Freely translated from an article written by Mauro Bellini and published on “Internet 4 things”.
Original content at:
All credits related to the content go to Mauro Bellini and “Internet 4 things”.
(English Version)
The development of Internet of Things solutions, the availability of data and intelligence allows the world of the facility to become increasingly central to the digital innovation processes of businesses and organizations.
Facility management: what it is and what it is for
Facility Management is a working function within the company that has the task of managing and coordinating the workspace so that it is functional and “comfortable” for employees, and also contributes to the pursuit of the company’s core objectives.
In simpler terms the meaning of facility management is that it serves to control all activities independent from the company’s core business (e.g. telephone and telecommunication networks, corporate and work safety, maintenance services, canteen service, offices, commodities and utilities and so on).
In particular, and usually, the Facility Manager is in charge of the management of buildings and their facilities and services (electricity, gas, plumbing, lighting, cleaning, catering, concierge, control and so on). Facility management can sometimes be outsourced by the company, but not always.
Especially larger companies may decide to have a dedicated building all for their employees, with a facility manager hired directly by the company. Other times the company may choose to rent offices, where all these facility management activities are managed directly by the building manager.
Obviously a facility manager will have to provide and maintain high levels of professionalism, ensuring that all the needs of the company are maintained properly, trying to save as much as possible so as not to negatively impact on business costs.
Who is and what the facility manager does
The facility manager is the company manager who takes care of the management of the facilities (structures). The facility manager performs the following activities:
- Design, plan and provide services to support the core business of the company;
- Increase the effectiveness of the company and its productivity;
- Adapt the company easily to the market;
The three main focuses for a facility manager are:
- Strategic (how and where to find and distribute the services needed by the company to achieve business objectives, including budget and cost decisions).
- Analytical (listen to the company’s workers, to understand their needs, if you are doing well, and what else you can do to improve the operation and productivity of the company through facilities, or structures, also analysing the data produced by the company over time)
- Managerial-operational (i.e. the management of the various services and operations, i.e. when and how best to distribute and provide facility services to the company)
Which opportunities for the future of Facility Management
As digital transformation enters the company, innovation processes are set in motion that have an increasingly direct and engaging impact on Facility Management. We must consider that spaces, environments and services in our work and in our lives as citizens increasingly depend on the capacity for innovation linked to the role of these figures. Innovation is making this market one of the “drivers” of development and the American research firm Markets and Markets estimates that Facility Management overall is growing from $32.21 billion in 2017 to $59.33 billion in 2023. There is talk of a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 11.4% over this period. But the real wealth of Facility Management, is all in the ability to act and manage phenomena such as Internet of Things, Big Data and Data Analytics, robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
We can say that if the quality of life depends on the quality of the environments in which we spend our time at work, in transport, in access to services, we can say that a large part of our quality of life depends on the facility world’s capacity for innovation.
Examples and future of facility management with IoT
The drive for change in IoT is so strong and intense that it is making its effects felt even in the more established and traditionally conservative sectors. The world of Facility Management & Real Estate, while attentive to innovation, does not belong to the sectors that have made digital innovation their flag. But with IoT something is changing in depth and this sector has also set in motion a real silent revolution.
How has the relationship between Real Estate and digital changed?
In order to respond, it is necessary to underline the evolution that distinguishes the real estate world and in particular the Facility Management & Real Estate management also regardless of digital evolution. In many realities this management is moving from figures with mainly technical expertise in the construction sector such as surveyors to figures who bring more attention to digital.
What pushed it in this direction?
The first real step towards digital in Facility Management & Real Estate came with energy. The theme of energy efficiency has allowed to bring a first whiff of digitisation on the wave of the advantages that can be achieved in terms of efficiency. But a very important role was played by the development of methods that allow to evaluate the performance and performance of buildings. An example comes from BRaVe, the solution developed by the GestiTec Laboratory of the ABC Department of the Politecnico di Milano, (now under technical management at BRaVe m&t, a spin-off of the Politecnico n.d.r) that provides organizations with a reliable and objective tool to evaluate the performance and quality level of buildings that make up a real estate heritage.
Did security play an important role too?
