Questions to Ask About Toolkit-based FDD: Part 2

March 19, 2019

Part 2 of a short series on evaluating different approaches to Fault Detection and Diagnostics.

All building owners, managers and their service providers need better ways to monitor facility mechanical systems, diagnose maintenance priorities, identify energy savings opportunities and keep building occupants comfortable. We have a new White Paper that dives into the critical differences between a toolkit approach to FDD and Diagnostics as a Service.

In the first part of this blog series, we asked a number of questions about the potential downsides of highly customized rule sets in toolkit-based fault detection. Perhaps the most important consideration for any large campus or building portfolio is the ability to scale and maintain FDD accuracy over time. Here is a summary of critical considerations:

• Scalability: Many facilities organizations have found that implementing a toolkit solution for one or two initial buildings might produce good results, but when they look at a roll out across a campus or national portfolio, can the issues of questions of quality control and false positives be addressed rapidly enough?
• Maintenance: In complex building portfolios dynamic changes are a given. A University, Hospital, Pharmaceutical lab or corporate office building all have mechanical systems that change significantly over time. Can the use of a toolkit address the maintenance challenges of each unique system configuration and sequence of operation that result from such changes?
• Programmer Dependency: What happens when the talented in-house engineer or third party whom you had setting up the rules is no longer available? Who is ultimately responsible for updating and maintaining diagnostic code over time?

These challenges are vitally important to facilities management professionals tasked with managing millions of square feet – every portfolio has buildings with unique parameters of their operation and complexities arise fast. If you want to analyze occupancy and find scheduling problems on simple buildings, that is one thing. But if you have a large portfolio with complex systems and want to future proof your analytics strategy with scalability in mind, rules toolkits might not be enough for your organization.

Responding to these issues, Clockworks® represents a new generation of FDD solution taking a fundamentally different approach to how diagnostics are set up and maintained over time. Automated FDD solutions, such as KGS Buildings own Clockworks®, are deployed as a ready to use SaaS platform with a core hierarchical diagnostics library that is both shared by all, and configured to be accurate for unique buildings, systems and equipment without requiring any custom code development. In other words, an approach that can truly be termed “Diagnostics as a Service.”

Download our white paper to delve more into the critical questions to ask when evaluating toolkit-based FDD vs. Diagnostics as a Service.

Until next time.

The KGS Buildings Team
Automated Analytics. Smarter Facilities