Category: Operations & Maintenance

The Ballon d’Or award is back this year and the race to win football’s most prestigious individual prize is heating up. The football world is overwhelmed by two goliaths: Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. The two adversaries have scooped each individual honor over the previous decade, and regardless of their age, they give no indications of slowing down.

So who’s better this season? Who will win this year’s d’Or award?

If that question was so easy to answer, anybody would have just calculated the number of matches they have played this season, winning passes they have made, and goals they have posted. But that’s not enough to determine or compare the performance of those two players. 

We would need to look closely into every parameter and circumstances that have impacted their performances and also examine how their individual game has improved as compared to the last season. That is the exact reason we depend on some of the highly advanced frameworks such as expected point added (EPA) and efficiency per match (EPM) that can quantify decision-making abilities and importance of each goal for winning the match, although they can not quantify the magic and passion both players have shown in this season, they can give us enough data to compare.

When we talk about benchmarking the performance of commercial buildings the rationales are very much the same. While comparing the energy or resource consumption of two or more buildings we can not just consider the utility bills, Sq Ft area, and the number of occupants of the buildings. Even if we are comparing similar types of buildings (both are offices or hospitals) we need much more granular level data, the right performance metrics and individual performance baselines. 

One of the main challenges with the open access benchmarks is their predictive nature. According to Peter Garforth, Principal consultant of Garforth International LLC,  “Data in the United States is very parochial, and it’s hard to get global benchmarks. Also, too often, it’s based on theoretical models and not on actual building performance”

For a macro-level understanding of the city or country’s building assets, Govt can promote openly available building benchmarks where building owner or facility manager can share basic building details such as area, occupants, annual consumption, etc and check where does his building stand on energy or resource intensity as compared to other buildings in the same vicinity. 

But to examine the micro-level performance of the building’s assets, check the effectiveness of a particular maintenance approach or determine what else is needed to get on a track to achieve sustainability targets one needs to get deeper with the benchmarking standards and indicators. So what can be done?

1. Dual approach:

As a building owner or facility manager while you share buildings details for Open access level benchmarks you can also maintain your own set of benchmarks of performance indicators which can monitor both the end results as well as the process changes you implemented to get there. 

There are various benchmarking mechanisms that operate on a national and international level. Most of them focus on the design and fabric (material) part of the buildings such as LEED & IGBC. While very few consider the ‘In use’ or operational part of the buildings and benchmark on how the building is actually performing. REEB by better building partnerships and NABERS, Australia are leading the league.  

2. Normalization:

Comparing a building’s performance for different weather conditions or different load demands would need accurate normalization techniques. The normalization of any impacting parameter by benchmarking software ensures that changes in performance reflect operations and management practices, rather than changes in tenancy or vacancy within the building or because of unusual weather. 

Benchmarking tools should create a feedback mechanism to assist building operators to evaluate whether energy efficiency measures are achieving expected performance and cost savings. If not then suggest what are the steps that needed to improve performance. 

3. Statistical tools:

There are software and plugins that combine statistical analytics (called regression analysis) with utility data to create building operation models. The Institute for Building Efficiency created the Lean Energy Analysis (LEAN) system, which is a cost-effective way to measure building performance using the utility bill data as the main source of information. Analytical tools like LEAN can provide a preliminary estimate of the size and make-up of potential energy efficiency projects. Another tool by FirstView automatically creates a simplified building energy model that can quickly diagnose opportunities for improvement and automatically compare a building’s performance against peers.

It is perhaps the right time to focus on your own benchmarking standards, leverage existing available tools and software to come up with an internal benchmarking strategy for your portfolio of buildings. If you are already following a particular building analytics tool then share your experience with us.

Larry is a 27 year old technician who works in a prestigious office tower in Dubai. He and his colleague have been tasked to take care of the entire HVAC network at the facility. It’s a newly constructed site that holds numerous green building certificates. On his regular day, he follows his daily maintenance schedule which includes acting on maintenance tickets, monitoring the BMS data, correcting chiller sequencing, etc.  

On a one fine day, his colleague got a ticket for one of the AHUs at the site and he went on to check the cooling coil of the same. Since it was a reactive call from the tenant, he couldn’t get time to check AHU’s historical data on BMS or the maintenance audit trail from CMMS. Although he had a CMMS application on his mobile, it didn’t give him detailed information on the asset so he called Larry to get the specifics on the AHU. 

