with complex operations that seek to future-proof their building system and capital investments should employ a facility optimization strategy powered by innovative facility management software such as FOUNDATION. From procurement to facility condition assessments to facility management and through to capital planning, Intellis's solutions bring best-in-class engineering efficiency to the modern built environment.
Schedule a demo with our team of experts to learn more about how we can help your organization implement tools that will improve efficiency, mitigate risk and increase ROI.
