Building Management and Maintenance Systems

Facility managers that adopt an analytical mindset to complement their technical skills can improve their operations by leveraging the smart-building data they collect. That’s one of the take-aways from the International Facility Management Association’s World Workplace 2025 conference held in Minneapolis earlier this month.

IFMA’s 30th annual flagship event drew more than 4,000 facilities management professionals, 350 exhibitors and dozens of speakers, many of whom challenged attendees to make their facilities — and approach to facilities management — more efficient and responsive to data.

In an interview, IFMA Director of Research Matt Tucker detailed the idea of an “FM analyst” mindset that facilities managers are encouraged to adopt to make sense of the influx of data they’re getting from all of their digital tools.

The “FM analyst” position is less a formal job title or credential than a “mindset” driven by the proliferation of data and the rise of AI against a backdrop of sophisticated cybersecurity threats, Tucker said.

Facilities managers almost have more data than they know what to do with, with much of it disorganized or siloed by location or department, Tucker said. This new normal demands a new approach that he described broadly as ”developing an analytical brain” — layering information synthesis and effective communication on top of existing FM expertise.

“Traditionally, FMs are amazing at technical tasks, but do we have the same skill set from an analytical perspective?” he said.

Answering that question is urgent amid generational change in the facilities management profession, Tucker said. He expects the majority of the facilities management workforce to turn over within the next 15 years. 

He called out two skills that FM analysts need in abundance: storytelling and the ability to collaborate.

Storytelling is vital for FMs to knit patterns and trends out of the data their systems are generating and then translate what they see for the C-suite. When advocating for a digital transformation project, for example, FMs need to speak in a language their chief technology officer understands without getting too deep into the facility's weeds — even if they think their audience can follow along.

Facility managers should ask themselves “‘Am I being convincing at the C-suite level?’” Tucker said. Executives “don’t want to be bombarded with spreadsheets, so the presentation has to be to the point.” 

Given the importance of data, which crosses function areas, facilities managers must become comfortable collaborating with colleagues in other departments like finance, human resources and information technology. 

“I don’t think we can be successful anymore just working on FM,” he said.

The importance of a data-driven, multidisciplinary approach to facilities management was on full display at the conference. Dozens of companies — including some of the biggest names in built environment technology — demonstrated solutions for more streamlined, efficient facilities.

The Johnson Control product OpenBlue, for example, uses AI to make sense of cross-functional data to help facilities managers improve space usage, reduce energy consumption and cut building maintenance workloads by up to two-thirds.  

“The siloes are long gone,” said Vineet Sinha, vice president of product management that leads development of OpenBlue enterprise solutions at Johnson Controls.

Sinha said modular tools like OpenBlue can do a lot of the heavy lifting for facilities managers overseeing complex footprints, regardless of the parent organization’s digital maturity, and even help FMs drive more digital investment. 

“Our advantage is meeting them where they're at in terms of digital maturity and then ramping from there,” said Sinha.

The under-construction future home of the NFL’s Tennessee Titans, the new Nissan Stadium, provides an opportunity for Schneider Electric to pull all the different technology it uses inside one facility to help operators visualize data across all the mechanical and electrical subsystems to help the organization meet its sustainability goals, Dave Rellinger, vice president of U.S. branches at Schneider Electric, told Facilities Dive. 

The new Nissan Stadium, an approximately 2.1-million-square-foot facility set to open in 2027, will use Schneider Electric’s solutions throughout, including clean uninterruptible backup power and IT physical infrastructure, electrical power distribution and controls systems, and an integrated building management system, the company says. 

These technologies are intended to help the stadium enhance energy efficiency, reduce emissions and provide increased operational control over the stadium’s infrastructure. The improvements are anticipated to provide a 20% reduction in energy consumption and a 30% reduction in downtime, Schneider Electric said in March. 

“Tennessee and Nashville are known for their rolling thunderstorms and blackouts. They don’t black out an event [at the stadium], but sometimes that burden falls on the community around it,” Rellinger said. “So, there's a really significant responsibility for the stadium to be as efficient as possible and operate as efficiently as possible, so we can participate in alleviating the grid when there's events.” 

“With millions of fans expected to visit annually, ensuring optimal energy performance is a key priority in the new Nissan Stadium,” Dan Werly, chief operating officer of the Tennessee Titans, said in a statement. 