Post that call, the duo communicated the asset’s operational details and actionable steps over Whatsapp, their preferred messaging application, and concluded it by closing the maintenance ticket. 

Now, this behavior looks normal and very common among the O&M teams, but if we look closely, we can realize the lost opportunity there. 

Let’s think of this from the perspective of Information management, there are the only technicians who know what are the frequent issues they come across, which assets need special attention and maintenance patterns they require. Hence their experience is valuable, which has accumulated over the period of their tenure there, and now it has turned into a piece of knowledge. But will it stay with the facility forever? 

If we look at the entire scenario starting from how the information or data is monitored or accessed on BMS, How it is analyzed by systems or manual calculations on excel and then communicated or distributed over different mediums (WhatsApp, Email, Voice call or CAFM apps) to technicians and operators. 

• We can observe there are a lot of processes that work as a black hole for insights and information.
• There is no central repository to record & utilize information flow among the teammates. 
• There are no ‘search cookies’ that have been saved when a technician assesses the BMS or CAFM dashboard.     
• Teams can access the asset operational manual or best practices over the internet, but there is no in-house database of the same which can suggest the appropriate maintenance procedure when needed.

This can directly impact operational efficiency as it would take time and resources to relearn the nitty-gritty of the assets for new team members. We may not be able to quantify the loss of knowledge and its implication on cost savings at a particular site, but it can definitely streamline your operations and help you to improve on your margins. 

What can be done?

Of course, there is no exact solution available out there in the market hence we can only speculate on how the ideal solution would look like. 

Getting secured access to centralized CAFM data is easier now, running an independent application on top of the CAFM data via API transactions can give on-demand insights on multiple assets. This “middle layer” analytics application can have the capability to ingest data from CAFM, other data sources like BMS and Energy Monitoring Systems, IoT data, etc, and provide contextual & actionable insights to O&M teams.

This ‘Middle layer’ application essentially works as an on-demand system, where O&M engineers could potentially ask for information, data, and correlation for any asset using Natural Language processing. Over the period of time, as more queries have been generated, the system can learn and recommend an optimum solution to the operator to assist faster resolution and knowledge retention.

What else would you like to see in that application? How much will it help your FM team to streamline their work and preserve the insights? What kind of smart building technology solution you think is needed?

Do you know that marketers love ‘Cognitive biases’? Every human being is emotionally, psychologically, or habitually attached to certain belief systems, thought processes. Marketers use that connection to influence or augment consumer’s choices in a particular direction.

“We are consumers. We’re the by-products of a lifestyle obsession”

Remember this iconic statement by Tyler from the movie Fight Club? Well, I wouldn’t go that far to establish my point. But we must have experienced getting manipulated by the brands for their profits both in personal and professional life.

Want an example? an age-old argument between using Excel for commercial use and Analytics tools. There are dozens of articles you would find which support the ideology that presumes Excel is an outdated application for analytics and you should move to specific tools or platform for automation, AI and all the futuristic use cases. 

They make you feel guilty & cheap for optimizing Excel to solve your business needs (reporting, forecasting & formula based calculations)     

While I agree that automated business intelligence tools can do a lot more than what Excel does, but that doesn’t mean everyone should go for them. Understanding your business need, available resources, and future roadmap of tech integrations is important before you make that switch. 

In this article, we will discuss those business or technical objectives which you should consider while making that decision. 

Time to process data:

How much time does it take for your O&M team to collect the data from different sources (BMS, EMS, CAFM) and analyze it on excel? Does the process is cumbersome and takes more than expected work hours? How frequently does it take place or how much of a repetitive component in it? Answers to these questions can help you quantify the value of your O&M team’s time.

There are multiple readymade templates available to manage, visualize and process real estate data from Cashflow analysis, Rental management to asset maintenance. If these templates are solving your pain points without taking too much of your team’s time then it’s completely justified not to automate things.       

Data Complexity:

There are 10+ parameters Air handling unit (AHU) generates on a continuous basis. A typical size commercial building consists of 35 – 45+ AHUs which produce hundreds of data points. Not to forget there are other critical assets and building systems that collect, store and visualize a huge quality of data points.  

When it comes to processing those huge files, most of the computers with standard configuration would struggle to open up a 100 MB .csv file, making it challenging to analyze and report such datasheets. Adding several smaller .csv files to data, like sales data for neighboring regions, will be immensely difficult to combine with your previous dataset and analysis.

