How Smart Building Technology Improves Building Maintenance/Functionality and Tenant Experience

Every facilities professional knows maintenance is important to keep building systems and equipment functional. But with budgets and limited staff, it can be difficult to manage and maintain a commercial building effectively. This of course, is unless you learn to leverage technology to optimize your building functionality. If done effectively, it will lead to better outcomes for both the building management team and the tenants of the building.

Any business can save 12-18% by investing in preventive instead of reactive maintenance. Smart Building technology is a crucial part to a healthy preventative maintenance plan. Companies like Asset Mapping are doing a great job on this. Asset Mapping allows users to remotely view all aspects of their building and building’s health in real-time; from air quality to operating system efficiency. They offer you the freedom to give your team different levels of access to equipment data and empower them with the information they need to become pro-active to problems. Without needing to replace existing hardware, you can easily map, monitor and measure the things that matter to you and receive notifications before issues occur. Technology systems like this that are constantly monitoring save commercial building operators time and money when it comes to maintenance. It also prevents larger building issues, meaning less problems and headaches for tenants, as major building functions they rely on tend to stay operational.

Another key segment in building maintenance is risk management. This is crucial to building managers, but is also vital to the building insurer, as it is a major part of the insurance profile of a commercial building. Having a product that works to help building managers constantly monitor their risk, while providing insurers a quick overview of a buildings overall risk, is truly a valuable tool in todays landscape. Companies like Shepherd Network have found a niche in today’s market doing exactly that. Their system is set up to track the operating performance of assets, systems & sites as well as the response times of maintenance teams to critical alerts. Typically, they monitor boilers, pumps, electricity consumption, water pressure and humidity using data feeds from existing SCADA or BMS. All of these data is analyzed and then is used to create a Risk Scorecard. The Risk Scorecard is updated in real-time and delivered monthly by PDF to client property managers and underwriters. It provides a simple and powerful way to track whether sites and systems are experiencing issues, if the number of issues is increasing or decreasing month on month, and how rapidly remedial services are responding to them. Think of it as a risk ‘hygiene score’ for your building, that allows key players to view property portfolio risks at high-level and in real-time while being able to focus in on exactly which systems and sites are causing the issues. This information drives better resource utilization, risk management and maintenance expenditure. Smart Building technology like this is crucial for fostering a healthy connection to building managers and their insurers.

Everything above is why Upward Labs has created a Smart Building specific incubation program. We want to help nurture the next wave of innovation in this industry by providing first-rate resources to startups that are working hard to make a difference for senior citizens. By offering knowledgeable mentors, pilot programs and so much more, we believe that the future of this industry will be happening right in our space in downtown Hartford, Connecticut.

For more info, check out: https://www.moveupward.city/smart-buildings-lab