Smart CSM Makes Buildings Smarter

Expert Dojo’s Accelerator Company Smart SCM, Makes Changes Toward a Smart and Green Life

SmartCSM makes buildings and their teams smarter by empowering facility managers to bring and manage their building’s infrastructure online.

To reach the smart, green future life we want, we need smart cities, and to get smart cities, we need smart buildings. But making buildings smart isn’t easy.

Our buildings are digitally challenged — dumb and consequently bumbling, expensive to run, often dysfunctional, and danger-prone.

Once online, they can start smartening up — supercharging themselves, us, and everything we do indoors. A green supersociety and spectacular new life then become possible.

An industry leader describes the situation.

“Our major buildings have yet to enter the digital age. And that’s a problem,” says Craig Caryl, CEO SmartCSM, a supplier of building management technology, with clients ranging from American Airlines and Toyota to Salvation Army and Universityof Miami.

There’s a lot of talk about smart buildings, smart organizations, and smart cities, but substantial progress is limited, according to Caryl. We’re not quite ready for tomorrow’s smart society because we don’t yet have the foundation to support it.

Before they can really smarten up, Caryl asserts, they need to get their basic critical systems online — electricity, plumbing, heating, cooling, ventilation, and then sensor-control devices and networks (the emerging Internet of Things with articialintelligence).

BIG PROBLEM, BIG OPPORTUNITY

ld-fashioned, oine management is costly and troublesome because paper is inherently inecient. It —

• makes repairs harder to diagnose and slower to complete,
• inates facility-department budgets,
• leaves little time for inspection and prevention, and
• provides scant data for problem analysis, making buildings more hazardous and less secure than necessary.

Perhaps most important, oine management compromises the quality of the building’s support functions, which in turn compromises the work, learning, and other good things people do in buildings.

All these drawbacks can be addressed by putting the critical systems of buildings online. The key benets include:

(1) Saving time and money. With access to online records from any device anywhere, a power outage or plumbing issue may be diagnosed almost instantly and xed right away. Among SmartCSM’s early adopters, labor savings of 10% to 40% are common.

(2) Making facility sta more proactive. Freed-up sta time may be invested in preventive maintenance, systems improvement, or avoiding costly shutdowns by predicting component failures before they happen.

(3) Increasing safety and security. When paper-managed buildings are challenged by bad weather, pollution, natural disasters, or dangerous people, recovery can be dicult and slow.

(4) Better supporting the activities of occupants. This may be the most important benet. Buildings exist to support important thought and action: making decisions, solving problems, producing products, delivering services, creating the next new thing, learning new skills, protecting or curing people.

WHAT’S THE FIX?

Basically, the process involves scanning and uploading all the paper documents, ranging from blueprints and wiring diagrams to device instruction manuals and “as builds” (plans updated during construction so they reect what was actually put in place).

These uploads may be supplemented by photographs and service notes entered by technicians. Contingency plans and action data may also be entered. For example, email addresses and phone numbers of building occupants may be linked to occupancy or evacuation contingencies, so people may be instantly alerted to issues aecting their location.

Existing digital les or spreadsheet routines may also be entered into the system and integrated with the now-digitized paper documents. “Everything you need to manage your electrical or other critical systems is now up there and under your control,” says Caryl “including AI and IoT innovations as they emerge.”

With the right smart technology, buildings and other “people containers” might become essential tools for preserving society and creating the stellar future we yearn for.

Through a smarter, cleaner, greener built environment (mobile- connected), we could enter a long period of perfecting our garden while extending it. They’ll have evolved along with their technology, and life will never be the same.