Why Predictive Maintenance is more than just a buzz phrase

Author : Andy Donnelly

16 January 2023

Andy Donnelly, Elogbooks Technical Business Development Manager, discusses how Predictive Maintenance and Smart Buildings will make greater business sense in 2023...

Predictive Maintenance

Although Predictive Maintenance has been a buzz term in the FM industry for a while now, the changes that have been brought about by the new ESG legislation, and of course the rising costs of energy, mean that Predictive Maintenance will become more than an idea for many businesses. For those who are not familiar with the term Predictive Maintenance (PdM), it uses data and technology to detect possible defects in equipment, allowing you to intervene before that business-critical moment.

Assets need to be tracked through their lifespan, monitoring the degradation of the asset, while having an overview of all work carried out on that asset, planned or reactive maintenance. Working with your service provider, the asset should be graded on every maintenance visit. This will give an easy visual into the condition of the asset, allowing you to combine this with replacement costs and job history, giving you an effective data driven system to help you create your Predictive Maintenance processes.

Data is key to any PdM system and the more data you are able to access, the more efficient your system will become. A combination of asset condition, historical asset data, asset audits and a view of your PPMs against the asset will give you all the data you need to be able to set up your PdM system with your service provider. Until now, a PdM system for most businesses has seemed like a major investment in technology, but, in reality, it is more of a process driven by data that most businesses, certainly those using Elogbooks, already have access to.

Smart Buildings

Smart Buildings will become the future for all tenanted buildings into 2023 and beyond, allowing the monitoring of footfall, vacant spaces, energy consumption and plant room operations amongst many other things. An issue with Smart Building technology until now is that most systems are aimed at new buildings, or buildings that are going through a large renovation. Most property portfolios contain between 80% to 90% existing buildings, often without renovation plans, meaning that smart building technology is not readily available to them.

However, there are solutions for older properties to become ‘smart’ in various ways; the most obvious, and probably cost effective, is a retro-fit sensor system to allow building managers sight of buildings from a whole different perspective.

A retro-fit sensor system allows you to gather real-time data from a variety of sensors; tracking everything from footfall through to leak detection in the plant room. The system relays the data back to a portal where you have access to all the sensor information you require and is displayed in various formats, including floorplans. Smart building technology puts intuitive property performance data into the hands of those who need it. Feedback from our 4D Monitoring clients has been clear; being able to identify energy saving opportunities, improve operational efficiency, inform maintenance strategies, and reduce utility costs has made a vast impact on their businesses.

With both Predictive Maintenance and Smart Building technology, 2023 will offer the power from new technologies to change the way we work well beyond the next year and revolutionise our practises well into the future.

To further information on Elogbooks and 4D Monitoring, please visit the Elogbooks website https://bit.ly/3TC5Zdd.

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