Now, do you find any difficulties processing your asset data? Do you think it will increase with the addition of building data (CAFM, Weather data) in the future? What is a bigger challenge? Is it a volume, logic (Formulation), or processing capabilities of the system? It’s important to understand how your O&M team wants to use your building data before choosing the right application for the same.     

Integration capabilities:

Now whether it is a simple help desk management or maintenance scheduling task, there are multiple individual standalone applications that communicate data to maximize the valuable insights. We are living in a multifamily tech architecture age where the ‘ecosystem approach’ of technology adoption is mostly followed. 

For example, you might want to process asset data over edge computing or fog layer offered by different applications and deliver alerts and notifications to your workplace communication channels such as Slack or Microsoft teams. A journey of data into insights can touch upon multiple applications via open integration protocols making a real-time response to such requests a necessity. 

Unfortunately, Excel or Google spreadsheets are not equipped to handle real-time data changes. Limiting them for manual data entry tasks and prone to human errors.

But, If there is no requirement for data integration or automation at your facility for now and in near future, your on-site FM team is comfortable drawing insights with an existing set of applications then you don’t need to dump excel for any other application. 

To sum up, check your business needs, future tech integration, and most importantly how you want to use your data before changing the boats. If your facility requires a more advance application then you can look for a building analytics software. If you can’t decide what is best for your facility so reach out to us.

How much time does your core O&M team spend on analyzing data from your critical assets? Or Implementing new applications/ Practices? Or even planning for new energy benchmarking methodology? 

In short out of all the time and resources that are there at their disposal, how much of it gets spent on transformational activities, that involve strategic decision-making and implementing new initiatives rather than simply transactional ones such as mundane monitoring and reactive maintenance tasks.

If an O&M team consists of a number of technicians and operators then the repetitive tasks, as well as strategic ones, can be managed internally. Work can be assigned based on the skills, experience and capabilities of the engineer.  

But in recent times, Most of the FM teams are striving for leaner structures to maintain the low operational cost model and lesser dependencies. They can not afford to expand their maintenance teams or allocate their quality resources to do fail-check monitoring of less critical assets. Even existing O&M teams are upskilling or reskilling their staff, rotating subject matter experts (SME) across their facility portfolio. In such situations, they would need to explore ways to outsource less critical parts of the maintenance so that the core team can focus on transformational activities and drive digitalization faster and in a cost-effective manner. 

Well, such a concept of mobile engineering contracts are not new to the facility management fraternity but it is paving its way to mainstream maintenance practices. Integral, a UK-based FM service provider company has first started such services under the term ‘Mobile engineering’ in early 2012. After getting acquired by JLL global, it has expanded its network and started leveraging JLL’s in-house tech applications to strengthen its remote engineering services.

Currently, Integral’s mobile engineering team provides on-demand mechanical, electrical maintenance services which are built on the parent company – JLL’s Corrigo CMMS platform and utilizing a smartphone app or desktop portal, On-demand services can be delivered by the mobile engineering workforce nationwide in the UK. 

What makes On-demand services such a lucrative option?

Such on-demand services let the client (A facility management firm) control their maintenance tasks and expenditure, with flexible access to quality engineers on a pay-as-you-go model. 

1. Access to trained professionals: 

FM teams wouldn’t need to invest in recruiting, training, or maintaining a diverse set of technically skilled professionals at every facility. They can easily access trained technicians or engineers on a limited contract basis when needed.   

2. Lean teams:

As there is no excessive staff on a permanent basis, an FM team can better utilize its core resources by segregating critical and non-critical maintenance activities and achieve operational targets with minimum expenditure on human resources. According to the US dept of energy a typical building maintenance team spend 30 – 40% of their resources on reactive maintenance practices. With on-demand services, they can access technicians when needed and let the core team focus on critical tasks. 

While it is highly cost-efficient for a client to access such on-demand services for reactive or run to failure maintenance (RTF) it is equally beneficial to the service provider. 

It has been observed that most of these on-demand services leverage their own or partner’s tech solution to gather operational insights while silently promoting their other products, ultimately creating opportunities for upselling.

An on-demand mobile engineering partner can take away the boring and less creative part of the maintenance, giving an FM team the opportunity to truly invest in their in-house maintenance team which is specifically relevant for mid-large size FM teams. 

