Into the boardroom

How many businesses think of their buildings as a strategic resource rather than an unecessary overhead? How many facility managers think of themselves as asset managers, employed to support an organisation’s overall business goal rather than someone on hand to fix the phones or adjust the air conditioning? The answer is probably not enough.

These were questions raised by Paul Ehrlich speaking at the BuilConn conference held in Brusells at the end of October. Talking about the future of building systems and how buildings are changing, Ehrlic says: “Many people would say a building is an expense, but we should be considering them as a resource and elevating the facilities manager to the role of an asset manager who supports the organisations overall business goal. Buildings are critical to the productivity of the people who work there as well as their efficiency.”

With the convergence of the worlds of building controls and IT the opportunity of creating ever more intelligent, as well as efficient and productive buildings, is moving closer. The era of enterprise building management is beginning to emerge.

The concept behind this is to break a building down into three levels. At the lowest level lie the traditional building systems including the ventilation and air conditioning, lighting, fire safety, access control, smoke evacuation and other systems. Above this sits the system integration layer where those building systems begin to be connected together to provide operational functionality and interoperability between systems.

The third level is the enterprise level. This is the concept of bringing the building systems together into the business systems and applications to create a common enterprise view. “This means bringing the information from the facility into the business level application and using it for some type of tangible benefit,” says Ehrlich.

This can be as simple as tying the conference room scheduling software for an office into the lighting and air conditioning control systems, using the data from human resource records to automatically create access control cards for new employees – and invalidate them when they leave – to the full blown integration of an airport’s flight control scheduling system with the building automation system.

Similarly for facility managers, bringing information together from the separate systems and having instant access to such data is essential for making decisions. “I need a dashboard for my building that shows how it is working,” says Ehrlich. “If I had a building that cost me 10 000 euros a month in electricity is that good or bad? I want to baseline that, profile it and compare it with other buildings. How is that building working against how it was designed? When utility rates change how are you going to react? If I have 20 buildings how are they doing? Access to data and analysis of data is critical.”

But Ehrlich does voice a word of caution. Ultimately he sees three business drivers that need to be satisfied: the need to create a safe environment; the need for a productive environment; and the need for a building that is efficient, not only in terms of energy use but operationally efficient as well as space efficient. “Never lose sight of these three drivers. If we can’t come up with an economic driver then all this technology doesn’t take us anywhere.”

Being able to support a businesses’ overall goal does mean controls and buildings services consultants need to require new skills. “I was talking to a consultant who says ‘we go and call on the IT manager now, the chief technology or information officer and we learn their business needs. We provide business solutions for them, and our fees, value and position has gone up’. People that are able to go in and provide hose business and technical skills are going to change their position dramatically in the market.”