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In a perfect world, facility management would be seamless. Multisite facility management then would be as easy as pie. Perfect scenario will be to have buildings with optimized operations, energy to be consumed efficiently, occupant comfort at its best, and repair emergencies becoming non-existent. But, we don’t live in a perfect world. However, we can optimize our operations to create an optimized one! Leveraging cloud-based building management systems for multi-site facilities is the way forward. Let’s focus on the challenges and solutions for multi-site facility management, says Shakti Singh Chauhan, Country Head – Facility Management, Reliance Retail.
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Challenges
The core challenges are obvious and we all know how imperfect things can be. For multi-sites, they are plentiful.
1. Every building has unique requirements leading to different levels of automation control
2. Budgets are limited and resources are few
3. Installing, integrating and maintaining automation systems specific to site can be costly
4. If a space is rented, then install options of servers and other IT equipment could be constrained
5. Amount of data produced by each facility is huge-difficult to collate and analyze for management decisions and actions
One of the major challenges confronting building managers is coordinating multiple facilities with different levels of automation in place – from simple (stand-alone) to sophisticated (integrated or full-blown building management systems). In these circumstances, the main objective of all facility managers is to:
- Understand the business/ Clients requirement
- Identify and anticipate all problems prior to their occurrence
- Create proactive-action plan for these problems
- Implement action plan to prevent or to solve these problems when required
However, when in chaos or in firefighting mode due to want of proactive actions, historical data, awareness of best practices etc., we move away from main objectives of FM. At times these challenges seem too overwhelming or too expensive to overcome. Many a time people fail to realize that building management is not just for large buildings anymore.
