10 Ways Technology and Data Analytics Solve Top Commercial Facilities Management Problems

Improving building performance while being efficient and effective in the day-to-day comes with many challenges for a facility manager. Spread thin already and having to be more agile than ever in a post-Covid commercial environment where hybrid work schedules are the new normal, facility managers find themselves submerged in trying to get ahold of how to match their building management systems to energy demands that change daily. Leveraging evolving technology and real-time data analytics can ease the burden on an overstretched facilities management team, addressing some of the most common pre-COVID and post-COVID challenges.

Challenge: Siloed Systems

Your building can’t get smarter if it can’t integrate with other systems. To achieve this, there must be a common platform installed for all systems to communicate, such as BACnet. With a common communication platform, you get the flexibility you need to add systems to the building management network with a standard, open source-based and well-known protocol. Universally used and well-accepted mean less training time for your team and new hires because it is already widely used in building management.

Installation and implementation are typically easy, requiring only three wires to be connected. With one login to access information from all building systems, identifying issues and trends takes less time and effort.

Challenge: Utility Management

Managing utilities can eat up a large part of your work time and personal time. There can be a different dashboard for every system, the requirement to be onsite to solve issues or make changes, not to mention the burden of being on call resulting in lost family or free time. With a common communication platform, the network infrastructure from system integration, and software implemented to derive something meaningful from the data collected by the building systems, the possibilities open up. 

Through a graphical user interface on your computer, tablet, or other mobile device, you can run the building from a centralized access point, whether onsite or remotely, with essentially a point and click (or tap, depending on your device) to make programming changes to the system. You’ll have the ability to look at floor plans holistically and easily identify performance issues or opportunities for improvement. The system can be easily adapted to changing building and workspace uses. You gain more freedom by not being tethered to an office or building. Additionally, you could possibly eliminate an existing overnight shift with the ability to address performance issues without having to be in the building. 

Challenge: Occupant Comfort and Happiness

From aesthetics to lighting to temperature, and everything in between, a people-first approach to buildings promoting occupant comfort, health, and happiness, has taken hold in the workplace and facility managers should take note. Occupant comfort levels have a direct impact on productivity, employee retention and wellness. In the age of COVID-19, occupant comfort takes on a whole new meaning in consideration of stopping or mitigating the spread of infectious disease while returning to office spaces. 
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Rethinking the use of space in an office building and optimizing light, temperature, and air flow all contribute to making the time occupants spend in the building comfortable and enjoyable. In terms of lighting, tunable-white light, daylighting, and automated shades all have a role in occupant satisfaction. With lighting arguably being the most visible and universally used technology experience in a building, it is evolving to be much more than illumination, significantly contributing to comfort, safety, and happiness in a building. A networked lighting control system can serve as the backbone for a smart building, not only informing lighting and automated shades but HVAC, air quality, occupancy control, cleaning procedures, and aesthetics. Through open APIs, data the networked lighting control system collects through its sensors can be shared with third-party vendors to develop building solutions based on occupancy affecting occupant comfort.

Challenge: Substandard Data Management and Insights

With an integrated building management system, all the data collected can be overwhelming and difficult to make sense of it all. Being a facility manager means you need visibility to address building performance and information about areas that need attention or other services. While all this insight is great, and you can see what is happening in the building, interpreting all the data coming from networked lighting control sensors, for example, to identify trends and issues on your own is time consuming and difficult. You can get stuck in analysis paralysis, but the right software program can make sense of the data for you. Data doesn’t go to waste and action plans can be implemented, helping facility managers be efficient and effective. 

Challenge: Reactive Maintenance

Putting out proverbial fires when something goes awry with a building system like lights being left on or HVAC being triggered in an empty room to a malfunctioning sensor can be all too common for facility management teams. The connected building systems that help optimize comfort, health, and energy budget simultaneously gather data that can move building maintenance from reactive to proactive, and ultimately to predictive maintenance. Analyzing building data, tells you when something might break or need attention. In terms of a lighting control system, with data-driven services, the facilities management team can be supplied with hours on and predictive maintenance for luminaires or battery-operated devices. For example, after a certain number of hours on, a luminaire in a stairwell can be identified as needing to be changed prior to it failing. Similarly, with a battery-operated device, you can see the status of battery life and preemptively change the battery when it’s at a low level.
 

Challenge: Safety and Security of People and Systems

Always at the forefront of facility management, building security including access control and asset tracking are challenging in the best of times. Independent, disparate systems make it more so. New safety issues that simply weren’t even considered before COVID have topped the list of priorities: from reducing touchpoints at high-contact surfaces to reducing entry and exit points, but the safety priorities before COVID still remain.

Lighting controls integration with the security system can identify access control with the swipe of a badge, signaling lighting control along with other building systems, which addresses occupant comfort and safety as well as emergency response. Should a physical security breach happen, the security system alerts the lighting controls to turn lights on in the space, so personnel don’t have to search for switches, and conceivably enable security cameras to capture footage in the space.

