The Role that Technology Plays in Advancing the Facility Management Industry
When it comes to maintaining your facility, the recent advancements in the world of technology has actually made great strides. No matter how technologically advanced your facility is, you always need to be updated on the recent technological developments in the sector of facility management. Even though this sector is advancing every single day, there are a lot of facility management organizations who even today rely on the traditional methods of managing maintaining facilities. As the sector continues to evolve and smart buildings take control over the traditional establishments of brick and mortar, it is important that the facility management sector as a whole embrace the change.
Let us take a look at the biggest technological innovations that the facility management sector has seen in tie recent past:
BIM in facility management: Building Information Modeling, commonly known as BIM is a popular tool that architects and contractors use to scale and develop various virtual models of facilities. With the help of BIM, contractors and facility owners get a complete visual model of their entire property. Though this is not an entirely new technology, it is gradually becoming a commonplace in the facility management sector. The power of these tools is gradually being recognized for data accessibility and timely project delivery. When this tool is integrated with the already existing work order programs or a facility management software, facility managers are powered with an enhanced ability to retrieve floor plans, asset information and O&M manuals. Though it is still in its infancy, companies are gradually recognizing the significance of collaboration and communication between facilities and building teams with the help of this visual modeling.
The Internet of Things (IoT in facility management): IoT generally refers to the network of accessible devices that is used by your facility. This technology relies on the tools like sensors, actuators, thermostats and the like in order to evaluate data and minimize the amount of energy that is used for each task. Each of these sensor or device picks up data on a building to better inform any facility team of the current temperature, sound levels and light vibrations in different areas of the building. The IoT is a lot like the human body. The better the communication between different parts of your body, the better will you your cohesive functionality be. By utilizing the IoT systems correctly, facilities teams can reduce the energy bills and provide an insight to the required data that is necessary to keep the residents of a facility happy and satisfied. A current challenge with this type of technology is that connectivity can be fairly costly to set up. If you do not have access to a common hub where devices will be integrated into, it will be impossible for you to aggregate all the facilities information into actionable metrics. However, this technology is continuing to develop and it will undoubtedly be an important part of the future smart buildings.
HVAC technology: when we talk of large facilities, the HVAC system proves to be a particularly expensive system to maintain. It is the advancement of technology and the implementation of different green ideas that have promoted the transformation of HVAC systems for the better. In order to be able to reduce the costs of cooling and heating of your facility and at the same time reducing the environment footprint, is surely a benefit for all. Advancements in the HVAC facility management systems and Building Automation Systems (BAS) have indeed come a long way in reducing facility management costs in different ways. These systems save facility managers some good dollars by notifying them promptly if any system in the facility is not functioning properly. These allows facility managers to avoid costly equipment failures by correcting them even before they occur. In the future, when these systems are integrated with a facility management software, they will be able to auto create and assign work orders to facilities team members depending on the type of asset and its location. However, the main challenge of implementing advanced HVAC and BAS technologies is cost and time. Therefore, before you go down the road and decide to implement a new BAS system, take your time and explore what your return on investment will be for a new system.
Facility management app: when you are in the need to access facilities information, you need to ensure that all this information is accurate, updated most importantly, is available instantly. By introducing a combination of contextual search, artificial intelligence and machine learning, a facility management app allows instant access to critical building and equipment information. By using optical character recognition, these apps extract information from old and faded building drawings absolutely accurately.
Therefore, the role of technology in facility management cannot be ignored. The earlier organizations embrace, the more efficiently will they be able to manage facilities.














