4 Ways Growing Building Portfolios Benefit From Cloud-Based Building Analytics

July 20, 2016

Every building is built and configured differently. That’s why the challenge for building analytics becomes magnified in large building portfolios composed of various categories: old, new, renovated, or expanding. Cumulatively, those buildings produce a lot of data, require a lot of custom configurations, and take a lot of time to manage in any proactive way.

But, from our point of view, those are yesterday’s problems—at least, if you’re using cutting-edge technology in a strategic way. In this post, we will uncover how cloud-based building analytics are best suited for large and growing building portfolios today.

Mass Customization

You might be thinking that the term “mass customization” is an oxymoron. But it’s not, and here’s why: KGS Buildings’ cloud-based solution, Clockworks, is able to scale across even the largest building portfolios without being bound by server capacity or hefty on-premise cost restrictions. In addition, Clockworks can adapt to each building system’s unique requirements; even the most complex building configurations. As a result, Clockworks can quickly be deployed in one-go across an entire portfolio, no extensive building-to-building setup required. Think about how much time that will save you and your team, both in the setup phase and with ongoing management of building analytics across your entire portfolio.

Rapid Technological Change

In the cloud, changes and updates to technology are deployed continuously and automatically across all buildings, systems, and users over a rapid development cycle. This ensures that customers always have the most up-to-date version of software the moment they’re released.

When it comes to building analytics, that means you no longer have to manually upgrade to a new version of software each year — upgrades occur automatically via web interface. Large portfolios benefit from the time and resources saved managing systems so they can focus instead on taking action — where the real savings and opportunities exist.

Faster Insights

When managing large numbers of buildings, systems, and equipment, any number of things can go wrong on a daily basis and can quickly become magnified across the entire portfolio. Take a leaking valve, for example. While just one may not cause a lot of issues, when a few start to leak, problems can escalate quickly. And how can you pinpoint where they are and how much of an energy and cost drain they represent?  Leveraging the real-time nature of the Clockworks solution, for example, these issues can be pinpointed instantaneously, and metrics around the resulting issues can be readily available. That means that not only will you know the moment an issue pops up, you’ll also have all the information you need to take action on the ones that are doing the most damage.

Cross-Platform Integration

Just as cloud-based building analytics can scale effortlessly across different buildings, they can also connect seamlessly with building automation systems (BAS) to extract data such as temperatures, pressures, flows, and setpoints. Our Clockworks building analytics solution, for example, is able to do this by utilizing a customized Data Transfer Service (DTS) that streams data to the cloud without the need for additional hardware, meaning it can do it faster and without any restraints.

The DTS communicates with BAS and metering systems to gather pertinent inputs and outputs and stream them into a single cloud-based platform — Clockworks. What this means for facility managers is your building analytics solution can do the heavy lifting for you, connecting to and analyzing data from any system you use and delivering that data to you all in one place. And because Clockworks then prioritizes insights from that data, you only need to log in to a single dashboard to know exactly what to take action on each day.

Interested in seeing how a cloud-based building analytics solution can benefit your large or growing portfolio of buildings? Schedule a customized demo of Clockworks.

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