Building management is a complex task. A building or campus manager has to be aware of many things and this leads a complex web of measurements, sensors, interfaces and dashboards. All these can be daunting and very difficult to monitor.
Furthermore, the more sources of data a person has and the more places to view this data, the less efficient the entire process is. Quite often, a simple power reading for example can mean very little when not taken in a context or in conjunction with other measurements.
For example, Building A presents a certain power use throughout the week. In weekends, this power consumption usually drops but there are weekends or evenings when it doesn’t drop that much. In an ideal situation, the person in charge of monitoring and managing the energy efficiency of the building would have all the information available from other parties. We all know that ideal situations are utopian, especially in large organisations, buildings or campuses.
With the right platform, the same person would have available, on the same screen, information regarding building occupancy, water consumption, energy consumption. These bits of information, presented on the same dashboard will paint a clear picture of what is happening. In our scenario, the building manager would easily understand that in some evenings or weekends, there are events and large meetings organised. This leads to power being used for longer. This would complement or even replace the need to have a notification from the events organisers or other departments.
The story above is not an imagined scenario. It does not identify the customer but it is real.
At SimplyCity we have been asked many times about the use of SimplyControl, the open data platform. If you wonder what a platform is, there is already an article you can read by clicking here.
Multiple platforms are not something new and most of the users will know how difficult is to gain access to all these bits of information. For a building or campus manager or management department, the already challenging task of keeping an eye on everything is made even more difficult by asking the team to log into 6-7-8 dashboards.
With a platform like SimplyControl, a campus management team could easily understand the actual water consumption of an irrigation system. The same data can also be presented, in the same platform, different dashboard, to the parks maintenance team which can understand better the water consumption coupled with the soil performance in various locations. This will lead to better designed and more efficient irrigation systems.
The same campus management can then observe water consumption, power consumption and building occupancy in one screen. This would be an easy way to see if a building uses large amounts of water and power when there are very few people around.
What about carparks or waste bin monitoring and collection ? What about the local facilities and their use ? Understanding how often facilities are used throughout a building and campus while preserving complete anonymity of the users is easy with SimplyControl. To gather data, simple devices such as the SimplyCity Crowd density monitors are employed. They will deliver the occupancy data while simple meter interfaces will collect all consumption data for power, water and even gas. All this information, and more, can be then easily presented in an easy to read interface. And the same goes for waste bin level monitoring.
Presenting data in a unified way creates a better context. Thus maintenance schedules and logs can be better designed and the maintenance crew can work more efficiently when and where they are needed, not just because there is a maintenance schedule in place.
