A Comprehensive Guide to Smart Building Facility Management

Though property owners and FMSPs understand the potential of smart buildings, facility management for these buildings can be a challenging task. 

While retrofitting old buildings with LED lighting, solar panels, and cool roofing might seem like a reliable solution to save energy and reach smart building maintenance goals, it takes a long time to show a return on investment (ROI) and requires new capital investment.

And the problem doesn't stop there. The current smart building facility management landscape does not offer visibility into the client portfolio. And deriving insights to identify gaps and opportunities and enabling data-driven decisions for energy efficiency is almost an impossible scenario. 

The real culprit? 

Fragmented solutions and struggling legacy systems that result in data silos and lack of visibility. This hampers data exchange and leads to confusion on prioritizing actions to achieve energy efficiency. 

Moreover, these systems often lack advanced data analytics features and capabilities needed to analyze real-time sensor data and uncover actionable insights. 

For instance, According to Facilio's State of Smart Buildings 2024 report:

• 87% of business leaders plan to invest in smart building technologies 
• 35.35% report integrating automation systems and sensors as a real challenge
• 34.43% say interoperability with legacy systems is their top roadblock to smart building tech adoption

So, what's the solution to overcome these pitfalls and streamline smart building facility management? 

You might need to rethink your approach and shift from point solutions and legacy systems to a single connected platform to optimize smart building facility operations and achieve significant ROI. 

Therefore, eliminating outdated technology and disparate systems and embracing a comprehensive solution will help leaders to achieve efficient smart building facility management and stay ahead of the competition. 

In this article, we’ll discuss smart building facility management in detail, their benefits for facility managers (FMs), and the factors driving their adoption. We’ll also explore practical and actionable ways to approach smart building facility management.

What is a smart building, and how does it work?

These technologies work together to reduce energy consumption, prevent asset downtime, save operational costs, enhance occupant comfort, and achieve sustainability goals. 

These buildings have integrated sub-systems, including heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), lighting, water meters, and security, all of which communicate with one another on a unified platform to monitor and analyze data.

By installing sensors onto core systems, they gather real-time data, analyze it using AI, and adjust settings to reduce energy consumption.

Different technologies used in smart buildings 

Internet of things 

IoT is a network of interrelated sensors and devices that help collect, exchange, and analyze equipment data. IoT helps facility managers gather real-time data to optimize maintenance operations in smart buildings. 

AI & ML algorithms

AI & ML algorithms for smart buildings seamlessly integrate with IoT sensors and other devices to analyze vast amounts of data and uncover patterns and trends in asset performance. 

Building automation systems 

BAS integrates and controls various building systems, such as HVAC, lighting, security, fire alarms, fire suppression, and plumbing systems in a centralized location. This helps facility managers manage different buildings across the portfolio using a single interface.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) 

BIM digitally represents the physical and functional characteristics of buildings, facilitating easy access for facility managers and technicians. Facility managers can access the centralized database to retrieve essential data needed to manage the lifecycle of assets. 

Here’s how a smart building facility management works:

1. Condition-based monitoring

At its core, CBM proposes a seemingly logical approach: leverage real-time data and sensors to monitor equipment health, intervening only when warning signs emerge. This stands in stark contrast to the archaic, calendar-driven maintenance regimes that still plague many facilities, leading to unnecessary downtime and skyrocketing costs.

But there's a catch—the sheer volume of data generated by CBM systems can overwhelm even the most seasoned technicians, raising questions about the feasibility of effective analysis and decision-making.

Furthermore, CBM's focus on individual equipment health can obscure the bigger picture. A facility is a complex ecosystem, where the failure of one component can trigger a cascade of problems.

CBM may prove to be a valuable tool in the fight for efficiency, but it's no substitute for sound engineering practices, experienced personnel, and a holistic approach to facility management.

But to truly harness its power, you need a solution that addresses the unique challenges of large, complex portfolios. 

Facilio's platform is designed to do just that.

Facilio equips you with the right data you need to focus on the assets for CBM strategy and curate your maintenance tasks. You can prevent potential failures and deliver high performing buildings to your clients. 

2. Predictive maintenance 

Unlike traditional maintenance practice that just focuses on fixing breaks using temporary quick-fixes, smart building facility management takes a proactive approach using predictive maintenance (PdM). 

Predictive maintenance leverages machine learning (ML), condition monitoring tools and advanced analytics to predict potential equipment failures and prevent unplanned downtime.

This helps you schedule maintenance tasks at the appropriate time (before failure occurs) to improve tenants’ comfort, extend asset's life cycle, and reduce maintenance costs across the client portfolio. 

