Make Your Buildings Smarter with IBM Asset Management

Optimized asset management equals higher ROI

Service Management in Action In a difficult and unpredictable economy, it's increasingly important that organizations get the best possible return on their investments. And toward that end, enhanced asset management can pay impressive dividends over time.

Modern asset management solutions, such as the IBM Maximo family, deliver on that compelling idea by helping organizations effectively monitor, maintain and update the full range of assets—traditional assets, IT assets and emerging smart asset classes. Furthermore, they apply across the complete asset lifecycle, giving organizations a holistic perspective of asset performance that extends not just to the complete infrastructure, but forward and backward in time as well.

And by linking and correlating asset information across different operational domains and business processes—thus leveraging existing assets in new ways—the aptly-named IBM Maximo suite can maximize the ROI those assets generate.

IBM Maximo solutions help transform buildings into smart buildings

“IBM Maximo aggregates facilities asset data in a central repository, analyzes it and then orchestrates appropriate actions based on that analysis via a unified business process engine. This gives building managers not just centralized asset tracking, but centralized control of related processes—all under a single pane of glass.” For many organizations, Maximo’s powerful features can also apply in areas they may not be addressing particularly well at present. Consider, for instance, the context of building facilities.

Facilities complexities such as ongoing maintenance costs and suboptimal energy efficiency will naturally translate into a substantial drag on the business bottom line. The larger the organization, and the more buildings it utilizes, the bigger this problem will become.

There is also the question of business resilience to bear in mind. In the case of data centers, for instance, facilities that aren't maintained properly are nothing less than an Achilles heel from a business standpoint. If facility assets related to air conditioning or power fail, the data center's services may fail as well, resulting in a potentially devastating business impact.

Fortunately, the IBM Maximo Asset Management solution can help minimize such problems, their costs and their business impact. IBM Maximo aggregates facilities asset data in a central repository, analyzes it and then orchestrates appropriate actions based on that analysis via a unified business process engine. This gives building managers not just centralized asset tracking, but centralized control of related processes—all under a single pane of glass.

In this way, IBM Maximo can help transform an organization's buildings into smart buildings—buildings that can be managed to create more business value through the optimal management of their facilities assets during their lifecycle.

An impressive array of facilities management features and benefits

To understand how IBM Maximo applies in a building facilities context, consider the scope of its features:

Facilities maintenance: Tracking asset configuration and performance and taking suitable actions
Space planning: Getting the best business outcome via the smallest waste of square footage
Data center infrastructure management: Driving up service levels and driving down operational costs
Sustainability: Maximizing asset life-spans and deferring capital investment
Service management, including out-tasking and external vendors

By providing asset management functions in all of these areas, IBM Maximo Asset Management delivers unparalleled visibility into how well buildings are performing against target goals, and also gives managers the ability to take swift and effective action when needed.

In fact, in many cases that action can be proactive, rather than reactive.

Imagine that a cooling asset in a data center isn't performing up to specified levels. IBM Maximo can detect that shortfall, then automatically notify appropriate team members of the problem. Subsequently, the Maximo Asset Management can be used to create a prioritized schedule of corrective action (possibly involving external contractors who specialize in cooling units) in which the most critical tasks needed to resolve the issue are performed first.

This approach minimizes the odds that a failure will occur, and it does so in a way that takes into account an organization's full context. Assets will not only last longer; they will also perform at higher levels over their full lifecycles. And by proactively detecting addressing the root problem before it can create a business impact, the total costs of that problem will be dramatically reduced. Employees will be more productive, based on a more available infrastructure and improved uptime for asset-dependent internal services. And clients or customers who use outward-facing services will get a better and more consistent user experience.

Facilities managers will appreciate Maximo's extensive capabilities in the areas of inventory management and contract management, which make it a straightforward matter to determine exactly which assets an organization has, and what needs to be done with respect to the terms of asset-related contracts.

Warranty fulfillment, for example, can be pursued where appropriate with faulty assets, directly reducing operational costs. Similar benefits apply in the case of service level agreements; should an organization not be receiving specified service levels from a given vendor, IBM Maximo Asset Management can quantify the difference and spur a suitable response.

Even external contractors and vendors hired to resolve particular problems will be empowered in new ways. The Maximo Asset Management solution can give them direct access to the work they've been assigned, allow them to request updates and give them status notifications. These features make it simpler and faster for them to complete tasks, because they don't need to communicate with the organization's staff for key information.

The overall result is that buildings will generate superior business value through reduced costs, higher availability of key assets and services and a faster, more informed resolution of problems when they do occur.

From facilities maintenance to facilities management

And to make the benefits of facilities management even more comprehensive, IBM announced on April 29, 2010 it signed an agreement with Drawbase Software to enhance its capabilities around smarter buildings management. As part of the agreement, IBM will license Drawbase software code to add space management and space planning capabilities into its software portfolio of offerings.

The agreement with Drawbase accelerates IBM’s ability to help customers move from facilities maintenance to facilities management – analyzing critical building and operational information to make informed business decisions, improve efficiencies and reduce costs.

“Better management of buildings and facilities are an untapped source of efficiency for businesses in every industry,” said Bill Sawyer, vice president, IBM Software. “With the new space management capabilities from the Drawbase code, IBM can now help clients comprehensively manage the layout, space usage, maintenance, operations and assets of their facilities intelligently and in line with broader business objectives.”

IBM Maximo Asset Management delivers at a Canadian school district

Every day, organizations of all sizes, in many fields around the world, use IBM Maximo Asset Management solutions to achieve just these results.

One excellent example comes from the case of the Calgary Catholic School District (CCSD), in Alberta, Canada, which serves almost 45,000 students in over a hundred different schools.

That implies an exceptionally large and distributed facilities management challenge, and indeed the CCSD is responsible for maintaining roughly 2800 assets, including 600 portable classrooms that are designed to be shifted from location to location based on need.

Until recently, the CCSD managed facilities used a self-developed system in which work orders involved seven different parts. The result, however, was a relatively slow response to problem reports, and higher-than-desired maintenance costs. And because the CCSD was acquiring on average two new schools per year, these problems were growing quickly.

For these reasons, the CCSD's operations team decided to move to a new solution designed to achieve the following goals:

Streamline the service request process through a centralized architecture
Improve communications between contractors, schools and the district as a whole
Integrate data in diverse systems to eliminate duplicate entries and improve cost transparency

Their choice? IBM’s Maximo Asset Management. Today, the CCSD uses Maximo as the central asset management software solution which fulfill all three of those goals. The results have been impressive, to say the least—higher asset reliability, faster response time to reported problems, longer asset lifecycles and reduced costs.

In particular, one leading facilities challenge has been dramatically improved: heating schools in winter months. Canadian winters can be challenging, and in the past, the CCSD typically had to respond to more than thirty different service calls per day, particularly those involving heat in the portable classrooms. Today, that number has fallen by more than a full order of magnitude—to only two or three calls per week.

Going forward, the CCSD expects to receive even more business value from IBM Maximo Asset Management. Despite the fact that they continue to acquire new schools, and must address new facilities issues as a result, the CCSD hasn't had to hire more staffers. This is because Maximo has substantially improved overall process efficiency—allowing them to achieve more, yet requiring fewer resources per task.

And future plans include integrating school buildings’ automation systems with IBM Maximo to track the schools' power usage. This will give the CCSD key information it needs to reduce energy costs—allowing them to go green, in other words, by way of Big Blue.

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