Modern commercial buildings certainly have no shortage of data. With the proliferation of Building Automation Systems (BAS), IoT sensors, meters, lighting, and HVAC systems, today’s buildings generate millions of data points related to system performance. But more data doesn’t automatically deliver more value.
Building operators often find themselves data rich but insight poor. In fact, according to an Autodesk survey of facilities managers, 85% say they struggle to harness their data.¹ Confronted with a sea of information, how can facilities departments turn all this data into action to drive efficiencies, lower costs, extend equipment life, and improve operations?
Beyond simply accessing data, as a facilities manager, you must be able to understand what that data is telling you, know what you want to do with it, and integrate it into your workflows. The question is: how?
Start with the Outcomes, Not the Data
Before diving into a dashboard, it’s important to define what success looks like. What goals do you want to accomplish, and what do you want your data to reveal?
For instance, maybe you’re looking to reduce energy costs and peak demand. Have you been tasked with finding and eliminating energy waste? Do you need to meet energy efficiency targets and measure your progress? Or perhaps you’re looking to take a more proactive and predictive approach to maintenance. Are occupant comfort, safety, and satisfaction at the top of your list? Identifying and prioritizing specific goals allows you to map out a data strategy for achieving them.
It’s also critical to identify roles and responsibilities. Decide who owns the data, who reviews it, and who takes action based on what the data reveals. When everyone knows their role, building data can be sent to the right person in the right format to support faster decisions and better accountability.
Performing Data Hygiene
Along with identifying your goals and roles, you’ll need to evaluate the current state of your data. Is it incomplete, with major gaps? Is it disjointed and disparate? Are you struggling to keep your head above a sea of data, finding yourself in reactive mode, constantly putting out fires instead of planning ahead? You’re not alone.
Half of surveyed facility managers say that more than 10% of their time is wasted dealing with fragmented data, and 38% say they struggle with poor data exchange between systems.¹ You may be among them. Buildings generate huge amounts of data from many different sources. The resulting data silos can lead to inaccurate information, workflow inefficiencies, and missed opportunities.
Dealing with this data chaos will be key. As such, the next important step in harnessing your information will be to clean it up. Perform data hygiene to eliminate bad points, fill any gaps, standardize naming conventions, and normalize diverse datasets so you’re working with a single source of operational truth.
Normalizing data captured by various sensors and systems, such as energy usage, temperature readings, and occupancy, enables you to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. It also allows you to make decisions based on accurate information. Equally important is standardizing your data in a uniform format that ensures consistent units, naming conventions, and structure, eliminating errors and saving you countless hours of labor.
Giving Your Data Context
You’ll also want to give your data context to make it more understandable and usable. Add metatags that identify equipment type, location, schedules, and other key information so your team can quickly see what each data point represents and how to interpret it. When data is tagged consistently, facilities staff can spot patterns faster, compare performance across assets, and avoid confusion.
Unifying Your Data
There are advantages to unifying building system data into one database as well. This makes it easier and faster to see equipment, alarms, trends, schedules, maintenance histories, and more in one place instead of jumping between disconnected systems to chase down the information you need.
Centralizing your data can additionally reduce duplicate data entry and errors, allow for simplified data sharing, and support analytics. Studies also show that unifying data can result in up to a 30% reduction in energy usage by consolidating workflows.²
Beyond the Dashboard: Analytics Tied to Workflows
Which brings us to our next building data best practice: turning raw information into insights you can act on. While dashboards can help you visualize data, the real, usable insight comes from analytics that provide not just visibility but intelligence. Realizing the value of insight, a growing number of facilities managers are embracing the use of analytics to drive improvements. In fact, 87% of surveyed facilities managers plan to use more data and analytics for decision-making.
Analytics go beyond dashboard graphics, allowing you to identify trends, anomalies, and correlations that a simple snapshot might miss. Instead of just a number, analytics reveal the “why” behind the data and what you should do next.
Ideally, your analytics should serve up the insights that matter most to you, with information you can put to use right away. To that end, analytics are most effective when they’re tied into a work order or ticketing system. This allows every alert, trend, and exception to be turned into a tracked action, assigned to the right technician, and closed out with a clear record of what was done.
When building systems data stays connected to the work order lifecycle, facilities teams can respond more quickly and proactively, work more efficiently, achieve better accountability, and continuously improve system and building performance. Tying analytics to an existing work order system and process also reduces the number of new systems and processes a facility team has to learn, which makes adoption easier and improves results.
Quality over Quantity: When Less Means More
Not all data is created equal. And not all data deserves your attention. In fact, 60% of surveyed facility managers say they waste up to 20% of their time just looking for information.³ So while there is value in retaining all the data generated by your building systems, you’ll want the most important, impactful, and useful information readily available at your fingertips. This ties back to understanding your goals before attempting to consolidate and clean your data.
Data that is disconnected from workflows and use cases has little ROI. To that end, when setting up your analytics, target the data most relevant to system and building performance, making it available with the least amount of effort.
Analytics platforms may include screening frameworks or logic to help you prioritize and filter vast datasets to pull out the variables that have the biggest impact on energy usage, system performance, maintenance, uptime, and risk. By using frameworks, you can rank and prioritize data and call out key inputs that you can take immediate action on to reach your goals.
Start Your Data Journey with the Right Partner
Getting a handle on your building data can be a daunting task, particularly when your time and resources are already stretched thin. Bringing in a partner with experience in data management and analytics can remove some of that burden.
Your partner should be able to help you identify and prioritize your goals; standardize, normalize, and unify your building systems data; choose and implement an analytics platform that fits your needs, or work around one you already have in place; and put the data that matters most within easy reach. This partner may also have low-cost strategies for harnessing and leveraging data without disrupting your building operations.
If you’re looking to make better use of your building data, reach out to Albireo Energy today.
Authored with contributions from Rudy Bohince, Director of Managed Service Center
