Facilities Management to benefit from IoT and AI

Experts say IoT and AI led facilities allow a minimum of 30% of sustainability savings, increasing asset lifecycle by 20-25% and creating a smarter workforce.

With rapidly changing technology scenarios and adoption of fast evolving technology, industry is bracing itself for a disruptive transformation by 2022.

By all accounts, IoT and AI driven innovative technologies will be the key solutions to offer real-time data and insight to make better business decisions.

A recent analysis report by Verdantix, a leading global research consultancy specializing in energy, real estate, facilities and maintenance, estimates that the global market for software and related IT services in buildings is currently estimated at $8 billion, and is expected to reach $12 billion by 2022. The global annual spend on facilities services stands at close to $1+ trillion dollars today, with the spend on buildings energy management almost close to that number.

This, for the sector that is one of the last adopters of IT – technology. Steered by hardware and good old experience, the facilities management sector has seen very little change over the years, much slower than other sectors at any rate. Globally, the FM industry is now on the threshold of advanced technology adoption. The evolution is needed, to meet the changing expectations of customers. Competitive times are demanding a shift from traditional, tactical facilities management towards a smarter, predictive facilities experience.

Over the last few years, the potential of software-led models to disrupt Facility management industry and provide large-scale efficiencies, has come to fore. With increasing commercial real-estate portfolios, it is time for facility managers to aim for better economies of scale. Apparently, a single oversight on just one part of the portfolio could result in an increase in operational costs by almost 15%. To meet the needs of the fast evolving industry, hardware-centric solutions may not be enough, since they are capital-intensive nature and in most cases, cannot scale as much or as fast.

What is needed is an IoT-driven edge technology to connect and unify all multi-vendor building automation and management systems centrally onto the cloud. ML can then predictively detect equipment fault and anomalies in performance and diagnoses the root cause of the effect, integrating corrective actions and creating an automated escalation mechanism with a prescriptive AI-driven recommendation on the issue. Thus, the three technologies can be used to unify people, process, and machine performance in real-time across a portfolio of buildings – eliminating the spend on multiple tools and avoiding the complexities associated with it. An intelligent a software-driven solution that aligns the asset-intensive buildings ecosystems can support property owners and facility managers, to achieve real-time operational efficiency and sustainability.

The biggest gains is in utilizing technology to centralize and consolidate operational data from multiple BAS and control systems is that it enables effective cross-utilization of asset performance with real-time maintenance management. And with a large set of data patterns to train on, these applications can produce pretty efficient predictive downtime models.