But unleashing this level of potential from predictive maintenance requires a robust platform like Facilio. For instance, Facilio unifies all your disparate point solutions into a centralized platform to enable interoperability and facilitate real-time data analysis. 

AI-powered analytics in Facilio can analyze vast amounts of historical asset performance, maintenance histories and real-time data to spot patterns in failures and predict equipment behavior. This way, you can minimize disruptions and improve asset longevity for your clients. 

3. Remote asset monitoring and diagnostics

Another great example of smart building facility management is remote asset monitoring and management. 

Manual inspection of assets and equipment is often a time-consuming and error-prone process. On the other hand, remote asset monitoring provides a real-time solution to monitor and control assets from a centralized location.

Remote asset management uses IoT sensors and communication technologies to collect and analyze real-time equipment data, diagnose failures, and allocate resources to prevent asset issues before they escalate. 

For instance, Facilio's connected platform effortlessly integrates with IoT sensors, offering you with a comprehensive visibility into asset performance across clients’ multiple assets. 

You can swiftly identify asset failures, identify root causes, schedule work orders, and assign technicians to complete maintenance tasks—all in a remote location. The result? Improve asset reliability, reduce travel costs, enhance technician efficiency and enhance issue resolution time. 

4. Energy management and optimization

Smart building facility management overcomes a major challenge and helps business leaders’ in achieving their top priority—optimizing costs. 

But wondering how?

Energy management and optimization has an immense potential to reduce operating expenses and save costs in the real estate landscape. It also offers added benefits—environmental sustainability, improved brand reputation and operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance. 

Smart building facility management achieves this by implementing strategies to reduce energy waste, and enhance equipment performance and energy efficiency. This may include reducing energy consumption, implementing smart systems and renewable energy integration. 

However, it's critical to leverage a capable solution like Facilio’s energy management platform to maximize energy efficiency and simplify energy optimization process. 

Facilio's cloud-based software optimizes building energy consumption through effective techniques including real-time energy monitoring, automated fault detection and diagnostics, predictive maintenance, energy benchmarking and demand response management. 

This way, Facilio empowers you to effortlessly reduce energy wastage and carbon footprint, optimize systems and implement energy saving initiatives. You can also demonstrate your commitment towards sustainability and cost reduction and deliver high-quality results to real estate clients. 

5. Occupant experience and engagement 

Smart building facility management significantly enhances the occupant experience through smart technologies, personalized services and data-driven insights. This improves occupants’ safety, comfort and well-being and ensures a hassle-free experience for them. 

But without the right data, you may not be able to derive real-time insights to optimize asset performance according to the occupancy rate, and climatic conditions. Moreover, you need a unified occupant experience strategy in place to exceed tenant expectations and deliver unmatched experience. 

And, many platforms do not offer the features needed for occupants such as dedicated portal, push notifications and alerts, and chat and comment features. They also lack cutting edge technology like AI algorithms to detect asset deviations and improve tenant experience. 

Facilio overcomes these legacy solutions limitations and offers multiple channels for tenants—web, mobile, in-app, and cloud phone calls to raise service requests, track status and avail maintenance services. This streamlines communication and facilitates real-time feedback collection. 

In addition, with advanced analytical capabilities, you can analyze space utilization and historical data to create a more engaging environment, thereby improving occupant satisfaction and retention for clients. 

6. Data driven decision making 

Lastly, smart building facility management supports data driven decision making by utilizing data analytics and reporting to gain visibility into current facility performance, identify areas for improvement and plan about future operations.  

Facilio's platform offers robust reporting and analytical capabilities, providing you with actionable insights into asset performance, energy usage, maintenance costs, and occupant satisfaction. This data-driven approach helps you make informed decisions that drive efficiency and cost savings and showcase your irreplaceable value to clients.

That being said, these strategies are most effective when implemented in conjunction with each other. By leveraging Facilio's comprehensive platform, you can deliver a holistic, smart facility management approach that exceeds your client expectations and sets you apart from the competition. 

How can facility managers stand out from the crowd with smart technology? 

Here's how facility managers can make themselves competitive in the market by adopting the right technology for smart building facility management: 

1. Flexibility 

The right smart building platform offers the flexibility for facility managers to remotely monitor smart building maintenance operations through effective remote-monitoring capabilities. 

Earlier, facility managers had to conduct physical inspections on-site to perform maintenance tasks. This was because the systems were disparate and unable to communicate with each other, demanding individual monitoring to determine their condition. 

With a powerful smart building platform, you can remotely monitor various systems, including HVAC, refrigeration, lighting, access control, and security, and analyze real-time data on a centralized platform through sensors and devices. 

You can also make real-time adjustments, tweak setpoints, respond to emergencies, schedule maintenance tasks, create and track work orders, and collaborate with technicians and contractors from anywhere in the world. 

