Modern building management needs data to overcome complexity

Building Management for Peak Performance

Building management in large assets like casinos, airports and shopping centres is incredibly complex to operate at peak performance. When you walk through your local shopping centre, you’ll probably pass through areas that were built and added through almost every decade since the 1970s. There will be a combination of modern climate control systems and older equipment that have to work together to deliver a consistent experience for tenants and customers.

Back at head office, there will be people concerned with ensuring that environmental ratings are adhered to and maintained. They will want answers about Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) - a measure of the overall condition of the plant and equipment that is required for reporting on cost reduction targets and board reports.

While the building operations manager’s job has never been easy, it’s become increasingly complicated over recent years. As well as new and legacy systems for HVAC, lifts and lighting, today’s operations manager has to ensure that the defibrillators on each floor are correctly maintained. They are responsible for ensuring that everything runs smoothly during fire drills and terrorism evacuation exercises. And, since early 2020, they’ve needed to be across myriad new and changing obligations brought about by the pandemic.

Without the right tools the variety, volume and velocity of this workload is more than one person can manage. The good news is that all of those different systems do produce data that can be used. However, until recently that data was hard to access and could not be integrated to give operations managers a dashboard view of everything happening in the property they manage.

Workflow and collaboration is the key

When an issue in a building is identified, determining exactly what the root cause is and ensuring the right person is onsite to fix the problem is a challenge.

For example, CIM’s PEAK Platform was able to identify that the temperature in a restaurant, within the building, was uncomfortable for patrons. The operation manager’s dashboard alerted them to the issue. A person was dispatched to the location of the problem and they found a badly clogged return air duct filter. A photo of the duct was taken and added to the report in PEAK, and dispatched to the cleaning crew to clean the filter.

At another site, a chiller was found to be not operating optimally and a water leak was detected. With monitoring in place,  the PEAK Platform told the operations manager that there was an issue with a water pump. They were able to dispatch the right person to repair the pump rather than having to guess whether they needed a plumber, electrician or engineer.

The PEAK Platform uses data intelligently to ensure that the right diagnosis is made as quickly as possible and then enables workflow, that can be used on almost any device, to send the right information to the right person at the right time. This takes the guesswork out of diagnosing issues so they can be resolved faster and at a lower cost.

Saving on capital works

When an operations manager is armed with accurate data, they can make better decisions about what equipment is being fully utilised and which equipment should be replaced.

By having a real-time view of how the plant and equipment in a building, or a portfolio of properties, operations managers can answer questions about LCA. And they can make more informed decisions around capital expenditure. For example, an older piece of equipment might seem to be a good candidate for replacement but if it has been underused, then it may still have years of service ahead of it.

Decisions can be made with real data and not gut feel.

The PEAK Platform takes the guesswork out of managing complex buildings and enables collaboration between all the parties involved in ensuring building operations are optimised. PEAK was created by a team of building, high ended manufacturing, software development and user experience experts. It’s designed to give stakeholders the information they need, when they need it.

For more information on how data can remove the complexity of operating buildings at their PEAK performance, get in touch with us today.