IBM Increases Building IQ for Superior Efficiency, Reliability and ROI

Smarter buildings yield a better business outcome

Service Management in Action When IBM talks about adding intelligence to infrastructures, people usually think specifically of IT. IBM's vision of a smarter planet empowered by smarter management, however, is actually much more comprehensive than that, encompassing the full scope of all an organization's assets—including entire buildings.

For buildings, just as for IT, the idea is to leverage information in new ways, link domains that had previously been separated, and ultimately drive a superior outcome via enhanced visibility, control, and automation. Given that kind of insight and power, it becomes significantly easier to address emerging challenges of all kinds.

One such challenge, for instance, is energy efficiency. Already, commercial buildings are estimated to consume more than 40% of all energy; as a result, they are also a major contributor to the global problem of unwanted climate change through excess C02 emissions. And going forward, projections suggest that unless organizations move to resolve it, the trend will only get worse. By 2025, according to some studies, buildings will be the dominant consumer of energy. Yet that energy isn't and won't be efficiently utilized; instead, up to half of it is typically wasted.

The same trending issue threatens to expand to public relations as well. As the public becomes more conscious of the importance of green design and implementation, it will likely reward the organizations it perceives as green, and penalize those it doesn't.

There are also, of course, fiscal aspects of building management to consider. In an unpredictable economy, getting the best possible return on investment from all assets is key to business success. Yet building ROI is often difficult even to establish—let alone optimize. How can organizations best manage large campuses of buildings, or diverse real estate investments, to improve their efficiency, increase tenant satisfaction, and create more favorable leasing terms?

Answering such questions accurately will typically require more information than is currently available. It will also require innovative solutions designed to deliver that information, and help organizations make the best use of it via enhanced services to drive up building ROI and efficiency while driving down costs and management complexity.

IBM solutions infuse buildings with new operational and management intelligence

“IBM's solutions for Smarter Buildings empower organizations to aggregate building information (spanning many diverse assets and services), analyze that information, correlate it across domains, and compare the results to targets and business policies. It also empowers organizations to take effective action—both automated and manual—to drive a better, smarter outcome.” This is exactly where IBM’s solutions for Smarter Buildings can help. The solutions empower organizations to aggregate building information (spanning many diverse assets and services), analyze that information, correlate it across domains, and compare the results to targets and business policies. The solutions also empower organizations to take effective action—both automated and manual—to drive a better, smarter outcome.

The results? Cases will naturally vary from deployment to deployment, but consider these common statistics for IBM-driven smarter buildings:

Up to 40% reduction in energy usage and costs
Up to 30% reduction in maintenance costs
Up to 90% occupancy rate
Up to 18% increase in employee productivity

Those are compelling numbers likely to command respect from any building manager—or, for that matter, any chief financial officer. And they merit a closer look at how IBM solutions for Smarter Buildings can be combined to create such broad and significant value.

Unifying building management to pursue holistic business goals

Today's buildings are typically a long way from a cohesive, optimized whole in which all available information and services are integrated to drive best value over time.

Instead, they are better described as a diverse array of services, assets, and processes—each managed independently and only loosely linked, if they're linked at all.

Consider, for instance, this typical list of services and functions:

Portfolio management
Asset management
Energy efficiency
Building services (including maintenance)
Occupancy and space management
Tenant services, such as via a help desk
Waste management
Regulatory compliance

Each is implemented as a separate world (resembling, in this sense, the technology silos that have long defined enterprise-class IT). Each creates its own information, measures it, and manages it, in its own way.

IBM's vision is simply a smarter approach. With IBM's help, organizations can link these and other operational clusters in order to make buildings more reliable, cost-effective, and sustainable in many different senses. Energy and operating costs will, as a result, fall; environmental responsibility, tenant/employee safety and security, and building ROI will all climb.

All of this is made possible via real-time communication that spans domains. That is, information is continually collected, analyzed, and displayed in intuitive, color-coded operational dashboards. It's also correlated against thresholds, targets, business policies, and regulation requirements. This centralized, simplified management architecture then yields improved visibility, control, and automation in the pursuit of business goals.

Energy management: The time for change is now

The leading challenge for building management going forward is energy efficiency. Fortunately, a number of IBM solutions can help establish and quantify energy efficiency, as well as leverage that information to get a better outcome over time.