Sure, but it can be said that Energy and Security have benefited from the push of regulatory requirements. They brought important benefits, but they were not the result of a new sensitivity to digital. For example, in the Anglo-Saxon world the digital culture already present for some time in the Facility Management & Real Estate world has led to the introduction of many alternative solutions that have led to new services.
For many of them, physical security, anti-intrusion, theft control, as well as safety in the workplace, environmental safety, premises and people have become lines of business and new operational efficiency. As well as activities once little considered but indirectly “expensive” as the management of problems related to neglect.
Is the IoT now helping to create a new culture?
Yes, the IoT is much more accessible now. Many sensors were there even before, they were more expensive and less performing and there was still no real integration logic, there was a lack of overview. The IoT today is disruptive not only because of technological evolution, because there are more performing devices, because the platforms allow for faster and more precise development, but because there is an overall vision.
The Building is becoming Smart… role and future of the Facility Manager
The building must be read with a double key: the new and the old. In the construction of new buildings of a certain level it is practically obligatory to design Smart solutions. The professional building for offices and businesses is not only equipped to become an intelligent building, but also designed for a new way of working, to be used more flexibly by organisations that aim for flexibility. For example, there are large organizations that require intelligent spaces designed to manage Smart Working solutions. The space must be able to be managed according to this type of organization, digital enables this space management. For example, smart meeting rooms prepare the environment for meetings, activate conditioning as early as necessary, switch it off at the end of the meeting, manage the lights, alert participants of other upcoming meetings, alert general services if special maintenance is needed. All this is service, efficiency, new business.
But is there also more attention in general on the real estate world?
Companies have experienced the phenomenon of delocalisation and post delocalisation as well known. Large industrial groups with large real estate properties have drawn attention to the great advantages that could come from a new interpretation of brick. In other words, for many large industrial groups after the efficiency on the operational side the time has come to make efficiency and effectiveness also on real estate.
Then there are other forms of attention once neglected or perhaps never really considered
An example of this is water management. Today those who construct a building must design the entire structure according to water consumption and factors that were once unimaginable come into play. Water is on the one hand a cost and on the other hand it is also a factor of environmental sensitivity, a value in the environmental balance sheet of the company. For this reason, designers design buildings taking water consumption into account, considering the different types of use and different types of water. Obviously for certain needs it is not necessary to have drinking water, for these needs you can use rainwater that the building itself is able to collect and manage. When rainwater is not sufficient, the system recovers it according to the reading of different parameters. For example, thanks to the integration of The Weather Company, Facility managers have at their disposal very detailed weather information that allows them to schedule the filling of non-potable water (rainwater) deposits in the presence of rain or otherwise schedule the filling of the same with drinking water. This means consumption management, but also energy management. Every time the filling through the drinking water conductor is avoided, an energy saving is also managed.
What is favouring this spread of building automation?
There are three main factors: the costs of IoT equipment, which as we have seen are more affordable and better performing, have longer battery life, have a higher reading capacity in the room and can, for example, serve for different needs. In some cases they may also have local processing capacity and allow the design of solutions that transfer data already partially processed, limiting communication only to the data strictly necessary. But above all, there is the Cloud: data management, data transfer to data centres, local processing capacity had high costs that with the Cloud have been reduced and the possibility of accessing many processing services has been made more simple, flexible and accessible. The third point lies in the very logic with which Smart Building systems are designed. Then there is the App phenomenon that allows to bring monitoring, control and action on complex devices and projects at the level of mobile devices. This phenomenon is allowing to activate very complex projects with high levels of usability and accessibility once unthinkable.
Facility Management at the service of sustainability
The great attention and pressure that comes first and foremost from public opinion and which invites companies and organisations to increase their commitment to environmental sustainability and workplace safety and quality represents a very important challenge for Facility management. Many of the challenges on the table relate to activities, projects, commitments that are or will be on the table of facility managers. For companies and organizations the environmental issue is closely related to business, there is no transformation that does not have a direct impact on business and the most enlightened and innovative companies are rethinking projects, products, services in order to make them compatible with sustainability issues also from the point of view of all the elements that affect the values of products and production.