How likely your FM team would go for such on-demand services in the future? Is your company using a real-time monitoring software? If you are already using mobile engineering services then share your experience with us. 

Recently the US EPA  (environmental protection agency) has updated the IAQ standards across commercial buildings and offices and highlighted the 3 important strategies to reduce the risk of spreading coronavirus.

1. Source control: That is to prevent pollutions to enter the office premise by strict inspection and monitoring of individuals, incoming air inlets, goods and material supply. This is by far one of the easiest and cost-effective methods to safeguard facilities.   
2. Better Ventilation: Improving the ratio of fresh air/indoor air circulation in the facility. Also identifying and redesigning the AHU network for hot zones where colling and air circulation is not effective enough. 
3. Installing air cleaners: This can improve the filtration of pollutants and stop them from further circulation. 

Ensuring the safety of the tenant is definitely one of the essential tasks for facility management teams; however, that shouldn’t become an excuse to neglect the energy efficiency or create a diversion from the energy intensity reduction targets.   

Improving ventilation or installing high-quality air filters can significantly increase energy consumption but it can be controlled and monitored with the help of the right building automation solutions. According to verdantix report Global Corporate Survey 2020, There are multiple air quality sensors, automation hardware and Air quality analytics application are getting launched in the market with that devising the right strategy to control and monitor the indoor air quality is getting important. 

What to track? 

According to WELL Building Standards, carbon dioxide (CO2) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are two primary indicators of good indoor air quality. Besides improving work productivity and hygiene it’s also important to keep a check on both the indicators to improve the energy efficiency of the building. Therefore air quality monitoring is gaining traction nowadays.

How to track?

Among the must-have list of sensors, most of the smart building infrastructure already follows Temperature, humidity, occupancy and ambient light sensors. They provide basic data on HVAC controlling and other operations and mostly integrated with the Building management system. 

There are few guidelines on designing a PCB to mount these sensors for optimum performance. Such as designing a PCB in such a way that it can take the temperature profile of the room and not the board or mounting structure. An ambient light sensor on the ceiling height will experience a different level of light to a person at a desk, so it is important to measure and adjust the lux levels during setup.

Tracking the CO2 and VOCs are a bit more difficult than the other type of sensors however three are two sensor technologies that are capable of picking up CO2. 1) Non-dispersive infrared (NDIR) technique. Which absorbs a particular wavelength of light and calculates the level of CO2 in it. 2) eCO2 sensor, This is a metal oxide (MOX) sensor and uses the principle that CO2 and VOCs exist together at a constant ratio inside typical buildings. It is an indirect measurement technique but is still valid for many applications.

Crosslink with other parameters

These sensor data can be clubbed with the occupancy and asset operations to control the CO2 levels and find out loopholes in the systems. The data collected by these smart detectors can then be used to adjust outside airflow in real-time for a more efficient operation. 

There are other technologies that can be considered on a trial basis such as Ultraviolet C (UVC) lighting, which is used for the disinfection of surfaces and spaces or humidification control for maintaining indoor humidity levels.

Having all the right sensors data is not sufficient but the complementary analytics solutions to correlate it with the building changes is also equally important. The facility management team should thrive to explore such building analytics software and make them as a part of their service delivery model.

when IAQ is your priority, how are you strategizing to improvise it along with aligning to performance contracts?

What is the first point of contact you establish when you visit a new website? Specifically when you have little time to spend and get the job done – Contact form? Or the tiny pop-up that comes out as a chatbot? It’s obvious to go on chatbot as it’s a quick and convenient way to ask for any query related to the product or services. This is just one use case for a consumer-facing, that is used to improve the conversion rate.

Chatbots are widely used across industries like fintech, healthcare, Edutech, and even law and they’re gaining importance as they are being used for multiple purposes. They are powered by advanced natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to simplify communication and provide what’s needed to the user. The Covid-19 pandemic has also turned a spotlight onto this technology, with many chatbots proving invaluable for handling a surge of consumer inquiries and concerns.

For a facility management industry, the Chatbot revolution is coming via mobile applications and that is not just limited to tenants or consumers but also backend operators Operations and maintenance teams. Hence in this article, we are going to talk about progress chatbots are making to simplify O&M team’s work and helping them in asset performance management.