The result? Save time, improve facility management team efficiency and reduce errors. 

2. More proactive work 

Smart building technologies help facility managers shift from a reactive (fixing assets when they break) to a proactive approach for assets' optimal health. 

Through IoT sensors, you can continuously monitor asset conditions, detect faults, schedule maintenance tasks, and resolve issues before they lead to asset failure. 

This results in increased asset uptime, reduced operating expenses, and improved tenant experience, demonstrating your accountability, enhancing the client's trust, and securing more contracts. 

3. IoT-driven unified insights 

Another way IoT-led and AI-powered smart building facility management platforms make you deliver outstanding results to clients is by providing real-time insights to optimize maintenance operations. 

They collect equipment data, effectively analyze repair patterns, identify abnormalities, and alert technicians to mitigate issues before they escalate. 

Additionally, they help with benchmarking performance by analyzing what works for best-performing buildings and applying those learnings to optimize other properties in the portfolio. 

Now, let's see how shifting to a holistic approach, like using Facilio’s connected buildings platform, transforms property operations: 

Factors that drive the switch to smart building facility management 

Several critical factors are driving the adoption of smart building technologies. Let's use the retail industry as an example to explore these factors: 

1. Energy efficiency 

Supermarkets in the US use nearly 50 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year and spend more than $200,000 annually in energy costs, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Conducting an energy efficiency audit can help identify opportunities for improvement. IoT-led remote monitoring can track different types of equipment such as HVAC, lighting, and refrigeration across sites, assess energy usage patterns, identify anomalies, and assign maintenance tasks to prevent increased energy consumption. 

For instance, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), the average store can save 14% of its annual building energy consumption by installing smart technologies. Smart thermostats, lighting systems, refrigeration systems, and advanced rooftop unit controls offer significant energy savings for retail stores. 

Imagine daylight and occupancy sensors installed on all retail stores across the client portfolio. These sensors can efficiently track the availability of natural light and supermarket occupancy rates. 

With this data, the BMS can automatically turn off or dim lighting on low-occupancy floors. This prevents energy wastage, reduces utility bills, and supports sustainability efforts across multiple sites.

2. Better ROI 

Adopting smart buildings offers a better return on investment than traditional buildings. Initially, you will experience some immediate financial benefits: optimizing energy utilization leads to lower utility bills and reduced operational costs. 

Additionally, smart building operations offer intangible benefits such as enhanced employee well-being, improved productivity, brand reputation, and improved occupant comfort.

3. Real-time data and analytics

Smart building applications facilitate real-time data collection and analysis by gathering data from different sensors and transmitting it to a centralized management system. 

This real-time data gives complete visibility into the current condition of assets. Applying machine learning algorithms to this data detects anomalies and potential threats. 

For instance, smart systems efficiently detect refrigerant leaks by analyzing real-time data from refrigerant sensors and controllers. This helps retail stores fix the leaks on time, serving customers without interruptions and preventing additional repair costs. 

4. Regulatory compliance and sustainability goals 

Sustainability remains a top business goal due to regulatory pressures and inefficiencies. The Forrester and Johnson Controls 2023 survey report  of 1537 sustainability leaders uncovers the following insights: 

• Only 10% of leaders report that their systems and equipment are fully integrated, and it’s costing the other 90% time, people, and money
• 69% of leaders believe smart buildings are critical to helping their organization accelerate sustainability initiatives
• Just 19% of organizations use proprietary or custom-built tools, and this is due to the advanced integration capabilities of these platforms 

Failing to collect and integrate data hinders visibility into energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, eventually blocking the road to sustainability. 

However, smart building technologies overcome this challenge by creating a unified platform that empowers teams with the data and capabilities they need to reach net-zero goals. 

This approach enables organizations to adapt to changing regulatory standards, quantify progress, and unlock new opportunities to conserve and adjust systems to save energy across multiple sites.

5. Improved occupant comfort and productivity 

Ensuring a convenient, healthy, and attractive environment for enhancing occupant experience is critical for retail stores to stay competitive with online retailers. 

Optimal lighting, air quality, thermostats, and temperature conditions improve occupant comfort, helping retain employees and customers. 

For example, smart HVAC systems efficiently analyze air quality in retail stores to determine contamination levels and identify root causes such as poor ventilation and air filtration systems, bacterial growth, or air pollution from traffic and construction. 

They then resolve the issue by automatically scheduling maintenance tasks and assigning work orders to optimize HVAC systems. This prevents fatigue, allergies, and headaches for employees, ensuring high productivity and good health. 

6. Scalability and flexibility for future upgrades 

Another significant benefit that smart building systems provide is high scalability, which may not be possible with traditional systems. 

