Key Takeaways:
Fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) can help building owners improve energy performance, occupant comfort and day-to-day operations—but technology alone is not enough. Building Operating Management spoke with Christian Whitaker, global head of technical services and sustainability with JLL, about why owners need to set clear goals, plan for investments that address identified problems and account for IT-OT security and data-access hurdles.
BOM: What is the owner’s role in getting FDD technology into facilities and having it deliver tangible benefits to organizations?
Christian Whitaker: (The first role is) setting the core priorities for a program. Why are you really doing this? Is it because of occupant comfort? Is it because you feel like there’s energy value there? Setting those priorities as the owner of the facility is incredibly important because that flows down through everybody in that food chain.
It flows to the property manager who’s operating the facility on behalf of the owner. It flows down to the facilities engineers and operators who are taking direction from the property manager. It flows down to the vendors who are taking direction from the property management company. Establishing the clear criteria of success is the first thing that an owner needs to do as a participant in the process.
The second thing, which is equally as important, is to have an expectation of backing up a program with necessary capital investments to solve the problems. Diagnosing the problem is half of the battle. Then it’s executing against that. That doesn’t mean fixing everything, but it means looking at the asset in the context, ‘How do I prioritize the limited capital dollars I have to get the best return on those investments?’ and then having clear criteria for how those decisions are made.
BOM: Are there particular roadblocks or misconceptions about FDD among owners?
Whitaker: The first one that tends to trip people up is the IT-OT (information technology-operational technology) infrastructure challenge — getting through the information security requirements for the building but then also ensuring that we have access to the data that we need. Surprisingly, this can end up taking months, if not years, to actually get connected into the facilities in order to extract the data.
A lot of this comes from an abundance of caution around information security and not wanting that data to be accessible through third parties. That’s a noble pursuit. In this industry in particular, fault detection and building automation has gotten caught up in the IT chase for information security around proprietary data versus the OT data necessary to run the facility.
Often, they’re caught up in the same (information security) processes, despite the fact that one may have more consequential outcomes than another. Underestimating that process is probably the single biggest challenge that I see in the industry writ large.
BOM: What else should building owners know about FDD?
Whitaker: It’s not just about energy and occupant comfort. That’s what we think about when we think about FDD because those tend to come up as the economic drivers for programs. But the benefits can extend quite a bit beyond that.
A use case that we have found extremely valuable to our clients involves things like demand-based services through bulk monitoring. We can actually integrate, for example, into (carbon dioxide) monitors in spaces. We can integrate into occupancy monitors in spaces. Instead of sending a custodian in to do bathroom cleaning every two hours on a clock, we can now use a demand-based system to say, “Actually, there’s been no occupants in that facility for the past six hours. We don’t need to dispatch custodial services today.”
There is some real economic value and optimizing the holistic performance of operating a building that are beyond the traditional mechanical controls.
Dan Hounsell is senior editor for the facilities market. He has more than 30 years of experience writing about facilities maintenance, engineering and management.
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