To accomplish this, the company will visualize all electrical and mechanical infrastructure in the building through a single command center that is able to visualize what’s going on with HVAC and other systems in real-time, Rellinger said. “We are going to be able to pinpoint, almost with a laser, where the HVAC loads and where the power consumption is. Where we will unlock a lot of efficiency for Titans is the ability to see the performance of HVAC and power as well as for their vendors and concessions.” 

Ensuring a successful handoff between construction and operation teams comes down to factory acceptance testing, “which is kind of a lost art in our industry,” Rellinger said. “Before we engineer the complete front end, all the graphics, alarms, schedules, even the sequences … we bring the stakeholders into our office — that's the general contractor, the design and commissioning agents — and they'll all have a chance to review what we're going to build.”

“This is like the [first iteration of the] digital twin so they can really start to visualize what it might be like to operate the building, years before it's physically built,” he said. “The light bulb starts to go off around what they're going to have ownership of when we turn it over to them, how it's going to work, and they get to inform us of all the customization that they really would like to see in it before it becomes a day-two activity,” or those day-to-day operations that occur after a facility opens.

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It wasn’t Danny Clemens’ idea to adopt a workflow management tool to help him manage the 29 buildings he oversees as director of facilities for the Bullitt County School District in Kentucky. The idea was the district’s technology chief’s to make procurement easier. But by adding facilities operations to the tool, Clemens has been able to tweak when and where his technicians focus their attention to keep older equipment maintained without disrupting classroom instruction.   

“The classroom is the center of our universe, so we want to disrupt it the least amount possible,” Clemens said in an interview.

The district’s tech director reached out to Clemens about 14 months ago about having facilities piggy back on the tool, from incident IQ.  

“We were using a platform that was digital but it wasn’t very good,” said Clemens, a former teacher and school principal who took over as facilities chief for the district in 2023. 

Incident IQ specializes in the K-12 space but other companies make workflow management software available to facilities managers, including UpKeep, MaintainX, Corrigo and Limble, among others.  

The big change for his operations is the visibility the tool gives him and his technicians into the status of the equipment they have to keep running.  

“I have only 15 maintenance techs and only two of them are preventive maintenance, so I have to be very efficient with our time,” he said. “This allows us to frontload the work instead of working from the backside.”

Work that requires a steady cadence, like keeping HVAC filters clean, gets inputted in the software so the maintenance techs get automated work orders.  

“It designates to them, ‘I should be at this school, on this floor, changing filters in the HVAC units on this day,’” he said. “It doesn’t rely on me going into the system remembering, ‘Oh, yeah, we need to put those in.’ It’s already built into the mechanism.” 

As things come up, he and other school officials send out work orders that everyone sees in real-time. 

“Whether it’s a school sending in a work order or we’re assigning a work order to a technician … the agent is on site or in the field acknowledging it and everybody stays within the loop, which is half the challenge,” he said.

The service data that’s collected over time helps on budgeting, too, by creating a history that can support capital requests, he said. 

“I was able to go into our last budgeting cycle and collect this data and tell our superintendent and finance chief, ‘This is where the work orders are coming from,’” he said. “That was a real conversation I had using this data to derive basically that we need $2 million of HVAC at this school, and I was able to support it because of the documentation I had.”

Clemens’ team has been inputting data on equipment as they work on it with the idea that the database will become more complete over time. The team has focused first on HVAC equipment to keep classroom temperatures comfortable and as part of a district-wide energy efficiency goal.  

“We pride ourselves on our energy use,” he said. “We’re a district that in 2000 still had a school burning coal outside of Louisville. Now we have a school that’s solar and all of our schools have geothermal. So for us, a lot of our work orders are for HVAC, because that’s the bulk of our energy savings.”

Internet-of-things and smart building technologies are increasingly important to building operators as they seek to achieve sustainability, security, health, space optimization, maintenance and operational goals, with many businesses relying on building data to inform decisions, according to a September report by Johnson Controls.

Optimizing space management was a key investment driver for 41% of 3,445 smart building leaders surveyed last August in a study conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by Johnson Controls. Forty percent of respondents named modernizing buildings as a key driver, while 39% highlighted carbon emission reductions, according to that survey. 

The market for smart building technology “is moving in the right direction very quickly, and I think that starts with the infrastructure. The infrastructure and the movement from IT to OT convergence,” Erin McDannald, CEO of Elevated, which provides smart lighting and IoT solutions, said in an interview. “There's a lot of talk in the industry right now about the integrated workplace management systems meeting operation technology and those two converging.” 

