5 Things That Made 2019 Great at Clockworks Analytics

March 20, 2020

In these early days of the new decade, we are reflecting on progress made and the key milestones of the past year. Here’s CEO Nick Gayeski’s viewpoint on a great 2019.

Over 250k Pieces of Equipment Monitored

Clockworks Analytics just passed a threshold of monitoring over 250,000 equipment across the world.   That’s roughly a 39% increase in the number of assets monitored in the past year alone.  Momentum is really accelerating for the application of fault detection and diagnostics to enable predictive maintenance strategies, drive energy cost reduction, and improve reliability.

2nd Annual Clockworks Analytics Client Council

We hosted our second Clockworks Client Council in 2019 and brought together facilities teams from across the country spanning higher education, healthcare, life sciences, and corporate real estate.  Their vision for transforming facilities management in their own organizations is inspiring.  Clients are undertaking significant changes within their organizations to evolve organizational roles, workflows and technology infrastructure to ensure that all facilities going forward will be connected to an intelligent analytics platform.

Momentum is Growing for Fault Detection and Diagnostics Software

Maintenance plans are changing to ensure labor time and technology complement each other.  Customers and service partners are reviewing their maintenance task lists and comparing them to what is now monitored and checked by diagnostics.  What was previously a maintenance task may now be continuously checked by fault detection and diagnostics, and need only be reviewed when the diagnostic indicates it requires maintenance.  Technicians shouldn’t be worried about their jobs, though.  The industry has a well known and growing labor problem with skilled people retiring and a shortage of incoming talent, along with a history of deferred maintenance backlogs.  Technology is there to help future technicians succeed in maintaining better facilities with a smarter approach, not replacing them entirely.

The Industry is Making Strides Toward Data Interoperability

There are exciting technology developments underway that will further accelerate the momentum and value for analytics in buildings.  The industry continues to make strides towards open and interoperable exchange of metadata.  There is still a lot of confusion about what metadata is really needed to make building analytics valuable to a facilities team, but the industry is moving towards a framework for exchange that is meaningful.  The discussion about Brick, Project Haystack and BACnet metadata is exciting, particularly as metadata standards more fully consider what information should be exchanged. Not just about what a point is or what an equipment is, but more about how equipment are related, the behavior of data, the importance of metadata relative to a sequence of operations, and the engineering of a system. These are the metadata which will help bring real insights about system performance and avoid the pitfalls false positives.

Facility Maintenance and Operations & Mechanical Service Providers are Moving Toward Smarter Building Analytics

Lastly, I’m inspired by the forward thinking leaders of service organizations who are looking to grow and future-proof their facilities, energy, and mechanical services organizations.  Just recently, one of our partners commented that ‘if we are not doing this (analytics) in five years, then we will not be doing this (being a service business)’.  While that’s a bold statement, I think the future of facilities services and management will belong to the bold people who embrace change and leverage technology to provide more value and better outcomes to their clients.

-Nick Gayeski

Automated Analytics. Smarter Facilities.