Taking Buildings from Smart to Smarter

Buildings today continue to operate as complex machines, heavy on investment, assets, people and energy. While time is ripe for infusing actionable intelligence into facilities and building management, actionable intelligence is hinged on tracking and monitoring efficiency: if you cannot measure, you cannot improve. This means looking at IoT & AI based technologies as enablers of efficiency in building operations across the three pillars: workforce, assets and energy. Software-led technologies are enabling transformative efficiencies through a unified approach of facilities and sustainability to help buildings leapfrog from smart to smarter.

Research indicates that an inefficiently monitored building incurs 30% more on energy costs and 15% more on maintenance expense. Imagine this in a single building scenario, where energy expenses amount to Rs. 3.5 crores, and multiply this across a portfolio of buildings. The loss due to inefficiencies can be staggering. With 70% of the millennial workforce wanting to be in a smart office in the next 5 years – and a whopping 72% of CREs ill equipped to have their departments deliver positive portfolio performance, the scenario makes a strong case for building management solutions that balance environmental consciousness and the inhabitant’s experiential comfort, with the buildings ROI for CRE’s.

So how can buildings achieve this balance?

The answer might lie in harnessing IoT and AI technologies to enable efficient and sustainable building management that deliver significant savings.

The three-pronged approach to attaining sustainable and efficient buildings

Efficiency, on the other hand, finds its roots in tracking, data analytics and proactive maintenance of the building, all in real-time. For facility managers and building owners this means:

• Tracking of maintenance and workforce efficiency – The workforce is an integral part of building maintenance and perhaps one of the critical areas of focus for active monitoring. A solution that uses IoT and Machine Learning provides contextual and real-time maintenance management and creates a smarter workforce that can take a pre-emptive approach to problem solving, as opposed to the traditional ‘fire-fighting’ Using meaningful insights to predictively reduce or circumvent issues and downtime of assets, creates significant efficiencies in the workforce performance as well as improved ROI.

• Tracking of water consumption and energy efficiency – Schematics already available from the existing technology installed within building structures houses mines of data, useful for curbing wastages and reducing the building’s carbon footprints. Proactively tracking water and energy usage patterns with a focus on highlighting unusual surges in usage can have a profound impact on the building’s sustainability efforts.

• Tracking of electro-mechanical asset efficiency – Maintenance of HVAC’s, power control, and elevators to name a few, all fall under the broader umbrella of operational dependent efficiencies with a direct impact on the cost efficiency of a building. For example, in the case of an HVAC continuously running at 19 degrees Celsius rather than the recommended 24 causes significant impact on cost, asset health and overall productivity of building inhabitants. Using current technology in a building management suite that combines real-time energy management and condition monitoring will empower facility teams to not only monitor and analyse consumption but also detect and act on asset performance – drastically improving the asset lifecycle.

IoT and ML-driven facilities management for real-time building performance

In the current scenario, heavy reliance on multiple vendors, providers, and standalone solution offerings, create information siloes that are not being effectively harnessed. The existing ‘smart’ facilities are limited in analytic capabilities and find it difficult to support mobile, real-time analysis, and across distributed portfolio.

What is needed is a software-led technology that can integrate with these systems, and unify data across the systems, to deliver optimum building management. IoT and Machine Learning technology are the next-gen building management systems, with the potential to leverage existing data to run buildings efficiently and centrally.

The future is now

For buildings to transcend into valued-contributors to environmental sustainability as well as become efficient profit centres for CRE’s and FM’s, the highly fragmented building environment, with several systems working in parallel and rarely in tandem, demands integration. And a software-led approach harnessing IoT and ML technologies is the future of real-time building management.