Occupancy management
As more and more people return to work, building owners and facility managers need to be more vigilant to ensure strict adherence to the stipulated health and safety protocols, and as such, smart building technology can help take into account all the key considerations such as social distancing. For instance, mobile applications such as contact-tracing apps can track office occupants and who they come into contact with or carpeted floors embedded with LED lighting can provide visual cues about where and how far apart people should stand.
To avoid a mass inflow at the workplace, organisations may need to rethink occupancy planning and workplace design in the long-term. However, in the short- and medium-term, organisations can consider installing sensors that measure workplace occupancy; deploying occupancy analytics that can help detect the maximum number of people in an area; and utilising reservation systems to move meetings to larger spaces as required or swap in-person meetings with online meetings.
Additionally, organisations can consider implementing online tools and systems that allow a remote employee to make a request when they want to visit the office premises and need a desk, parking space and other provisions. Facility managers can combine information from occupancy analytics and workplace reservation systems to also indicate which workspaces and meeting rooms are used the most.
Predictive maintenance
In the world of FM, remote monitoring and data analytics is the need of the hour right now, and with time, will become more essential for providing efficient FM services. Modern predictive maintenance leverages machine learning, AI and data gathered from a building’s connected devices and sensors. This combined information can help FMs monitor remotely and predict maintenance needs, and even indicate when an equipment can fail in a specific number of hours or days.
The data gathered over a period of time can also be utilised to see what regular behavioral patterns look like. The future of FM truly lies in automation and dispatching a technician even before the building owner realises there is a problem with something in the facility.
Instead of allocating more money on premiums for emergency maintenance, facilities can depend on connected devices to foresee and schedule maintenance needs without affecting uptime and productivity. Moreover, an IoT-enabled sustainability management solution that draws real-time information about buildings with the help of available data can be instrumental in realising predictive energy efficiency.
As we gradually make the return to ‘normalcy’ – be it the reopening of schools and universities or staggered hours at the office – this has opened up a host of new challenges and opportunities for FM teams everywhere. The current crisis demands for greater operational resiliency, rapid responses to changing protocols, and seamless occupant experience. And as such, the FM industry should leverage IoT for more strategic decision-making, as it will in turn enable them to deliver greater value and trigger positive change during these challenging times.