To better serve operators seeking insights that can drive decision-making and automation in their buildings, smart technology vendors are working to bolster their capabilities and expand their market presence. 

LG CNS expands into US building technology

LG CNS announced its entry into the U.S. buildings technology sector on Dec. 2. The South Korean digital transformation company that is part of LG signed a memorandum of understanding with U.S.-based real estate investment and development fund SomeraRoad and Mastern America, the U.S. branch of Korea’s alternative investment company Mastern Investment Management.

The three corporations will collaborate on smart real estate initiatives, incorporating digital transformation technologies like AI, IoT and automation to transform building management efficiency and enhance user experience, according to a news release. These capabilities include services for employees, visitors and managers of smart buildings, such as mobile access cards or digital employee IDs that provide greater convenience for security and payments. Additionally, LG CNS’ content management system enables “simultaneous delivery and management of various types of signage in large buildings,” per the release. 

The initiative will focus on developing smart technology into SomeraRoad projects, including hotel and luxury condos and multifamily residential properties within mixed-use projects in Kansas City, Missouri; Nashville; and other locations, the companies said. 

Amerlux rebrands as Delta

Last week, commercial lighting manufacturer Amerlux, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Delta Electronics, announced a strategic shift to better serve building operators with smart and sustainable building solutions, legally renaming itself as Delta Intelligent Building Technologies.

Despite the name change, Amerlux will continue to operate under its original brand, focusing on architectural lighting fixtures. Other Delta Electronics subsidiaries, including Delta Controls and Loytec will continue providing building automation, according to a Dec. 2 news release.

The integration aims to strengthen Amerlux and Delta’s positions in the North American building automation sector, enhancing sales, system integration and customer service capabilities, the companies said. According to the release, the move is part of Delta’s vision to create an integrated ecosystem of advanced technologies that can meet the evolving needs of modern building management.

Akenza works to bridge BMS, IoT

As facilities look for smarter ways to manage and optimize operations, integrating building management systems and IoT provides actionable insights that can help operators and facilities teams simplify building management, according to IoT platform Akenza.

Last week, the company announced the launch of its Building Edge solution designed to bridge the gap between BMS and IoT for enabling intelligent, efficient and sustainable building operations. The new platform combines traditional wired BMS systems and wireless, battery-powered sensors into a unified platform, standardizing data points and providing operators with a cohesive view of their facilities, Akenza said in a Dec. 3 news release. 

“By integrating the akenza Building Edge, building operators can transition from isolated systems and fragmented data toward a comprehensive, cohesive view of their facilities,” Akenza said. “This shift not only simplifies building management but also empowers sustainable and efficient decision-making.”

Honeywell unveiled an AI-powered building management system Tuesday that enables building operators to control their software, services and devices through a single interface. 

Facility managers, multi-site operators and integrators can connect building systems to the platform, called Connected Solutions, through an AI-enabled installation process that can be completed in hours, according to Honeywell. Once a building or campus is fully connected, operators can gain data and real-time visibility into how critical systems operate and how to troubleshoot challenges, the company said. 

"From aging buildings and rising downtime costs to skilled labor shortages and growing cyber guidelines, building owners and operators face a complex landscape of global trends that are constantly making operations more complex and costly,” Billal Hammoud, president and chief executive officer of Honeywell's building automation segment, said in a statement. “To address this, Honeywell's Connected Solutions allows building managers to link critical building software, technologies and devices together to streamline management and compliance and help protect uptime.” 

Connected Solutions is built on Forge, the company’s IoT enterprise performance management software-as-a-service that uses AI and machine learning to provide autonomous control of devices, while serving as a repository for domain knowledge from the industry.

The new platform uses advanced encryption for security and remote monitoring for convenience. It offers predictive maintenance prompts to help building operators tackle issues before the become a problem and has an energy-management component. These capabilities can reduce labor time, cost and disruption compared with traditional systems, the company says. 

Two early adopters — Verizon Communications and Vanderbilt University — have begun testing the solution. Verizon has been using it to help predict building and system issues before they become dire, Honeywell said.  

Vanderbilt aims to enhance building system efficiency, reduce energy consumption and optimize user experience, particularly in older facilities, Honeywell said. Almost 10% of the University’s campus is using the technology, according to the company.   

“Connected Solutions … [offers] the tools to use real-time data and AI-driven insights to help us optimize our buildings," Alex Kohnen, chief facilities officer at Vanderbilt University, said in a statement. 

