By the very nature of the job title, when you are a Property or Facilities Manager, it’s a fairly practical role looking after the facilities – buildings, sites and so on – that you are responsible for, and pretty much one that you have to be on site for. With the current Government advice to work from home where possible, how does this work for those of us who need to actively manage buildings? How are you connected to your buildings? How do you know how they are behaving? If they have reduced occupation, how can you be sure that you are not using energy on heating, lights, air conditioning when it isn’t needed in the situation where the property is unoccupied?
Most Property or Facilities Managers struggle to be connected to their buildings when working remotely – during forced circumstances such as these or when managing multiple sites. Beyond email, phone and perhaps checking into static reports, there tends to be very little that standard Building Management Systems can provide to keep managers informed and updated about how their building is behaving and performing on a continual basis when they aren’t there. The more technically astute will be able to dial in to the Building Management System remotely, if setup, but even those are usually provided with clunky and disparate graphics akin to an 80’s arcade game.
How you can achieve working from home
So with the current situation only likely to escalate, are our commercial buildings likely to haemorrhage cost and energy use unwittingly for the landlords? The curious thing is that it is entirely preventable and should be one less thing to worry about in this period of heightened anxiety. Using a system, such as the one we have developed in-house at Demand Logic, allows property professionals and contractors to be connected to their buildings no matter what time of day or night and no matter where they are.
The data that we provide about your building allows you to remotely triage the issues and use the online platform to plan, advise and share ideas with your team on how to get them fixed, either as an emergency or once daily business resumes working out a process with us to decide what and when. By seeing your building’s data, you avoid the latent spike in getting your issues resolved and pressure on suppliers, thereby planning in future maintenance or repair ahead of the rest.
Data is beautiful and effective
This live data visibility also provides the ability to monitor the performance of major and associated plant; enabling you to ensure that there is not needless operation of large, energy hungry, chillers or AHUs causing pure energy wastage. Buildings often operate on time schedules, which have been pre-agreed across all parties and tenants to ensure that a comfortable environment can be achieved for the building users. These controls led time schedules are often only amended in line with seasonal changes. Therefore, in this time of uncertainty and government advised home working, offices are going to be far less occupied, if at all. However, the controls system may not have been amended to take this into account – so there could be completely empty offices which are running at a lovely comfortable 21C, with nobody there to appreciate or benefit from it. To achieve this, all of the major plant is operating and running, costing money, energy and carbon.
What’s more, our system allows us to collaboratively under take a deep dive into your buildings performance, identifying what issues are more on going or long term, providing you with the ability to budget for work over time, particularly if that requires capital expenditure. And with the recent JLL report citing how green offices are likely to attract premium rental income and minimise tenancy void, we are able to help you increase the environmental track record your buildings.
The current situation
We recognise that our customers are likely going through a challenging period of adjustment as significant changes to underlying building occupation and usage are combined with the difficulty of trying to manage and maintain properties with less resource onsite. We are working closely with our customers to ensure their building’s systems are running in line with changing requirements. Facilities Managers, Building Engineers, DL Account Managers are often all working from home but collaborating remotely on the platform. That is the power of harnessing live BMS data. Where illness may lead to site staff shortages and stand-ins, we are making sure we can put remote training in place to get new users up to speed as quickly as possible. . But most of all, we are here to support all who work within the property sector to make working from home the ease it should be.
