Do you have a building management strategy to help you optimize facility operations? Excellent facility management takes more than being clean and organized. You need a detailed strategy to ensure smooth operations without increasing the costs. Your prime goal as a facility manager is to keep your property occupants safe and comfortable.
To make their experiences better, you need a strategy that can help you observe the best building management practices. This article explains how having an effective facility management strategy can enhance operations.
What is Building Management? – An Overview
Building management is the supervision of operations within a property to scrutinize performance and spot areas requiring urgent maintenance. A building manager has to control everything that boosts the occupant’s safety and comfort.
They must create a safe, efficient, and functional building environment for everybody. This is where an effective building management strategy comes into play. It entails reactive and proactive actions to help address emerging issues and future equipment upgrades.
Effective Building Management Strategy for Ensuring Maintenance Best Practices
A reliable building management strategy should let you follow the best practices for property maintenance. It should incorporate a proactive tactic to prevent regular downtimes and expensive repairs. Your strategy should help you follow these maintenance best practices:
- Perform Preventive Maintenance – One way to promote operations within the facility you manage is to do preventive maintenance. During preventative maintenance, you will assess the core building systems for mechanical issues. These include your HVAC, electrical equipment, water pumps, security appliances, and elevators. This preventive tactic will allow you to address mild wear and tear that may worsen later, if left unattended. Preventive maintenance is a suitable way to enhance the lifespan of core systems, increase their energy efficiency, and reduce the likelihood of sudden failure.
- Inspecting and Auditing Systems – This includes regular inspections and assessments of building systems and infrastructure to spot problems. The inspection and auditing process uncovers compliance issues that may attract the local building authorities. By doing routine property inspections and evaluations, you can avoid unnecessary penalties and operational downtimes.
- Merging Your Vendors – A facility manager deals with different vendors to obtain all the necessary services. Without a good building management strategy, they may find the process of managing many vendors laborious and inefficient. You can consolidate vendors to create a small list of suppliers who can tackle all your services. Vendor consolidation makes communication easier, reduces prices, and enhances accountability.
Creating an Affordable Facility Management Strategy
To manage your building more effectively, try to lower the costs and save money. Here is how a building management strategy can lower your expenses without affecting facility operations:
- Intentional Facility Maintenance – If you want to work within your budget or lower it, try preventive maintenance. By intentionally maintaining your facility, you can avoid sudden equipment failures that lead to unforeseen downtimes and expensive repairs. It will also help you keep your core systems updated and functional, which will lower your overall operation costs over time.
- Invest in energy-efficient Building Systems – Having the best building management strategy is useless if you install low-quality systems that consume a lot of energy. These systems will increase your utility bills and make your building less sustainable. On the other hand, if you invest in energy-saving core systems, you will create a more energy-efficient and sustainable building. If you use fluorescent or incandescent lighting, upgrade it to LED to reduce your energy costs. Additionally, install a high-quality HVAC system that consumes less energy to heat, cool, and ventilate a property or introduce energy-efficient thermostats.
- Adopt Sustainable and Eco-friendly Practices – A reliable building management strategy should include eco-friendly measures that improve a building’s sustainability score. Adopt environmentally friendly practices such as recycling dirty water, installing solar panels, planting trees and lawns, and adopting responsible waste management methods. These actions will not only promote environmental conservation but also attract tenants who care about sustainability.
Apply AI for Operational Efficiency in Your Buildings
AI plays a transformative role by improving how we use a building management system to monitor and control properties. With an AI building management strategy, you achieve these goals:
- Facilitates Preventive Maintenance – It is difficult to identify operational issues manually, warranting for an advanced tool such as the AI. This advanced technology can analyze your sensor data in real-time. It can identify early signs of equipment failure or reduced performance. By releasing valuable insights continuously, AI can trigger the BMS to generate maintenance requests before the problems worsen. As AI corrects more data, its machine learning algorithms will create more realistic and reliable predictions. This will reduce guest work and allow you to schedule maintenance services more effectively.
- Enhances Traditional BMS – A building management system facilitates the work of a facility manager by centralizing monitoring and control functions. However, the traditional BMS lacks the automation capability that allows instant adjustment of the core building systems based on tenant occupancy patterns, energy demands, and other forecasts. The incorporation of artificial intelligence into a business management strategy introduces algorithms that analyze data patterns more accurately, improving the operations of the traditional building management systems.
- Saves Money – Artificial Intelligence optimizes energy consumption by triggering alerts before issues worsen. The AI contributes to the long-term cost-savings goal by automating labor-intensive manual tasks, preventing machine downtime, and enhancing asset utilization. Thus, AI can improve your ROI by reducing overall overheads over time.
Integrating Internet of Things
Another way to improve your building management strategy is to integrate the Internet of Things into your BMS. IoT can enhance your building management approach by introducing sensors that collect a wide assortment of data, including temperature, air conditioning, and humidity.
Since IoT connects to the internet, it delivers data insights into the BMS instantaneously. IoT sensors save energy by automatically turning off the lights when tenants leave.
These sensors can allow the HVAC equipment to automatically adjust itself when the environmental conditions are no longer comfortable for occupants. They can boost building security by reporting breaches before they trigger a cyber-attack. IoT sensors improve visibility, enabling BMS to respond to issues fast and increase comfort.
Cloud Computing
Another way to make facility operations more efficient is by embracing a cloud building management strategy. If you have properties in many locations, you can manage them from a central point by introducing a cloud-based BMS. This platform can offer scalability if you get more facilities to manage.
It can also provide remote monitoring, allowing you to observe and control the core systems of each building without physically walking inside. A cloud-based building maintenance management system allows you to get services from different third-party vendors. While you may worry about cyber-threats when running a cloud-based BMS, its benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
What are the Benefits of Having an Effective BMS Strategy?
An effective building management strategy offers these advantages:
- Saves energy – An optimized BMS allows energy equipment to run only when necessary.
- Reduces Operating Expenses – AI promotes predictive analytics and preventive maintenance. It minimizes manual intervention, which reduces utility costs.
- Prolongs Equipment Life – Early detection and correction of equipment anomalies helps to prolong its lifespan.
- Ensures Compliance and Sustainability – A building management strategy that promotes sustainability allows core systems to lower their carbon footprint. Facility managers comply well with local building codes when they make their systems more sustainable and eco-friendly.
- Tenant Comfort – Efficient building systems relying on an optimized BMS improve the quality of life for occupants.
Conclusion
Do you plan to improve facility operations, but do not know how? What you need is a building management strategy that works. Ensure your strategy incorporates cost-reducing measures, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and cloud computing. If you optimize your BMS, your facility will operate more smoothly, reducing downtime and increasing occupants’ comfort.