Whether expanding to new locations or increasing the number of assets, smart building systems can accommodate the growing volume while ensuring efficient maintenance operations across sites.

Imagine a platform that seamlessly integrates with third-party applications, adapts to changing industry regulations and customer demands, and provides customizable workflows and flexible reporting capabilities.

Such flexibility is possible with smart building facility management software, which can help you future-proof multi-site facility management. 

7. Enhanced security and safety measures 

75.89% of US facility managers report health and safety as an important issue for their facilities and operations. 

Smart building systems enhance the security of buildings by integrating sensor-based product tags, locked display cases, intrusion detection systems, access control systems, and surveillance cameras. 

These systems enhance physical, environmental, and cyber security by analyzing real-time data from devices and protecting this data with robust security measures. 

For instance, if an environmental threat arises in a retail store, smart building systems can analyze factors such as humidity, air quality, and temperature levels to anticipate potential hazards like fire or smoke. 

When anomalies are detected, the platform sends alerts to managers, enabling them to coordinate incident responses and evacuate occupants from the areas. 

The practical way to adopt smart building facility management 

Here's a practical way that you can follow to adopt smart buildings and deliver exceptional customer service to clients: 

1. Close existing gaps 

As the first step, you need to close existing gaps in the ongoing facility management processes by adopting a connected building platforms: 

• Bring together dispersed data into a single platform 

How can you leverage data and derive insights if the information is dispersed across different systems such as BAS, fault detection and diagnosis (FDD), computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) ERPs, sustainability suite, and computer-aided facility management (CaFM)? 

Gathering the required data manually to make data-driven decisions can tire employees, leading to delays, inefficiencies, and redundant work. 

The solution is a platform-driven approach that integrates different sources (BAS, BMS, and sensors) to consolidate data in a centralized system and unlock portfolio-level insights for efficient smart building facility management. 

It is the key to accumulating reliable information, optimizing facility management workflows, and achieving smart building goals. 

• Lack of awareness 

Switching to other isolated-point solutions for smart building facility management will not solve the problem; they will just increase risks and costs. Adopting a comprehensive solution such as a unified platform is  they way to manage multi-site facilities efficiently. 

• Say goodbye to legacy systems 

Legacy systems can only offer data storage; most operations are done outside this platform. As a result, they cannot meet the growing needs of smart building operations: efficiency, interoperability, visibility, insights, analytical capabilities  and more. 

Switching to a connected building operations platform that can centralize all smart building operations across the client portfolio using a single interface is essential. 

2. Choose digital retrofits over physical ones 

Replacing existing infrastructure with new physical systems can be expensive and time-consuming, whereas digital retrofitting expedites modernization without breaking the bank. 

Digital retrofitting uses a combination of IoT, AI, and ML models to digitize legacy systems, offering much better ROI than physical retrofits. It combines all disparate systems into a single platform to analyze data and offer exceptional insights into smart building operations. 

3. Pick the right technology 

An interoperable, IoT and AI-led platform connects multiple disjointed systems, consolidates data, and uncovers actionable insights. 

Here are some components that you shouldn't miss while choosing the best building management software: 

• Integration: The platform must seamlessly integrate with existing systems to unify data, derive meaningful insights, find opportunities, and streamline building operations
• Scalability: Choosing a scalable system that can handle thousands of assets across the portfolio is critical to achieving net-zero carbon energy usage and sustainability
• Cloud-based: Choosing a cloud-based platform to store huge volumes of asset data offers added benefits such as flexibility, high security, and easy access
• Technologies employed: Evaluate how the platform evolves over time to help facility managers make energy-efficient decisions. Although every platform claims to use AI, providing generic alerts regarding threats wastes occupant time and causes inefficiencies. 

The ideal smart building platform must use ML algorithms to adapt to evolving needs, learn from previous errors, and provide more accurate results to reduce energy consumption and support sustainability goals. 

Unlock the potential of smart buildings with Facilio's IoT-led platform 

With Facilio's IoT-led, cloud-based connected buildings platform, you can track the energy consumption across different buildings, identify cost and energy-saving opportunities, and streamline operations across the clients' portfolios through a single interface. 

The platform’s fault detection and diagnostics solution, powered by advanced machine learning algorithms, accurately detects equipment issues, sends alerts, and automatically resolves them. This helps optimize asset performance, achieve efficiency, and reduce downtime. 

The best part? Facilio requires only 1-2 months to turn around and implement changes, and you can get ROI within weeks of implementation. 

It seamlessly integrates with your existing systems, breaking down data silos and empowering operations and maintenance (O&M) teams with the data they need to enhance efficiency. 

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