Chatbot Over Mobile apps

In our last article on mobile technologies for FM, we highlighted how far mobile applications have come to improve inter-team efficiency and reduce the dependability of dashboards. While mobile apps provide filtered and specific information to the operator chatbot can further narrow it down and deliver on-demand insights. 

For example, if a technician wants to scan through a detailed maintenance history of a particular chiller he either open his mobile CMMS or asset maintenance application, selects the asset, and checks the historical data. Instead, he can just scan the QR code assigned to the chiller and ask a chatbot for the specific data. Of course that, the chatbot should be linked to the asset knowledge base so that it can fetch the raw data and provide it to the technician.   

Well, there is a psychological angle too, chatbot feels more human than the apps so for the workforce who are resistant to change their working style too often a transition to chatbot seems easier than the mobile application. NLP-powered chatbots use the understanding of sentence structure, idioms to determine user intent and respond accordingly.

Understanding Context and complex data      

When chatbots are integrated with the knowledge base of asset performance management applications they can offer first-level support by providing basic analysis. Chatbots are best at dealing with structured yet limited information. For example, the user can ask for the time series or regression analysis of the selected parameter and then share the graph or report with his colleague or supervisor. 

Auto mode for repetitive tasks 

Out of multiple tasks, there are few tasks an operator has to do repetitively on a daily basis for example checking the threshold values, changing manual setpoints, etc which can a boring and irritating activity. A chatbot can monitor the repetitive requests and automate the loop to provide instant alerts on the setpoints. It can identify a user’s daily analysis pattern and make those insights available to him on time.         

Communicate insights to team members

Mobile applications are great for inter-team communication but they come with limited ‘editing’ features. Consider a scenario where a chief engineer finds out an anomalous behavior of the AHU and wants his field technician to do a physical check and look for the past maintenance data. Now he can either call his technician or text him on the app but he is not able to show him what he has seen unless he takes a screenshot of the graph, annotates his views and shares it with him. Personalized chatbot and register vendor, user based on his login key and then customize UX accordingly.  

A chatbot can combine the features of a smart editor and the efficiency of the CMMS or asset management application without the need of installing separate applications on mobile. 

Chatbots can be deployed over multiple options – in-app, designated URL or a chrome extension which can be assessed over mobile and desktop at the same time. Since chatbots are basically server-side apps with a simple user interface, they are easier and faster to deploy in comparison with mobile applications.

What do you think, would your O&M team reap the benefits out of a chatbot? Are you planning to build one or interested to explore more?  Well, Xempla’s has a surprise feature update for you. Join us for the Product Wednesday on 24th Feb where we are going to demonstrate our new product feature related to the chatbot for facility management O&M teams. 

We saw the rise of mobile technologies along with the new age cloud-based CAFM and CMMS. It started with the work order management applications which later expanded to inter-team communication, inventory and asset management. But if we want to pinpoint the era when it really exploded for multiple usages and become the mainstream medium then it has to be in the lock down or the pandemic time.

Mobile applications are intended to allow maintenance professionals to move seamlessly between their desktop to smartphones, tablets, to other mobile devices.

In this article, we will talk about the ups and downs mobile technologies have gone through to become the most preferred choice among the facility management teams and the efforts of some of the leading Facility Management providers to make it accessible to their clients.  

Challenges overcome by mobile technologies:

Initially, moving from paper-based maintenance scheduling to spreadsheets was a challenge for most of the facility management teams. The kind of work they have been doing for ages will have to move on to an in-house desktop-based application which was a massive task for change management. 

Although the decision had a lot of benefits, it has to be communicated well to the ground level teams, then mid to large size Facility Management firms, the shift was relatively easier as the age and skill sets of the workforce management were more relevant to accept the change than the unorganized and small scale Facility Management firms. 

Those property management teams who started with the cloud based CMMS in the first place had a different set of challenges in front of them to move towards mobile-based applications. In fact, the challenge was two-folded: A) lack of adaptability B) Connectivity or Wi-Fi issues.

Adaptability:

Heather Wilkinson from Mapcon technologies, shared his view on the adoption of mobile technologies, “Operations engineers were resistant to change. If a plant has used a desktop version of CMMS software for years, many workers aren’t pleased about learning how to use it on a mobile device”  this was particularly true with the elderly staff. 

In one of our earlier blog post “New leadership strategy by Facility Management O&M teams” we have talked about synergies between FM applications and operations staff ideal application should not intimidate the operator rather leverage his skills and highlight the progress, make him feel comfortable working with it, and maintain the transparencies.