In all of this, a key role is played by the processes and logic of Facility Management, which are called upon to manage the growing need for adaptation to climate change, for example in the management of work environments and the management of conditions related to temperature, always the facility has a fundamental weight in the management of issues related to energy efficiency, in turn conditioned by climate change. Third, and certainly no less important, is the issue of safety, which in turn must be rethought in relation to the management of the repercussions of certain climatic phenomena on the working environment. The issue of energy is also becoming increasingly important in many respects, both as a further focus on issues related to resource management and energy saving (as has long been the case in companies and organizations) and in the sense of redesigning organizations and environments according to a different relationship with energy issues. Buildings are among the main responsible for energy consumption and not only for issues related to air conditioning. This consumption must be put in direct relation with the evolution of climate change, the rethinking in the management of spaces must pass from a complete reading both of the use of environments: of the consumption related to their use, and of their management according to the changing climatic conditions outside the environments themselves.
Facility Managers more and more attentive to new sources of data and knowledge
Data, analysis capabilities, new sources of knowledge and new forecasting models to be put in direct relation with Facility Management’s ability to modify these environments and their use. There are many aspects related to the management of buildings that can affect sustainability and on which a key role can be played by Facility Management, for example the introduction and use of renewable resources in relation to the time of use of the environments, the type of services provided and the type of resources used. The impact of certain threats on the ability to produce energy and the ability to exploit the energy produced. For Facility Management, sustainability is one of the most important challenges in terms of impact on the logic of the profession and the need to have tools, applications, digital services able to increase the knowledge of the environments and the ability to predict their behavior.
The Facility Management Market
The Global Facility Management Market is a sector with a strong development dynamic, in particular thanks to the effects of digital innovation. The tools available to Facility Managers are changing this profession and are changing the management of the building world in all its various dimensions: safety, efficiency, energy, resource management, evolution of working conditions, regulatory compliance, document management and planning of interventions and maintenance, just to mention some of the most important aspects.
The Global FM Market Report for 2018 reports that in 2017 the Facility Management market reached a worldwide value of $1.15 trillion. Of this something like 466.6 billion dollars are related to outsourcing services while 11.5 billion come from integrated Facility Management services.
The report realised by GlobalFM highlights a series of trends that are characterising this change and that allow Facility Management to be increasingly closer to the business of companies. In particular, the key issues that correspond to different market trends are the following:
- Business Productivity
- Anything as a Service
- Sustainability
- Energy Management
- Performance Contracting
- Partnership & Collaboration
- Cloud Service
Future developments of Facility Management
Digital innovation is making the role of Facility Management increasingly important in the development and implementation of Smart or Intelligent Building and Smart Infrastructure projects. It is not possible to design new perspectives for the provision of services without the profound involvement of the facility manager who is particularly called upon to bring an overview of the buildings, spaces, needs, critical issues and dynamics that characterize the needs of those who live those spaces. In particular, digital is changing the relationship between the 4 major subjects that are at the basis of our relationship with the environments in which we work, live or that allow us to access the services we need:
- The spaces
- People’s needs
- The needs of companies
- The time
- Resources
Facility Management towards integration with Property Management
The Facility Manager has to work first of all on the knowledge of these 4 factors and digital contributes in a decisive way to increase the quality and profodonity of this knowledge. On the basis of this knowledge it is necessary to relate all the factors in order to find – thanks to technology – the most appropriate synthesis for people and companies. A synthesis that will certainly be dynamic, i.e. it will be changeable by nature, destined to change faster and faster over time, and the spaces, thanks to technology, will have to be so flexible as to follow this change and find, as soon as possible, a new synthesis.
In this scenario Facility Management is increasingly closer to Property Management and is moving towards lines of development that we can summarize in four points:
- Workplace innovation in relation to new phenomena such as smart working
- The spread of intelligent objects, of IoT that is concretely “making buildings talk” and that provides knowledge that was once inaccessible
- The dissemination of a Data Driven culture that allows to develop working methods closely and strongly linked to data analysis
- The accessibility of Artificial Intelligence solutions that introduce new automatmats and new efficiency deframes
- The integration between phenomena: the Property that looks at the Facility and the Facility that brings value to the infrastructure world and that plays an important role in the logic of Smart City Platform increasingly based on IoT solutions.
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