The launch is in line with Honeywell’s plan to roll out product offerings as it prepares to split off its aerospace and advanced materials businesses, with the goal of standing up three public companies. 

“As you … look at our three large segments, their needs are diverging in terms of the capital investment needs as far as innovation themes in each industry,” Mike Stepnik, senior vice president and chief financial officer at Honeywell, said at an industry conference in May. 

Over the past few quarters, Honeywell has seen better-than-expected performance in building products sales as part of its building automation unit, according to its Q1 earnings report. The segment includes building infrastructure, fire detection and building management systems. 

“We use projects and services predominantly to pull our content and continue to advance our [product introductions],” Stepnik said. “The most exciting thing about the building automation business is the fact that this is a business that truly exemplifies what we’re trying to do with the rest of the portfolio, meaning to create install base and then mind install base with value-add services, connected offerings, etc.”

Carrier released upgrades to its Abound Insights platform that the company says will bolster the app with interactive maps and updated site view lists to help enterprise-level building operators manage their portfolios, the company said Thursday.

Abound Insights is an AI and IoT platform that uses predictive insights, recommendations and autonomous actions to help operators get better performance out of their equipment and operations, Carrier says. 

With the upgrades, operators will get operations and maintenance recommendations while accessing connected sites with weather and air quality overlays. They’ll also get advanced filters and export capabilities so they can download site lists, equipment details and work order reports for streamlined planning and tracking. 

"With these enhancements, we're giving building operators the power to see and manage their entire portfolio like never before," Yasir Qureshi, general manager of Carrier Abound, said in a statement. 

Getting a context-rich picture of building systems, like the platform is trying to provide, is a first step for building operators trying to meet long-term goals like saving energy, combatting cybersecurity risks and implementing preventive maintenance, studies have shown. 

"By delivering a truly enterprise-wide view, we're helping our customers unlock smarter decisions, drive measurable energy savings, elevate occupant comfort, and streamline operations across their portfolio — all through the intelligence of the Abound platform," Qureshi said. 

The upgrades follow AI-driven maintenance upgrades to the Abound platform in June that added interactive dashboards, alerts, to-do lists and recommendations for more than 25 categories of equipment in commercial buildings, including HVAC, refrigeration and controls. 

Carrier’s technology updates track with progress being made by its competitors. Earlier this week, Trane Technologies released AI tools that enable building operators to analyze occupancy, energy use and weather to adjust HVAC operations and provide recommendations on what actions to take based on conversational prompts. 

In addition to the software, Carrier recently marked a milestone in the energy efficiency capabilities within its hardware, earlier this month becoming the first HVAC manufacturer to complete the U.S. Department of Energy’s Commercial Building HVAC Technology Challenge laboratory validation in the 10-to-14-ton rooftop heat pump category. Lennox, meanwhile, first completed laboratory validation for commercial cold climate heat pump rooftop units in the 15-to-25-tons category earlier this month.

Software company MaintainX last week closed a $150 million series D funding round, suggesting investors see growth potential in AI tools to improve facility maintenance operations. 

"MaintainX has achieved remarkable product-market fit by addressing a critical challenge that affects virtually every physical asset-driven industry," said Byron Deeter, a partner at venture capital firm Bessemer.

The funding will help MaintainX expand its AI capabilities, advance predictive maintenance solutions and further develop its enterprise asset management capabilities, the company said in announcing the round. 

The fundraise comes at a time when the average cost of outages is increasing. Almost 30% of industrial respondents in a survey the company conducted last year say there’s been an increase in the financial impact of disruptions.

Proactive maintenance is the most effective way to reduce unplanned downtime incidents, according to the survey, which was based on responses by 1,165 maintenance, repair and operations professionals. 

Although 86.8% of facilities use preventive maintenance strategies, almost 60% dedicate less than half of their maintenance time to these strategies, highlighting a crucial area for improvement, MaintainX says. 

Almost half of building operators believe that AI could have a significant impact on improving the efficiency of preventive maintenance and scheduling, according to a report by Building Engines, a JLL company. This belief has led a number of vendors – including Carrier, IBM, Honeywell and Ecotrak – to upgrade their AI-driven maintenance systems and launch new technologies aimed at improving operations. 

“With [AI-driven] predictive maintenance, you can anticipate equipment failures are going to happen before they happen, and I think that’s what everybody’s trying to get to,” Scott Boekweg, product management lead at JLL, said in January during a joint webinar with IFMA on the state of facilities management technology. “This not only reduces the downtime, but it also prevents the overspending on unnecessary maintenance, and AI can help with that.”

