How to Reduce Energy with a Building Operations Center
Learn how Mechanical Services Providers and Energy Service Companies
maximize building energy efficiency and cut costs
Insights by Tim Cramer | Director of Solution Consulting | Key2Act
24/7 Remote Building Monitoring Cuts Costs
A Building Operations Center (BOC) is similar in many ways to a Network Operations Center (NOC). The primary difference is instead of focusing on network performance, it focuses on the building performance of any number of building operations ranging from energy management to mechanical systems and comfort control to performing monitoring-based commissioning.
Change Management: From Reactive to Proactive
The goal of the Building Operations Center should be to deliver proactive, just-in-time service on a wide range of potential issues, as well as being able to predictively and prescriptively identify issues before they become failures.
Building the Business Case
In order to successfully implement a BOC, we first need to define how our business strategy should be built around its capabilities. The following considerations should be made:
· Service Offering – The first and most critical strategic decision to make is what services you intend to offer with your BOC and how you intend to charge for those services. By its nature, a BOC implies some level of asset monitoring, diagnostic, and resolution. Depending on the asset, these services can sometimes be offered entirely remotely or may require a field technician. These services can be charged as part of a recurring service agreement or delivered as time and material on demand. In any case, the scope of the services and their costs must be clearly defined to give context to all following business and technology decisions.
· Operating Hours – Depending on the types of systems being served and the services offered, there may be dramatic differences in needed hours for managed services. Some may inherently require 24/7/365 operations. Others may only require regular business hours. This needs to be discussed and established in advance. Operating 24/7/365 will not only require additional staffing but also contingency plans must be made for power failures, storm/travel conditions, and any other potential interruptions to normal operations.
· Scale – At a per-site or even per campus basis, BOCs stand very little chance of being profitable. The more connected and larger scale of sites a BOC can serve, the greater the returns on investment. For example, 24/7/365 operations typically require a minimum of 5-7 staffed employees, even if they are only servicing a single site. This level of service can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars annually and could make it cost-prohibitive to service a single location. Often, hundreds of sites can be serviced with only 2-3x increases in staffing. This makes the costs much easier to spread among multiple locations and equates to an opportunity for higher margins at each site.
· Staff Skill Level/Tiers – This can depend largely on the services offered as well as technology solutions deployed. As a rule, higher-cost technologies tend to be able to be managed by lower-cost staff and vice versa. The more cognitive load we can move to our technology solutions, the less skilled team members we need. Tiers of staff members can then be utilized, where junior members handle more basic service functions like reading reports, receiving requests, and reporting outcomes, while more skilled team members perform more difficult functions like adapting new processes, evaluating existing processes, or high-level troubleshooting and implementation. There will always be a need for at least one highly experienced subject matter expert to oversee and supervise the BOC in all applications.
Choosing the Best Technology Solution
The next strategic decision in effective operation of a BOC is to determine the type of technology that can be utilized or deployed to effectively monitor, diagnose, and affect asset performance and maintenance. The following are common BOC technology solutions and their desired results.
· Asset Monitoring – There needs to be a means to monitor the controlled assets in the service portfolio. Monitoring can come in a wide variety of forms, including everything from IoT devices to Building Automation Systems to utility meters. The key objective here is we need to identify the data source in order to monitor and analyze the performance of the assets needing service.
· Fault Detection and Diagnostics – BOC staff need to be aware of the problems that could be happening and when they are occurring through automated problem identification and diagnostic to feed. This system must be adaptable to changing needs and methods of evaluation. At the most basic, this can be IoT or BAS alarm system, but the goal should be to install a scalable FDD system with analytics capabilities beyond device or system-specific alerting.
· Reporting/Visualization – To realize the KPIs that assure appropriate service delivery, we need access to visualization, business intelligence, and/or reporting tools. Using these tools, we can better understand if the fix worked, the costs reduced, and/or revenues increased. These KPI’s help show not only the value of the work performed but also the value driven by the BOC.
· Call Center Software – While not the highest value proposition of the BOC, it will inevitably need to offer call center functionality. It will require the means to both contact customers to communicate problems, statuses, and solutions as well as a means to receive inbound requests for new issues and updates. This means we need robust technology solutions to handle what could be numerous inbound calls to various agents. Some higher-level features/functions that should be considered here are call recording, call parking and transfer, automated voicemail, prerecorded responses, listen-in functions (for leadership and training), and call conferencing, among others. It is also a best practice to consider true “omnichannel” support by including communication via text message, email, and social media.
· Issue Tracking/Maintenance Management – Armed now with the tools necessary to track and identify service issues for our clients, we need a tool to track the service workflow steps and status from triage to diagnosis to resolution. These tools come in many forms, often specialized to the specific services delivered and can be highly contextualized in their form and function.
Business Outcomes of Remote Building Analytics
With the goals of our BOC clearly defined and our strategies determined, what are the deliverables we expect to provide to our clients? While the specifics of those deliverables will be highly dependent on the services we intend to offer and the technologies we intend to use, there are a few general categories of deliverables that we can define that are expected in a BOC.
· Enhanced Service Level Agreement (SLA) – The entire underlying purpose of this type of service model is to deliver services at a higher level than were previously possible. This may be a requirement based on the client served (data centers, laboratories, healthcare, etc.) or it may simply be a way to add value to elective services on high-value clients or clients seeking to add to their own competitive advantage. As such, the BOC should expect to include line items in their service agreement that guarantee flat or predetermined rates and/or reduced time frames to service delivery. They may also include extended or more robust warranties of work based on the higher degree of certainty in resolution and verification.
· Enhanced Communication/Reporting – Even the best service can fall flat in customer appreciation if not coupled with effective communication and reporting. Clients need to know they are getting the value for what will be positioned as a premium service. Client communications should be prompt and highly informative. Reports should be simple, concise, and include only the details and information necessary to demonstrate resolution.
How to Get Started
Learn more about a unique offering, called the Building Optimization Broker (BOB), which combines building optimization with proactive service workflows and energy utility analytics to build your own Building Operations Center. Meet BOB. Or Schedule a Consultation.
About the Author:
Tim Cramer | Director of Solution Consulting | Key2Act
10+ years in HVAC/BAS as a Property Manager (22 buildings), and BAS Service Operations Manager (over 1,500 buildings – commercial, retail, residential)