IoT in Facilities Management: Real-World Use Cases & Examples

Blog Post

7 Feb

Monday, 7th February 2022

The world of facilities management is changing fast—and it’s technology that’s driving this change. According to one 2021 survey, the adoption of new smart and touchless technologies is the transformation having the biggest impact on facility managers (FMs).

The Internet of Things (IoT) is at the heart of this trend. These smart networks of connected devices, sensors, systems, and things, are having a big impact on the way buildings are run. Thanks to IoT technology and artificial intelligence, office buildings, warehouses, factories, education institutions, and many other commercial buildings are becoming more intelligent—and they are delivering real-time data to FMs.

In short, the deployment of IoT in facilities management is transforming the way that FMs manage the people, processes, and physical systems across their building portfolio.

Here, we want to show you how. And we’ll share some concrete examples of how we at Infogrid are changing how facility management works for the better.

Tackling Common Challenges in Facilities Management

As technologies, work habits, and employee concerns change, so does the work of facilities managers. Yet in today’s changing market, IoT can tackle some of the biggest challenges for FMs:

Sustainability. According to the RICS 2021 UK Facilities Management Survey, sustainability is one of the most important considerations for FMs right now—in a context of global climate concern.
Changing workplaces. Thanks to COVID-19, the workplace is in flux. Occupancy, building usage habits, user concerns, and technologies are all undergoing rapid, unpredictable transformation. It can be difficult to keep up.
Labour and cost. A 2021 survey published by Idox Group and the Facilities Management Journal found that budget constraints were the biggest concern for facilities managers. 62% of FMs surveyed said it was their number one problem.
A lack of building data. Buildings are a data black hole. With no real insight into air quality, occupancy, or building health, business decisions can suffer.

But we can help you solve these problems.

By combining the world’s smartest IoT sensors with artificial intelligence tools for data tracking, we can give you concrete insights into your buildings’ energy consumption, usage, regulatory compliance, and virus risk.

It’s our IoT technology that makes it happen. Our IoT sensors can turn your doors, piping systems, and other objects across your building portfolio into smart devices capable of feeding you real-time data into maintenance conditions, occupancy, and energy usage, all on a central dashboard.

And with that hard data, you can make smarter, better informed business decisions, to make your buildings and business processes more efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable. And you can automate and optimise things like maintenance, cleaning, and HVAC.

Here’s what our clients with our IoT solutions:

IoT in Facilities Management: Use Cases & Real-World Stories

With Infogrid’s smart building sensors, FMs can make buildings across their portfolio healthier, happier, and more productive.

Here are just some of the ways our IoT solutions can help facilities managers:

Track occupancy. Without purpose-built technologies, It can be tough for FMs to know how many people are using different parts of their facilities at different times.

But due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this knowledge is more important than ever—to ensure social distancing measures and minimise viral risk. With Infogrid’s occupancy sensors, you can get real-time data on occupancy across different spaces and meeting rooms in your buildings.

Let’s take one example. We enabled London Metropolitan University to overlay real-time occupancy data with air quality insights to provide a healthier environment for students and staff. Thanks to these insights, stakeholders were reassured during the return to onsite work.

Monitor cleaning. When led by schedules and rotas, rather than usage data, facilities cleaning can be inefficient and costly. But with IoT sensors, you can receive live insight into traffic and occupancy, monitor toilet usage, and collect user feedback on cleanliness levels. And that lets your cleaning teams provide targeted cleans exactly when and where they are needed.

We did exactly this at one shopping centre in London. By equipping every toilet with three sensors—to monitor traffic, feedback, and usage—we helped make site cleaning more intelligent. In hard numbers? For every 10 bathrooms across the site, the FMs saved £15,000 a year.

Optimise air quality. At Infogrid, we’re driving the adoption of smart technologies to monitor heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC). With our sensors, we can help you gain visibility into CO2 levels, volatile organic compounds, humidity, light levels, and air pressure, across the entirety of your site. That lets you optimise air quality—and reduce viral risk—while minimising energy use and labour costs.

Crucially, our IoT solutions help facilities managers drive smart decision-making, too. Thanks to insights provided by our air quality sensors, the data analytics firm, Relx, invested in dehumidifiers that could reduce viral risk by 80%.

Automate maintenance checks. IoT solutions in facilities management help make maintenance that much easier. Forget manually surveying equipment health or checking for leaks. Instead, with sensors, FMs can see and prevent maintenance issues before they even occur, to prevent downtime and ensure full productivity.

We worked with the facilities management firm, JLL Integral to equip the office of a financial services firm with a pipe monitoring system. Our IoT solution took one hour to install—and it reduced the time spent on manual compliance by 81%.

But that’s not all that we can do. You can find all of our IoT use cases here—and, if you have a specific problem to solve, get in touch with us. We can create a solution to help.

The Benefits of IoT in Facilities Management: Concrete Results

No doubt this all sounds great. But what concrete benefits can IoT bring to facilities management? We’re glad you asked:

IoT can help you save energy. By automating HVAC, for example, FMs can provide the heating or air conditioning your facility needs only when it needs it. This will save you money—and reduce your environmental footprint.

One supermarket we worked with saved $1.6 million a year on energy costs on HVAC alone thanks to Infogrid’s IoT devices. Another retail company reduced their annual energy consumption by 800 tonnes of CO2.

Smart maintenance can save you labour costs. Legacy methods of monitoring building health and ensuring compliance are labour intensive, inefficient, and costly for FMs. By replacing manual monitoring with automated data insights, you can save serious costs on labour hours.

For example, we helped one London theatre save over 2,000 hours a year on compliance.

IoT technology can keep employees and staff safe. IoT can have a concrete impact on staff wellbeing. Whether that’s through leak detection, or by mitigating viral risk through air quality control, our solutions can make staff health measurable and improvable.

In fact, optimal indoor air quality has been found to reduce staff absences by 30% over a year, while boosting productivity by 50%.

Buildings have long been a data black hole. Not any more. Thanks to our IoT sensors, facilities managers can know what’s happening across your building portfolio and when.