Data Data Data

We live in a world of data. Never before has so much information been right at our fingertips, but it’s easy to lose the importance of data just because there is so much of it - and buildings create thousands of data sets every day. Where should you even start?

Why is building data important?

As with anything else, if you do not have data, you have no opportunity to understand, learn and improve on your current situation. That means you cannot make smart decisions, and any action you do make could be decreasing your efficiencies rather than improving them.

However, it is possible to have too much data. The immense data sets created by multi-story or multi-tenant buildings - or both - can easily overwhelm. How do you start to review that data when it could take hours to even understand what you are looking at? What happens if you miss the most important part, or the data that reveals the challenge you face - something that would be easy to do with millions of data points.

This potential overwhelm of data is often why many property and facilities management companies collect data but do little with it. It’s more effort than needed, but as businesses are beginning to become more conscious of their environmental impact, there is going to be an increased focus on building performance.

We know that buildings create large amounts of carbon, both in their construction and their ongoing management. Businesses need to understand their carbon footprint to start making positive changes, and data is a key part of that. The effectiveness and accuracy of current methods of monitoring building and energy performance have been disproven several times over, many of which are ‘point in time’ assessments and often carried out at the design stage. Without understanding the ‘here and now’ of the performance gap of a property, there is no real way of establishing a starting point for improvement without utilising data.

What building data can Demand Logic give me?

You may already be using a Building Management System (BMS), but that does not necessarily mean you are receiving the right data that you need to make the best decisions.

In fact, receiving the wrong data could be doing more harm than good, distracting you from the data that could deliver tangible actions for your team across:

● Opex cost reduction
● Staff health and well-being
● Carbon and energy management
● Outcome-focused maintenance
● Insurance risk management
● Fault and defects identification

For example, many of our clients save >10% on their energy usage in the first year of working with us here at Demand Logic - a huge reduction that has a corresponding decrease in carbon creation.

How can I understand building data better?

Whilst every data point matters, Demand Logic will rationalise and aggregate it so users of all levels can understand what is going on without becoming ‘data snow-blind’. Users don’t need to be data analysts, we do that for you. Building operation is simplified into three, real world, indicators; energy efficiency, occupier comfort and mechanical effectiveness. Inefficiencies and anomalies in your building which impact one of these KPIs are instantly identifiable and an action can be raised. It’s like accelerating to a solution before you even realise there is a problem. The different filters will show:

● Real time data
● No limits on the number of data sets which enable Demand Logic to provide insight to every part of the system; major plant, meters, terminal units, right down to child assets such as pumps, motors, valves and sensors – all through a single device connection.
● This data richness enables tangible information to be provided to support decision making and identification of faults within a system without leaving your screen.
● Verified actions are created by our technical team, moving away from hundreds of BMS alerts, which become nothing more than noise, to a meaningful list of tangible actions which will have an impact on performance.
● Portfolio benchmarking – through the vast amounts of data collected, we are able to provide visibility of property performance across a portfolio to illustrate the ‘best and worst’ performing properties. This enables stakeholders to understand where they need to concentrate efforts in order to improve performance and identify benchmark levels as targets to achieve.

But the real proof is in the pudding. Data is only meaningful if you can make meaningful changes thanks to its insight, and that’s precisely what Demand Logic delivers.

Whether it’s improvements in efficiencies for facilities management teams, reduction of service charge costs for property managers and occupiers, decreasing the building’s carbon footprint, or an uptick in productivity, you can quickly see how the data will start changing the way your building operates.

Lowering carbon through building management

One of the easiest ways to make a big dent in lowering carbon is through improved buildings management, and that means data - but it also means the ability to understand that data. Numbers are just numbers until they gain some context, and the Demand Logic dashboard empowers you with that understanding.

If you would like to know more about how we use data to improve building performance, get in touch.