Lighting sensor data in a networked lighting control system can be leveraged for broader application and integration with additional third-party APIs such as asset tracking. Asset tracking helps keep track of and secure equipment, electronics, machinery, or other valuable devices. In terms of safety of people in a post-COVID commercial office, the data collected by the sensors can also identify space occupancy and trends in use of different spaces, informing cleaning and sanitization protocols.

Challenge: Budgeting and Controlling Maintenance Costs

Budgeting and controlling costs are a constant challenge and more so in the hybrid work environments predominantly found in commercial workplaces today. Controlling costs and budgeting becomes easier with predicative maintenance implemented, analyzed building management system data, and optimized space utilization. Additionally, facilities managers gain real-time, utility-grade power monitoring with a networked lighting control system by measuring the energy consumption of every load on the network. This provides a level of precision so accurate that a utility company could use it for billing. Metering enables facility managers to track building power usage for lighting or other loads connected to the lighting control network and provide power measurement readings to the building management system or other building services via open APIs.

Challenge: Sustainability

Over the past decade-and-a-half corporate sustainability has picked up steam to become a business priority with much of the responsibility directed to facility management professionals. From figuring out how to sustainably operate an older facility with aging, disparate systems to working on new builds implementing smart technology that facilitate achieving sustainable goals and obtaining sustainability certifications. No matter the scenario, the goals remain the same: decrease water, energy and material use, reduce negative impact on the environment, and optimize the building environment for occupant health and well-being. 

Whether a retrofit or build-to-suit, a networked lighting controls system can help achieve sustainable goals related to energy conservation. Integrated with the building management system, the networked lighting sensors data can tell you where your building is wasting energy, identify equipment inefficiencies, when energy use increases, occupancy patterns, and more. Data-backed information can help identify sequence of operation changes and repair and replacement opportunities leading to a more sustainable building.

​​​​​​Challenge: Space Utilization

Office space utilization has typically meant ensuring enough space for all employees and all possible functions that need to take place in the building. However, COVID has disrupted commercial building occupation and function. In the past, office buildings were designed to meet every need. Acquiring more space was the solution. But now a transition is happening where companies and facility managers are questioning if they really need more space. Considering work environments post-COVID, optimizing space is becoming more important. The challenge on the horizon will be determining what is the least amount of space a company’s employees need to work. 

With a networked lighting controls system, the sensors collect data that can show trends in space usage and allow facilities management to easily change layout based on the needs of the building. Software programs designed to analyze and interpret data the sensors gather can help with identifying under-used or unoccupied spaces and at what times of day. Understanding these trends in behavior and utilization lead to improved employee experience and reducing costs.

Challenge: Vendor Support

Ultimately, you’re a jack of all trades and can do a lot on your own but trying to troubleshoot an issue on or make changes to a system you don’t fully understand, or you’re not fully acquainted with all its intricacies can be fruitless and frustrating. Vendors are experts on their systems. Whole service contracts give access to experts to assist with maintenance and repairs, essentially becoming an extension of your team and alleviating your team’s stress and headaches. If desired, vendors monitoring their system can identify when a system is about to have an issue via remote access and can likely solve the issue from offsite or lead you over the phone.

Investing in evolving technology creates opportunities for facilities management teams to deliver enhanced value, even with limited onsite people resources. New issues and challenges were presented to facilities management teams with the introduction of COVID-19 while still having to manage pre-COVID challenges. Leveraging these available tools and systems along with real-time data analytics eases the strain put on facilities management teams while solving many of the challenges faced daily in what has become an ever-changing commercial environment. 
 

References

Bagust, Paul. “How Will Proptech Drive a Step Change in Facilities Management?” RICS (blog), June 16, 2020. https://www.rics.org/north-america/news-insight/future-of-surveying/data-technology/how-will-proptech-drive-a-step-change-in-facilities-management/. 

Garra, Robert J. “Networked Lighting Controls.” Consulting - Specifying Engineer, April 8, 2021. https://www.csemag.com/articles/networked-lighting-controls/. 

Keller, Maura. “Understanding Access Control Challenges During the Pandemic.” Facilitiesnet.com (blog). FacilitiesNet, September 9, 2021. https://www.facilitiesnet.com/doorshardware/article/Understanding-Access-Control-Challenges-During-the-Pandemic--19379. 

“New White Paper Offers Actionable Insights on Workplace Well-Being.” Wellcertified.com (blog). Deloitte, January 20, 2022. https://resources.wellcertified.com/articles/new-white-paper-offers-actionable-insights-on-workplace-well-being/. 

ServiceChannel, Payal Srivastava, Payal Srivastava, and ServiceChannel. “6 Ways Facilities Managers Can Support Sustainable Facilities.” ServiceChannel, January 10, 2022. https://servicechannel.com/blog/6-ways-facilities-managers-support-sustainable-facilities/.