French Quarter, New Orleans

Recently, RSC attended the 2019 ARCHIBUS Nexus Conference in New Orleans. The trip was filled with lots of good food and beautiful accommodations from the Chophouse steakhouse and the InterContinental hotel. The conference week itself was full of catching up with old friends and colleagues and intriguing discussions about the facilities world’s present and future. Below are some of RSC’s favorite highlights from the speakers at the conference.

Where is the facilities world currently?

Dr. Sarel Lavy, from Texas A&M, talked about the current state of the facilities world to demonstrate how using data can drive performance. Lavy had conducted much of his own research concerning how the facilities world is being most utilized and the importance of facilities in today’s economy.

For example, did you know that the global facilities economy circulates $1.1 trillion? Did you also know that 20% of the U.S. GDP is contributed to by the facilities field? This is great news for facilities as we grow and look for future expansion opportunities.

Lavy was also able to narrow down the most important KPI’s in the facilities world—out of almost 200 KPI’s found in literature on the subject— to four main categories:

  • Financial (Cost)
  • Physical (Condition Assessment)
  • Functional (Occupancy / Utilization)
  • Survey (Satisfaction)

Knowing that these four KPI’s are given the most attention helps the facilities world immensely. Measuring performance in general allows facilities managers and IWMS providers to know what clients are looking for in terms of output from their IWMS system, and deliver the best, customized product to companies looking to track assets. In turn, the big data that companies gain from IWMS systems can drive and inform their own strategic decisions in an array of areas.

ARCHIBUS Serraview Merger

Last year in December, ARCHIBUS and the Australia-centered IWMS company, Serraview, merged and are now working on merging products. New products will incorporate ARCHIBUS’s wide range of modules and capabilities with Serraview’s cloud-based, IoT-powered platform. Read more about this in our later article, ARCHIBUS and Serraview Merger, and ARCHIBUS’s article on the subject.

ARCHIBUS Workplace

ARCHIBUS is currently working on a light-weight, responsively designed, quick-responding user interface called ARCHIBUS Workplace. This application will allow employees within a company to find other employees, find work and meeting spaces, and request moves through their phones, tablets, and other devices. This mobility is an exciting step forward for the facilities world.

Sustainability and Resiliency

Another fascinating speaker was Dr. Sarah Slaughter, who talked about making buildings more sustainable. As the president of the Built Environment Coalition, she focused her discussion around two key words: resilience and sustainability. According to the Built Environment Coalition, resilience is “the ability to accommodate changes and disruptions over time and maintain critical functions of all interdependent systems”1 and sustainability is “the improvement of social systems to better provide social justice, economic opportunity, and environmental regeneration”1.

Dr. Slaughter indicated that oftentimes people may perceive sustainability as only possible when a building is first being constructed. This is, in fact, not the case. There are many ways to make a building sustainable once it has been built and established, and there are standards for determining how to do this, like the ISO 55000. Some of the tips Dr. Slaughter gave on how to make a building more sustainable and resilient are:

  • look to data, like weather, to help plan for emergencies.
  • observe traffic and construction data to see how a building may be affected by another project.
  • use routine maintenance as an upgrade opportunity to install sustainable systems.
  • think about how energy can be shared, like partnering with another town or building.

Take-aways

All in all, there are many changes that are happening in the facilities world, both on  global and granular scales. There will be many opportunities in this industry within the coming years for growth and development, which will ultimately change the direction of the facilities world to adapt to the ever-changing tech world.


Sources:

1Built Environment Coalition: What is Sustainability? What is Resilience?


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