Every day, buildings generate new data that can be used by owners, managers and operators for a new paradigm of facility management with greater awareness and insight to significantly reduce costs and improve performance. Today’s data, properly organized and harnessed, can show aspects of your building portfolio that you could never see before. This dramatic change in visibility is like viewing the night sky with a powerful telescope instead of just looking up at the stars with the naked eye. This metaphor is useful in realizing the relationships of things within the universe of our buildings, and understanding their interrelated cause and effect. We are certain to unmask and discover new correlations of events by more powerful and measurable associations. The expanded view provided by new data reveals a completely different understanding of how buildings are working—or not working—with new awareness into the origins of issues and problems, enabling new knowledge that leads to improved operational methods and design standards. Whether your responsibilities for decisions regarding buildings are in executive administration, finance, portfolio management, operations, or facility planning and design, you will benefit from new and better views of information derived from data aggregation and analytics. Through the more powerful lens of data, you will never see your enterprise building portfolio in the same way.
Facility industry challenges persist. Organizations continue to be required to do much more using less money. Facilities management is no exception. There are considerable challenges embedded in existing facility industry practices that limit improvements. New methods are necessary. The emerging methodology is data analytics—seeing new information and new patterns in new time frames for new outcomes. It is now possible to measure, sense and see the exact condition of practically everything in near real-time. Now people, buildings, campuses and even entire cities are able to operate and interact in entirely new and different ways with better, more productive outcomes. The key point is that big data and analytics, when harnessed, become the new method for decision making and are the future of process improvement.
Buildings are expensive to own and operate. Facilities operations, management and capital planning together are a major cost center for most organizations, after payroll. Operational costs represent the major percentage of lifecycle costs for building owners, and those costs are growing, often unpredictably. Budget volatility is damaging to enterprise operations, especially from the fixed assets that are a key strategic asset of every enterprise. Making your portfolio of buildings smarter with enterprise-wide data awareness across functional roles can be your key tool for new cost savings, efficiencies and best practices. Utilizing data to lower operational and maintenance costs and reduce excess or inefficient space has a dramatic positive effect on enterprise budgets. In fact, according to the Builders’ Association, operation costs account for 71 percent of the total costs of a building’s ownership.1 Therefore, it is of significant value to integrate new analytics of building data with facilities planning and maintenance to optimize building performance, as well as the work effort necessary to keep buildings in optimum state of repair and occupancy. Because the costs are routinely recurring, it only takes a small percentage of improvement to harvest significant value in time, money and performance both annually and over the total life cycle of facilities.