The world is getting smarter and smarter – regardless of the current stockpiling of toilet paper going on these days – this is still the case, basically. Thanks to digitization increasing every day, information is always available, anywhere. The only remaining obstacle to overcome in today’s Facilities Management, however, is capturing the data. Top-modern, high-tech buildings are equipped with fairly sophisticated building management systems capturing and continuously analyzing many different data and conditions, in order to react properly when required. Usually, these data are available either in a data base or in a cloud for further evaluation and reporting. Regrettably enough, these technically sophisticated buildings are still the exception to the rule these days. Thus, other innovative solutions need to be applied for existing facilities such that this data is available to customers.
In this context, a lot has been done during the past years, fortunately. And a lot will happen in near future in this field. Using LoRaWAN and comparable technologies, you can retrofit buildings already today with a lot of sensors, very fast and at considerably low cost. Although the amount of data transmitted is admittedly quite restricted, for the majority of uses cases this is totally sufficient yet. In the course of continuous 5 G expansion, yet another technology will be available on a broad level allowing the transfer of large amounts of data as well.
However, with capturing and transferring data the task is not done yet- data has to be monitored in a very close follow-up and respectively analyzed to be able to realize an added value. It is exactly at this point in time when a CAFM-system comes into effective action:
Analogous to manually captured tickets, a transferred sensor value indicating a non-appropriate condition, for instance, needs to trigger a ticket or a respective process in the same way. As we are not talking about two, but rather more than 2000 sensors, it is absolutely indispensable to master this enormous data flow to be expected. In order to be always up to this challenge, we have integrated in speedikon C the well proven WiriTec methods that always allow to identify the actually important values in the mass of data via preliminary filters, algorithms and configurable rule-based mechanisms.
It is only those actually important values that will be taken over into speedikon C to be subsequently elaborated based on rule-based mechanisms. Thus, a fairly too high CO2 concentration in a meeting room, for example, will trigger a malfunction report indicating that the room has to be ventilated. This identical value, however, can also be used to define the need for cleaning in a particular room. An increased CO2 concentration usually means that a room has been used by employees and thus wants cleaning. We have already described further interesting use case scenarios in a previous Blog post .
Thanks to this seamless integration of sensors and of the respectively generated values into the already existing workflows and processes, real added value can be generated very quickly. Where in earlier days an employee had to actively indicate an existing problem, by generating a malfunction report via an online-form or a specific app, this process can nowadays run based on automatically captured values. As all values are stored in speedikon C for a very long time, these processes can subsequently be analyzed to be able to possibly optimize rule-based mechanisms or threshold values.
In future, it will not be the employee any more who complains, but the building or the technical facility themselves. In case you require any further information on how to easily integrate sensors, we are looking forward to hearing from you.