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Changing Everything: The Power of Data Analytics in Building Management
Presented by IBM
How agencies can take advantage of facilities data to become holistically more efficient
Facilities managers in state and local government are at an important juncture: ignore building data or embrace it.
Tasked with balancing the multitude of vital, interwoven factors that constitute a building’s operations, inefficiencies are bound to arise that aren’t always visible to the naked eye.
But through the lens of data analytics, agencies can identify those inefficiencies and completely turn them around. Among a long list of other benefits, analytics can help facilities VPs and managers improve efficiency, reduce energy footprints, identify faults and ultimately plan better for the future.
There’s never been a more appropriate time for stakeholders to start looking critically at — and taking advantage of — the data their operations generate. As the power of analytics tools grows, the barriers to accessing them are receding.
For example, the IBM Smarter Buildings solution resides in the cloud, which makes it easy to access and implement. And the application of analytics has a rapid time to value, providing new insights almost immediately and most typically from existing data sources.
The benefits of better analytics start with allowing facilities managers to pinpoint opportunities they hadn’t yet seen. For too long, facility data has rested in siloes, dormant and divided. Metrics for things like lighting, HVAC systems and even foot traffic across different spatial regions were at best informative when viewed in isolation; at worst, they were meaningless due to a lack of context.
Now, with the right tools, facilities managers can normalize those data sets and compare them to one another, allowing them to spot operational waste and redundant spending — which is especially critical in state and local government.
According to the Builders’ Association, operations account for 71 percent of the total costs of a building’s ownership. Viewing lighting data alongside occupancy data, for instance, can uncover new and unique areas for making those operational costs more worthwhile.
This cost efficiency is especially attractive in light of the estimation that 50 percent of the electricity usage in the average building goes to waste. Analytics can help trim state and local budgets while shrinking carbon footprints as well.
But despite these clear advantages, most facilities managers aren’t taking advantage of their data as aggressively as they should be.
To drive enterprise-wide change guided by data, leaders should start bringing disparate data stacks together and analyzing them against key performance indicators. At the federal level, the General Services Administration realized value from analytics by normalizing the data from all of its buildings, assets and control types across the country. In doing so, GSA dramatically cut its annual emissions and spending.
The broader the range of data that facilities managers bring into the analytics mix, the more powerful the outcome. Analytics can even extend beyond real-time optimization and start to predict outcomes and drive decision-making success in the future.
Getting started is simple with subscription services, and solutions can often be supported out of savings produced from the operational budget — thus eliminating large investments in upfront capital.
Download this white paper from IBM to dive more deeply into the transformative power of analytics for state and local government building owners, operators and facilities managers as well as other stakeholders.
This content is made possible by our sponsor. The editorial staff of Route Fifty was not involved in its preparation.