Challenges

As I championed the power of building automation systems to my peers over the last twenty years I encountered many who were frustrated.  The challenges they were facing seemed to fall into the following general areas.  Perhaps you can relate to some of them.

Too Many Systems

In the early years of building automation it seemed like every company wanted to try their hand at making overarching systems that could do everything their customers wanted to do.  Often times, especially in school districts where various projects pulled in competing controls firms over time, the results were not good for the daily users.  Recently I walked into a room where five different computers (some of them legit antiques that could fetch $$$ on eBay!) were monitoring various building systems which couldn't interact with each other. Such a user cannot often comprehend that what they spend to modify, update and resuscitate these systems could have more than paid for a modern integration solution.  

Not Intuitive Enough

Building automation system engineers have an amazingly complex skill set and are extremely adept at helping larger organizations gain control of their physical assets.  In order to accomplish that they must focus on making sure all the nuts and bolts, hardware and software, work together properly and without error.  All that being understood, there are times when the navigation of such a software interface is not what the end user hoped it would be.  For the maintenance tech in the field trying to navigate the system on their tablet or phone this can be frustrating and impede their productivity.  At the same time, tweaking the look and feel of the system to be more user friendly comes with a cost and this too can be frustrating.

Cannot Integrate with Facilties Scheduling / Work Order Tools

For years now industry leaders like FMX have been providing organizations with intuitive web based tools to enter work orders and scheduling for after hours building use.  These tools can integrate nicely with building automation systems to set special occupancy schedules for HVAC automatically or turn on parking lot lights for approved schedules.  In addition some services can take a critical BAS alarm and import it automatically into the work order system ensuring a faster response from facilities personnel.  This saves money and time for the end user, but since they are weighed down with the aforementioned concerns, they are dismayed at the prospect of trying to make something like that work.

Practical and Affordable BAS Training Options for Staff Seem Nonexistent

Sending a maintenance technician away to BAS training for a week isn't always an option for organizations.  More practical training methods seem unavailable to many of my peers in the industry.  Sometimes all they want is someone to sit down and click on things with them and that can get quite pricey.  Again, affordable training options seem nonexistent!

BAS coaching can help in all of these areas and more, click the How Coaching Can Help tab above to find out how.