With the increasing availability of cost-effective networked thermostats, controls, and sensors, many companies and service providers have unprecedented remote access and visibility into their facilities. We call this emergence of increasingly intelligent building systems Energy Management 2.0, or EMS 2.0.
So for companies that provide facility maintenance services to their clients, how do you leverage the capabilities of EMS 2.0 to turn your company into a service hero?
Fundamentally, EMS 2.0 can enable facility maintenance firms to deliver higher levels of service, more proactively, and at higher levels of profitability.
By gaining remote visibility into buildings – especially with visibility down to the equipment level – a facility maintenance firm can often discover problems with equipment before the client discovers them. EMS 2.0 gives diagnostic insight before a technician is dispatched to a client site to resolve a problem, which means less time on-site to resolve the problem and the ability to ensure that the technician will have any necessary parts on-hand to fix the problem.
In addition, EMS 2.0 systems enable a deeper dive into equipment performance to uncover and resolve many issues that tend to go undetected but add significantly to maintenance costs and energy consumption, and decrease equipment lifespan. These issues can include:
- Short-cycling compressors
- Broken economizers
- Overloaded compressors
- Over / under temperature
- Thermostat set-point anomalies & excessive overrides
With just a few points of data, including real-time energy consumption at the equipment level, thermostat set points, ambient temperatures, HVAC duct temperatures, and outside air temperatures, effective EMS 2.0 software can make it quite simple to detect and react to these previously hidden problems.
A 2012 HVAC survey by the Professional Retail Store Maintenance Association (PRSM) revealed that:
- Repair procedures are overwhelmingly reactive in nature
- Reactive repairs cost, on average, $622 per service call
- Planned repairs cost, on average, $207 per service call
If facility maintenance providers have access to the insights available through EMS 2.0, they can help their clients improve profitability by reducing expensive reactive repairs. By significantly improving the effectiveness of lower-cost planned maintenance while delivering maintenance services proactively and in a more cost-effective manner, you’ll be a hero to your facility maintenance clients.