MaintainX serves more than 11,000 companies managing more than 11 million assets globally, the company says. Its services help reduce unplanned downtime by 34%, increase production capacity by 15% and reduce monthly maintenance costs by 32%, it claims.  

"Equipment failures cost companies $1.4 trillion annually, and many still rely on outdated tools. We built MaintainX to change that," Chris Turlica, CEO and co-founder of MaintainX, said in a statement.  

The company raised $50 million at the end of 2023 to add AI and other improvements to its platform. With this latest round of capital funding, MaintainX is valued at $2.5 billion, Reuters reported.

Carrier and IBM this week each released AI-powered tools that aim to help building operators improve their maintenance operations. Both highlight the ongoing push by vendors to meet demand for data-driven insights and automation that can improve efficiency in the facilities management sector. 

Almost half of building operators believe that AI could have a significant impact on improving the efficiency of preventive maintenance and scheduling, according to a December report by JLL subsidiary Building Engines, which surveyed 370 commercial real estate professionals in collaboration with Building Owners and Managers Association International. 

On Wednesday, Carrier announced upgrades to its Abound Insights Assistant app that analyzes equipment performance across building portfolios and provides insights to building owners through the app, including recommendations for over 25 categories of equipment in commercial buildings, including HVAC, refrigeration and controls, the company says. 

The tool alerts users with detailed information about problems and warnings that can help to schedule a site visit for inspection and complete maintenance, the company said in a release. For example, when there is a suspected refrigerant leak in the chiller, the system can warn there may be a risk of potential compressor damage, allowing technicians to show up prepared, Carrier says. 

An equipment health dashboard within Carrier Abound also shares information on energy efficiency and potential failures that can be filtered by equipment categories, with users able to prioritize and allocate tasks based on the health of connected systems and skills required for each task. Located within the “To-Do List” feature, each task for equipment also includes AI-generated repair recommendations and service history, Carrier says. 

IBM on Wednesday released a new version of its Maximo application suite that the company says is designed to help clients deploy asset lifecycle management in the data and AI era. The software provides capital planning tools and a Generative AI assistant that can help users engage with asset data through natural conversation.

The upgrades are meant to enable the proactive maintenance of assets, IBM says. In order to help plan capital allocations for projects , Maximo can also generate and compare multiple scenarios for investment in assets based on business priorities; the Asset Investment Planning tool will provide weighted analysis and multi-objective optimization to balance cost, risk and performance, IBM says. 

The company also added space management features to help optimize workspace use, lease administration and accounting capabilities. Together, IBM says Maximo now provides a “comprehensive solution for real estate and facilities management.” 

Facility managers wanting to lower the chance of a Legionella or other outbreak in their water system are more likely to head off problems by integrating lab test results with their building maintenance and management system, says Noah Reding, vice president and general manager of real estate and facilities at software company Accruent. 

Using the BMMS to analyze test results over time can identify trends before bacteria levels reach a critical threshold, Reding said in an interview. 

“If you’re meeting a schedule you’ve had for years and you start to see something that’s abnormal, that’s perhaps a leading indicator that can help you see something [that could lead to an] outbreak,” said Reding. 

About half a dozen states and a number of localities require some facilities to test their water systems regularly, but manually spotting trends while they’re still nascent can be difficult.

That’s where BMMS can help.

“The tools are essentially creating a level of insight that lets you take action from a preventative maintenance perspective,” said Reding.

If analysis of the data in the BMMS shows bacteria levels ticking up, even though they remain below threshold levels, facility managers can have technicians conduct more detailed testing or take other action as part of regular work on the water system, Reding said. 

“You essentially augment your typical work orders and say, ‘Hey, while you’re out there, capture this data or take this measurement,’” he said. “We’ll send it to the lab and then make sure that new data goes into the system as well. Now you’re tracking not only typical work order status, but you’ve added this data to it as well.”

Early action can head off problems well before they reach a compliance threshold that would trigger intervention, he said. 

“It’s all about having a baseline, and if things differ from that baseline, what adjustments can you make?” he said. 

A BMMS can be as simple as tracking work orders or as complex as an integration involving data from multiple tools, like those that track indoor air quality along with space usage, so a typical system should be able to easily handle the addition of lab culture test results, he said. 

Integration of test results “is a good example of how BMMS tools are used for all kinds of maintenance management, whatever it may be,” he said.