The How-to Guide on Preventive Maintenance for Facilities Managers

How does digital transformation provide preventive maintenance?

When it comes to the comfort of tenants and the other occupants of a building, the buck stops with the facilities manager. Let's break down how digital transformation can assist in preventive maintenance.

Charged with ensuring the comfort and safety of everyone in a large building, the facilities manager needs to ensure that everything from HVAC and elevators through to emergency lighting and defibrillators are working at their peak operational performance.

The challenge is that the best facilities managers are those that are highly engaged with their clients. As customer service superstars, they have highly developed skills when it comes to communicating, showing empathy and listening to the needs of clients. But they also need strong technical skills to understand what to do when a problem is detected. And finding facility managers that are ‘people people’ with highly developed technical knowledge is exceedingly difficult.

When a problem is detected, such as part of a shopping centre being too hot or too cold, the facilities manager typically contacts an engineer or technician who comes out to the site. That expert makes an assessment based on a combination of experience, observation and instinct which the facilities manager may find very difficult to understand or evaluate.

This is because there is a lack of transparency in the exact root cause of the issue. Or, there was a lack of transparency. CIM’s PEAK Platform offers preventive maintenance via digital transformation. It extracts data from plant and equipment, pulls it together into a usable form and delivers insights to the facilities manager. Facilities managers no longer need to rely on what service technicians tell them, they have quantifiable intelligence on the root cause of the fault or problem.

Plant and equipment that maintains occupant comfort and safety can provide a wealth of useful data in the detection of issues before they become faults. With modern building management tools, this information assists with the diagnosis of breakdowns and the detection of misconfigurations. However, until now, that data was hard to access and aggregate into a single platform to extract rich insights.

CIM’s PEAK Platform makes the opaque clear by liberating that data. Traditionally, this data has been traditionally locked away and inaccessible for facilities managers. By applying advanced analytics, it's possible to take all that data and present it in a form that gives it context and meaning, thus facilitating preventive maintenance.

What does preventive maintenance look like?

A facilities manager can receive an alert to a potential issue on their smartphone, tablet or computer. From that alert, they can look at the data in a way that is actionable and they can engage with technical experts. The insights not only pinpoint exactly what and where the problem is, but also alert them to potential solutions, taking the guesswork and reliance on third-party assessments out of the equation. The facilities manager is empowered to do their job, in a way never before possible without digital transformation.

For facilities managers, the complexity of the engineering and data is suddenly streamlined, highly accessible and gives a roadmap on which steps to take to rectify faults and prevent future issues before they even occur.

By investing in technology and digitising the fault detection process Melbourne Museum was able to anticipate the unexpected, deliver significant operational cost savings, ensure the comfort of patrons and the longevity of the rare and valuable items it houses. The PEAK Platform was able to detect almost 120 faults at the Museum. Resolving these issues not only protected the valuable assets and assured the comfort of patrons but also saved the Melbourne Museum over $160,000 on its annual energy bills.

Facilities managers need the complex made simple - to identify issues and get them resolved quickly and cost-effectively. They don't want to do the engineering work but they do need to be armed with information that is useful to them. While cost savings are important, facilities managers must ensure tenant and patron comfort and safety.

When they have access to timely data in a form that gives them insight, they can better engage with engineers and technicians and ensure their clients receive the best possible service. The result is dramatic cost savings, enhanced machine and plant performance and reduced emissions - ultimately translating into an improved bottom line for business.

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CIM's PEAK Platform is a best-in-class building analytics and property operations software, improving efficiency, sustainability, and tenant comfort across property portfolios. Discover more by watching a demo.