Inside Our Live Demo: How Clockworks Turns Building Data Into Actionable Insights
September 29, 2025
By Julia Gandy
The gap between reactive and proactive building maintenance isn’t just about mindset—it’s about having the right tools. In our recent live demo and Ask Me Anything session, Chief Commercial Officer Alex Grace walked through exactly how Clockworks Analytics bridges that gap for facilities teams managing everything from single buildings to global portfolios.
The Proactive Maintenance Promise
The numbers are compelling: research from Pacific Northwest National Labs shows that proactive maintenance can reduce costs by 25-30%, eliminate 70-75% of system breakdowns, and cut equipment downtime by 35-45%—with a 10X return on investment. Yet most organizations struggle to get there. Why? Because traditional building automation system (BAS) alarms and even basic fault detection tools don’t provide enough actionable information to truly shift from firefighting to prevention.
What Makes Diagnostics Different
During the demo, Alex emphasized a critical distinction that often gets overlooked in the FDD market: the difference between fault detection and fault diagnostics.
“It’s one thing to find problems in buildings,” Alex explained. “It’s entirely different to put them into a workflow where the right person is engaged at the right moment to address that issue and validate that the work has been completed.”
The webinar illustrated this with a live example of an air handling unit experiencing multiple issues. While a typical alarm might simply flag “High Discharge Air Temp,” Clockworks’ diagnostic engine identified that a hot water valve was leaking and that the economizer wasn’t operating efficiently—then automatically grouped these related issues, identified downstream effects on zone temperatures, and quantified the energy and cost impact.
The Platform in Action
The live demonstration covered the complete diagnostic workflow:
Intelligent Prioritization: The platform sorts issues by avoidable costs, comfort impact, or maintenance priority depending on user role. An energy manager sees different priorities than a reliability professional managing asset lifespan.
Root Cause Analysis: Rather than presenting a list of disconnected faults, Clockworks connects the dots. When multiple issues appear—simultaneous heating and cooling, high discharge air temperature, and hot zones downstream—the platform identifies which are symptoms and which is the root cause.
Automated Workflows: Once issues are identified, creating tasks and work orders is streamlined. The recently released AI summary feature automatically generates action items: “Inspect and repair air handler dampers and fans,” “Review and correct static pressure control logic,” with clear distinctions between mechanical and controls issues.
Validation and Measurement: Perhaps most importantly, the platform monitors whether issues are actually resolved after work orders close, enabling organizations to track first-time fix rates—a critical but often overlooked maintenance KPI.
Beyond Detection: Building a Data-Driven Culture
What emerged clearly from the session is that successful FDD implementation isn’t just about the technology—it’s about transforming how facilities organizations demonstrate and measure value.
As Alex noted: “When you ask a facilities leader how many work orders their teams completed last year, they can tell you. But if you ask what dollar value those work orders saved the organization, there’s really no way to know. Once you start to shift to a proactive and condition-based maintenance process, you can now put dollar values to the work occurring within maintenance.”
This shift from cost center to value center represents a fundamental change in how facilities operations contribute to organizational goals around energy efficiency, sustainability, and asset management.
See It For Yourself
The hour-long recording includes detailed platform navigation, live data examples, and extensive Q&A covering everything from deployment timelines to handling messy building data. Whether you’re evaluating FDD platforms, looking to optimize existing implementations, or exploring how to build analytics into service offerings, the session provides practical insights into what separates basic fault detection from comprehensive diagnostics.
Watch the full recording to see the platform in action and learn how Clockworks is helping organizations move from reactive to proactive building operations at scale.
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