Machines are the foundation for all aspects of modern living. Yet, machine health remains a blind spot in numerous industries ranging from water treatment to manufacturing to power generation and beyond. Industrial and commercial buildings are no exception. In an industry where margins are often inconsistent year-to-year due to equipment failures that affect critical building systems, it’s counterintuitive to ignore machine health.

When critical equipment fails it can be sudden, disruptive and costly on multiple fronts. There’s the monetary cost of fixing the machinery and the negative impact on occupants, whether it’s tenants or the building owner’s own employees. Many machine failures within a commercial building only become noticeable after occupants complain. This is often the unavoidable byproduct of monitoring through manual inspections on a monthly or quarterly basis – after what may have been a minor fault has progressed into a major issue.

The solution to avoiding these failures altogether is continuous diagnostics. With this strategy, sensors create a continuous stream of data from critical assets that can be accessed via the web and allow stakeholders to visualize machine health in real-time. Instead of having a reactive, fire-fighting strategy, facilities managers and building engineers can use continuous diagnostics to minimize unexpected downtime and maintenance costs while improving overall equipment reliability. Below are a few benefits that will drive the adoption of continuous diagnostics as a machine health solution within industrial and commercial buildings.

Capitalizing on the falling price of IoT & emergence of AI

It is often the largest technology companies that set the pace for the rest of the market, trickling over to industries they didn’t intend to change. IoT technology is beginning to become widespread across nearly all industries and is also becoming ingrained in consumers’ day-to-day lives. This technology is only going to get more affordable and commonplace as the investment in IoT is not expected to slow down any time soon.

IoT is the key to unlocking a new generation of smart buildings. Digital twinning, or creating a virtual representation of physical assets, has been a hot topic within the building sector. However, this concept has been hard for many buildings to implement. Often building owners are left with fragmented ecosystems of IoT sensors within their building that are generating high amounts of raw data that then need to be manually sifted through to be of any value. This data is also mostly basic telemetry: knowing when a machine is on or off, its temperature and pressure readings and other raw sensor data. However, there are countless cases where the control panel shows that a piece of equipment is fine, but there is an underlying issue that can’t be seen with raw data.

Continuous diagnostics and a focus on machine health can address these issues, as it can generate value right away. Continuous diagnostics leverages IoT with AI to create actionable insights from machine data, going beyond the basic readings of a control panel. AI driven processes gather data and identify patterns and anomalies at a rate that just isn’t possible manually. Once a fault is identified, it is compared to a database that then provides the best recommendation of how it can be fixed. This streamlines response and repair times, instead of creating additional responsibilities to diagnose machines. The industry is moving away from raw data and towards data-driven insights as it continues to become more sophisticated.

Overcoming the industry knowledge gap

The talent pool for facility managers is shrinking as a workforce comprised mainly of Baby Boomers continues to march towards retirement. Smart building technologies have largely been relied upon to help fill the gap and automate processes. Continuous diagnostics focused on machine health is no different. This is a good thing, as buildings have become exponentially more complex and sophisticated from a technology standpoint. Continuous diagnostics can easily be scaled from a single facility to a campus to facilities across the globe. With clear insights into machine health and the ability to predict faults, resources can be properly deployed, and technology can be used to partially fill the knowledge gap that a retiring generation is leaving behind.

Shifting away from an ownership mindset

Across different industries, people are becoming more receptive to the idea of opting for subscriptions over ownership and large capital outlays. Subscription models have disrupted plenty of traditional institutions within personal lives. Many choose renting homes over buying, streaming services instead of purchasing individual movies or songs, and now even major automotive companies are preparing to offer subscription options as an alternative to owning or leasing. These events are showing people are losing their appetite for large capital expenditures and prefer fixed expenses that provide peace of mind. This same mindset is occurring in the built environment as stakeholders seek “as-a-service” models to mitigate risk.

By implementing diagnostics-as-a-service, facilities managers and building engineers do not need to become IoT and data scientists overnight. Through a service model, technology is deployed by experts, wireless connectivity is optimized by experts and insights are delivered by experts. This strategy lets a building benefit from continuous, risk-free diagnostics and ensures that the other large capital assets that a building has invested will remain in good health.

Preserving a brand & productivity

Commercial and industrial facilities are no longer just geared toward getting work done. The architecture and design of buildings is increasingly becoming a reflection of a company’s brand and marketing strategy. However, no matter how aesthetically pleasing a facility is, it can leave a negative impact if critical infrastructure equipment isn’t working properly. This can have serious repercussions if a faulty facility is the first impression that is created for a potential business partner, customer or even new hires.

The health of critical assets in a building can also impact employee productivity. Take temperature as an example. The U.S. Department of Commerce sites that overly heated workplaces can cause fatigue and irritability in employees. Studies from Cornell University have shown that workers that struggle to stay warm also are more prone to mistakes, which can lead to a 10 percent spike in labor costs. This all underscores the importance of preventing downtime of and faults within buildings systems through continuous diagnostics.

Cutting costs

Continuous diagnostics can reduce operating costs, even within facilities that were previously deploying preventative maintenance programs. This was the case for a healthcare facility that decided to make the switch. By using diagnostics-as-a-service, the facility was able to start monitoring 70 critical machines throughout the facility in real-time. Among those machines were two domestic hot water pumps which serviced 90 percent of the building’s hot water. It was instantly discovered that there was a significant misalignment between motor and pump. The facility was able to proactively replace the coupling and perform alignments on both pumps. This prevented US$29,000 in repair costs per pump and a total $500,000 in repair costs were avoided across the facility.

With continuous diagnostics, buildings can implement a risk-free solution as a service, dramatically cut operating costs and downtime, and capitalize on cutting-edge technology innovations. And while a facility can take advantage of all these benefits, it doesn’t come at the expense of overburdening its staff of facilities maintenance and building engineers. Instead, it augments their abilities and allows them to focus on the most impactful functions of their jobs.