Meeting the data and business process challenges posed by complex facilities is no easy task. With comprehensive solutions for data control, analysis and interpretation, you can achieve significant improvements in financial, environmental and operational outcomes:

• Optimize facility performance and reduce operating costs across an entire portfolio of buildings.
• Reduce the risk of failure of mission-critical systems.
• Simplify supply chain management for facility operations and maintenance.
• Coordinate functional roles of facility and process management with executive initiatives.
• Apply technologies for facilities systems and practices.
• Coordinate strategies and tactical operations across the full range of facility and portfolio management functions.
• Improve cost control by aligning space inventory with demand.
• Mitigate risk in the face of volatility and constant change.

The shift in the control of information from and about buildings is the foundational root benefit that underlies all these quantitative and qualitative management benefits. When you control the data, you can have greater confidence in your decisions and actions based on that data. You can harness information more reliably for improved business intelligence and better process control. Adopting a data-centric approach enables real and essential changes in operations because you have the big data picture to track the cascading effects of change.

For example, you can improve maintenance operations for faster, better and less expensive maintenance to keep facilities on line more reliably with higher performance:

• Shift from calendar-based maintenance to real-time-condition and predictive maintenance: Calendar-based maintenance does not address the anomalies that occur between timed maintenance cycles, which can result in direct or cascading degradation of facility performance and wasted money until the next maintenance cycle. Advanced analytics correlate operating conditions to give you advance warning of failures through trending, and enable the team to apply predictive corrective action.
• Improvements in maintenance supply chain management: Real-time condition assessments identify operating anomalies as they occur, and help maintenance teams ready resources to address anomalies when they occur. By identifying more precisely what needs repair, it is easier for you to manage the supply chain for replacement parts.
• Prioritized maintenance actions based on alerts with the highest consequences: Facilities operations teams are faced daily with hundreds of competing priorities for maintenance. Analytics use automated and managed criteria of conditional assessments to help facility teams prioritize corrective actions. Criteria for prioritization are determined by the facility teams, and are typically based on system criticality or cost.
• Event correlation for reduced work order hours: Analytics can employ event correlation algorithms to help you identify the root cause of a cascading failure. Identifying the cause saves significant time in maintenance diagnostics and saves considerable cost in unnecessary repair or replacement of components. In addition, root-cause analysis extends the longevity of system components that might be overworked to compensate for suboptimal performance of upstream components.
• Service call coordination for reduced maintenance overhead: Analytics can help aggregate work orders to enable teams to batch service requests by location, engineering discipline, skill set, contract type and warranty coverage. The benefit is fulfilling the most service tasks with the lowest cost for travel, service visits and other maintenance logistics.

These examples illustrate the value you can harvest by applying data analytics outside of its basic application to monitor or control systems and equipment. When IBM implemented analytics in our facilities, the initial site realized a 16 percent reduction in work orders and a 39 percent reduction in hours per work order for a net reduction in total work order hours of 49 percent in the fist year for the systems monitored. For the same systems, addressing faults when they occurred reduced energy consumption 12 percent with similar annual savings in the following years. As the application of analytics to additional systems and sites continues, savings are similar to date for 28 sites with 2,500 monitored assets.