Connectivity:

Although the assets are well connected in a facility through wired communication channels, slow connection or WI-FI dead zones are still the issues facilities in tier 2, tier 3 cities are facing. Since most of the asset locations are either underground floors or in remote facility locations they create dead zones where there can be little or no Internet connection. For a mobile app or CMMS portal, maintenance-related data may get delayed to display or an operator may find it harder to input/save the data. 

But there is a solution too, a responsive native mobile app can store your data in case you lose the connectivity and provide real-time data as long as your connection works. This solves any connectivity and data storage-related issues. 

QR code: taking labeling to the next level

By now looking at primary challenges and finding appropriate solutions, Building a mobile app considering the persona of an operator and making him part of the solution is the prerequisite for successful deployment. Then came the features that add on to the existing application, QR codes and bar code technology for asset tagging came up with multiple use cases. A simple QR scan can show the operator the live status of the asset, can create the work order instantly and schedule the maintenance when required.

Now as the operations staff is a lot more familiar with the mobile technologies technology vendor or FM teams can build on his comfort levels and introduce workflow management, workplace optimization application or sustainable building management solution the further help him stay connected with the critical asset all the time and focus on insights that matter to him.   

Well if you are interested to explore how QR codes can maximize your O&M team’s efforts then you might want to join us for our Product Wednesday’s webinar which is going around Xempla’s new QR code related product feature. 

Though most of the buildings use Building management systems (BMS) to analyze and monitor their critical assets, they have come across a situation where even BMS have failed to detect the anomalous behavior of the asset. It has been only providing insights on retrospection analysis, which does little good to a large state of the art facility. So the exploration of other smart building technology solutions with a bigger picture have begun.

On a journey to unified building operations and maintenance practices, the next step leads to predictive maintenance by leveraging data analytics. A term that has been overused yet less understood among the property owners and service providers. So we thought, let’s dissect this term and highlight aspects that triumphant on conventional or planned preventive maintenance.        

Contextual insights

When an asset or the operational parameters are linked with the contextual information they often pinpoint the exact cause of the fault. For a commercial building, it could be an occupancy or (Indoor/outdoor) temperature that should be taken into consideration while predicting the exact cause of the asset failure. Having a piece of contextual background information can help in providing recommendations on asset settings as well as occupant’s behavioral aspects.  

Fault detection and diagnostics:

It starts with defining a ‘Fault’ or abnormal behavior of an asset. Most of the BMS dashboards follow some set of rules and set points to define asset operations. For example in an air handling unit the fan is drawing more current/power than the predefined value then the BMS sends an alert to an O&M team. This undermines some unseen scenarios:

• User or Operator would need to fix the setpoint based on his understanding (limited to his knowledge)   
• Any outlier value can be considered as a sign of a fault since it crosses the setpoint (without considering contextual information)

With this, the need for statistically driven anomaly detection techniques that can maximize building performance is increasingly growing.

According to James Dice, thought leader and consultant, The biggest challenge here are in driving action from FDD, he quoted that “With traditional solutions functioning as a human-in-the-loop tool, going from diagnostics to action to verification is not an easy route. More so when they are greatly limited by (manual) operating procedures”

Life Cycle analysis:

Some assets are prone to a sudden failure due to the nature of their working environment that is linked to historical performance. Tracking such incidences can help in predicting when the next failure and the probable reason for the same. 

Having data on asset tagging since the day of installation and subsequent maintenance activities according to the time stamp can unlock a lot of opportunities to predict the next failure and prevent it from happening. 

Operational accountability:

Although it has nothing to do with the assets, accountability of the O&M work can be an important part of a successful maintenance team. With the help of connected data infrastructure and IoT sensors, critical assets like lifts, elevators, and HVAC systems can transfer the command data to a centralized system on maintenance performed and check it for quality. 

As every task has been linked to an operator who is performing it, ensures transparency and accountability in work    

Now, these are some of the aspects that come in handy with predictive maintenance which is only possible if you are leveraging data analytics for the same. Of course, there are other benefits too such as improving the sustainability quotient of the building by reducing energy and resource losses and providing uninterrupted performance and a better experience to a tenant.             
Wanted to start with Reliability-based predictive maintenance practices? This article might help you lay down the next steps towards a comprehensive facility-wide approach to predictive maintenance and choosing a building analytics software for your organization.