One such solution is IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management. Thanks to an extensive list of IBM business partnerships with facilities providers, this solution can collect data from many different types of facilities assets, including HVAC units, lighting systems, and others. Once this data is aggregated, it can be analyzed at any necessary level of granularity or abstraction—for instance, to determine the energy efficiency of heating/cooling within a building, track a building's overall energy efficiency, or baseline the efficiency of a collection of buildings on a campus.

Also directly on point is IBM Maximo Asset Management for Energy Optimization. Given information from the IBM Tivoli Monitoring solution, this offering can render it, in real time, for direct visibility into changing conditions and a fast response to emerging problems. Configurable maps can be created to illustrate, for instance, how heat, power, humidity, and other key metrics are changing in any building or subsection within it. If a problem manifests, that problem will be easy to spot—and the response to it will be accelerated.

Operations management: Tracking all assets, over their complete lifecycle

Operations, too, is an area where IBM solutions have much to offer building managers.

In particular, the IBM Maximo Asset Management family of solutions can create value in ways that go far beyond energy management per se—allowing organizations to monitor and manage the complete range of their assets, including mobile, fixed, digital, analog, and even mechanical assets, across their complete lifecycles.

Because assets can easily be managed and maintained for better performance, those lifecycles also increase in length; each asset managed in this way thus generates better ROI over time. The value in the context of buildings, which have a wide variety of different asset groups and assets, is clear: Maximo family solutions can help link and correlate information in direct fulfillment of IBM's Smarter Buildings strategy, which links and correlates building domains that are typically separate.

IBM Maximo for Service Providers, for instance, can standardize and manage processes even when they apply to multiple customers, over multiple physical locations. For service providers, whose business arrangements often involve specific terms and rules that change from client to client, that is a powerful value proposition indeed.

Space management: Drive up the ROI per square foot

How can building managers get the best use of floor space? One excellent answer to that question: IBM Maximo Space Management for Facilities, which supplies complete, yet intuitive visualization of floor plans, and the assets they involve. This information can then support consolidation initiatives, ensuring as little space is wasted as possible.

In the specific case of data centers—the heart of IT operations, and often very space-challenged—IBM Maximo Data Center Infrastructure Management can create similar value. This offering gives IT managers a broad array of key information that they need to ensure IT assets are arranged in the most efficient and productive manner. That includes not just space utilization, but also related data like power requirements, power capacity, and heat dissipation.

IBM's recent acquisition of TRIRIGA will optimize building management in many new ways

For proof of IBM's ongoing commitment to improving its building management solution portfolio over time, consider that in April IBM acquired TRIRIGA (link resides outside of ibm.com)—a leading provider of facility and real estate management solutions. These solutions, to be integrated with IBM's current suite, will create value for building managers in a variety of impressive new respects.

In the context of energy efficiency, for instance, TRIRIGA TREES can help organizations tailor energy investment planning by identifying the best investment opportunities and tracking the ROI those investments generate over extended periods of time. If organizations want to establish a carbon footprint for a building, or any logical group of them, they can. This is key information helpful for identifying cost reduction opportunities, reducing environmental impact, and improving an organization's brand strength through positive public relations. TRIRIGA solutions can also help optimize environmental sustainability, and reduce costs, in a larger sense; they provide detailed visibility into utilities consumption generally, including not just electricity, but also gas and water.

Additional TRIRIGA solutions will enhance IBM's building management strategy in other contexts. These include:

Real estate portfolio management and strategic planning. Determining future space requirements, growth needs, and occupancy costs will be easier than ever using these solutions. And once armed with that information, managers will be empowered to make decisions that yield the best possible long-term ROI. For instance, accurately projecting the demand for occupancy in a given building or group of them can simplify the process of determining lease terms, which is certainly relevant to building owners with many tenants.
Capital project management. Managing buildings over time for best business results means being able to assess specific building conditions and create a prioritized plan designed to drive positive change in the ways that will benefit organizations the most. TRIRIGA solutions can play a key role in that process—pinpointing the most promising candidates for improvement quickly and accurately. They can, for instance, determine the need for and value of new heating/cooling asset investments versus alternative areas that might require attention such as plumbing or roofing.

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