Building Analytics Comparison Guide
FDD vs. “Beyond FDD”
It’s 2021 and in the last decade, we have experienced unprecedented technology changes that have effectively re-engineered how we live our daily lives. However, there are still industries, like commercial buildings, that are struggling to adopt and implement new technology. Sure, many early adopters have tried numerous technologies like Fault Detection and Diagnostics (FDD) to push the industry forward, but the results have been mixed. Why? Because the technology was built for the tech-savvy, early adopter and was not yet ready for the mainstream user. The mainstream user wants to use technology that is simple, fast and scalable with an emphasis on the second “D” in FDD - diagnostics. They don’t want to know the problem but want to know the solution in a way that’s easy to understand.
The Challenges
The Building Conundrum
It’s perplexing that despite many attempts to implement siloed and semi-integrated best of breed FDD technologies, we still can’t easily answer these basic questions:
Which leads one to wonder, are we attempting to solve the problem the wrong way?
The Traditional Building Approach
Traditional FDD has come a long way over the past 10 years. Users now have access to more data analysis and insights but still experience challenges when they want to transfer insights into proactive service actions. When a problem requiring human intervention surfaces, the part of the downstream services workflow is generally disconnected from FDD building analytics. Instead, there’s generally a manual process hand-off where someone physically enters a service work order ticket into a work management system. The rich analytical insights discovered in the FDD tool are either lost in the hand off or are significantly simplified in the transfer. This action negates the benefit of achieving faster time to service resolution to improve comfort, save energy and/or extend equipment longevity.
What’s needed is to take a step back and reframe the problems that need to be solved.
Survive or thrive – It’s a Choice
Customer expectations are changing. Everything is now driven by the insatiable desire for immediate gratification, personalization, and intelligent automation to win more business and remain relevant in the competitive marketplace. In the HVAC business what worked well a few years ago might have been to have little to no remote analytics visibility or access to an analytics program decipherable only by an advanced power user. But times are changing.
Data Driven Maintenance = Combo of Diagnosis + Service Resolution
Now what’s being asked of building analytics is two things:
1. Transition from a back-office tool to a front-office tool.
2. Expand reach into the service workflow to provide vital diagnostic insights into the hands of the most important asset – the mobile technician.
Building analytics was once relegated for the technical professional with the knowledge and context to interpret trends and graphs, like a radiologist reading an X-Ray, to uncover the problems with the equipment/system and why. The shift for building analytics has been to evolve from a niche technical tool to a mainstream user tool. Through analyzing time-series building data, the user is able to uncover intelligent insights and root cause recommendations that can be quickly prioritized, deciphered by both the experienced and the junior technician.
The next critical element is to get prioritized issues promptly into the services workflow for a hybrid services model whereby some of the issues can be fixed/triaged remotely and other issues can be quickly fixed by scheduling a technician and a truck. While it’s great that building analytics can poll data in near real-time, this is of limited to no value if the insights don’t translate into service action and prompt resolution.
For this to happen, building analytics needs to extend its reach beyond analysis to service action by either offering automated service workflow apps or by integrating with existing work order management apps. These solutions will help streamline efficiencies to not only resolve the issue(s) but also delight the tenant.
This is achieved when building analytics triggers a service request which is promptly picked up by a service process to schedule a service call and immediately dispatch the key building fault details, system impact, and recommended fix to a technicians’ mobile.
This type of approach is required to achieve lower operational costs, productivity improvements, and high customer satisfaction scores. A key side benefit is this proactive intelligence greatly aligns with the automation trend in all industries. It is particularly important in the HVAC industry and will assist with attracting and retaining talent to adapt and thrive in the current and future skilled labor shortage.
The goals to survive or thrive are similar, but what separates the thriving leaders (e.g., UBER) from the survivors (e.g, taxis) is the ability to adapt and align with the industry rather than evolving incrementally. The leaders are always poised to move ahead by using technology to achieve lower operational costs while also experiencing higher customer retention rates and therefore higher gross margins.
The Solution
What’s Needed in 2021 and Beyond is an Ecosystem Approach
To solve the multi-dimensional problem of knowing:
1. How are my buildings doing?
2. Are they getting better or worse?
3. What are the best opportunities for improvement?
4. Have past improvements been successful?
We need to connect the various silos of information into a field services ecosystem driven by building analytics insights.
First, building analytics need to evolve to meet the needs of the technician and not the heavily technical power user. To do this, we need to break the mold of requiring an expert user to decipher the data and instead create analytical rules that spot patterns, prioritize high-value work, and provide root cause diagnostics with system effect and recommendations, in actionable and easy-to-understand language.
While the evolution of traditional FDD is getting better, an ecosystem approach that ties in three other equally important elements will more easily answer those four building questions.
1) Energy Benchmarking: In addition to analyzing Building Automation Systems (BAS) with FDD building analytics tools, it’s necessary to include utility bill data for Energy Star benchmarking. This data will help determine if buildings are getting better or worse and if past improvements have paid off. The ecosystem approach breaks the bottleneck between what traditional FDD identifies as high-priority issues impacting energy. It also bridges the gap between building analytics and work order management to finally enable proactive action.
2) Work Order Management: When an issue is identified it ordinarily needs to be scheduled for dispatch in a separate system resulting in a loss of valuable troubleshooting data that the FDD identified, causing a gap in the work order process. What’s needed is for the diagnostic data along with the system effect and recommendation to get into the hands of the most valuable person in the service workflow - the technician.
What the technician needs is diagnostics with system effect and recommended fix so that they are prepared with the right parts to resolve the service call. What invariably happens is the tech is sent out with limited information resulting in extended service troubleshooting time along with the second call required to resolve the service ticket.
The ecosystem approach connects the FDD tool to the services workflow to create a feedback loop between the service manager, service technician, facilities manager, and building analytics FDD tool.
3) Open Ecosystem: Every building and business system is unique and unfortunately one solution does not fit all. To adapt and change, the ecosystem approach must be able to integrate with other business applications (e.g., CMMS, ERP) via an easy-to-use web API. This allows the building analytics data to extend into other service workflow applications and streamline the business processes while eliminating redundancies, delays, and errors.
Bring Solutions with Beyond FDD
To maintain HVAC systems at peak performance, lower energy, improve comfort and extend equipment longevity requires an integrated approach. First, building analytics needs to stop bringing problems and start bringing solutions. Second, the recommended solutions need to initiate service action, from scheduling to mobile dispatch, so that building analytics no longer is incorrectly labeled as a tool that’s all talk and no action. Finally, by integrating the combination of building analytics + energy benchmarking + automated service workflows we can easily answer our four initial questions.
Beyond FDD Solves Problems in a Different Way
It takes what Einstein so eloquently said many years ago “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” It’s time to explore a different way to solve the 2021 building dilemma. It’s time to Meet BOB. #BOBKnows Beyond FDD
A New Approach for This Decade
Explore a new way to solve FDD that is simple, fast and scalable to quickly on-board a new building. And say goodbye to needing a PhD in data science. Better yet, meet a new platform with a mission to go beyond traditional FDD to master the smart building ecosystem. Meet BOB and experience a new approach to FDD.