đ Welcome to Nexus, a newsletter for people applying analytics and other smart building technologyâwritten by James Dice.
If youâve been forwarded this email, you can sign up for your subscription here:
This is an experiment, and Iâd love your feedback. If you have thoughts, questions, ideas or tips, join the discussion on LinkedIn or hit reply.
+ When analytics insights fall flatâOne of my essays was featured on the Gridium blog. Hereâs a taste:
If youâre finding cool stuff with your analytics and itâs falling on deaf ears, it might be time to take a step back and consider this: EMIS is an exploratory analytics tool. We use it to find the needle in the haystack and to understand what the data is hiding in our buildings. But to get stuff done, we need to transition to explaining what the data means, including who, what, where, why, and how.
+ The latest on LinkedIn:
Itâs commonly accepted in our industry that O&M staff are âin fire-fighting modeâ practicing âreactive maintenanceâ.
Personally, I think the âfire-fighting" narrative is true (seen it for years). Itâs also getting stale. Every seller of solutions claims to enable building operators to see the future and spend their time preventing problems instead of fixing them.
And yet, I havenât seen maintenance practices or this stale narrative change in my 10 years in the industry.
One potential reason: I think we create confusion with what weâre proposing as the solution to reactive maintenance. We have:
- Preventative maintenance
- Prescriptive maintenance
- Proactive maintenance
- Condition-based maintenance
- Reliability-based maintenance
- Predictive maintenance
How do you define these? Whatâs the difference?
+ NYC buildings prepare to drastically reduce emissions to avoid penalties (NY Post)âitâs not often building analytics software gets into the newspaper. Thatâs what happened a few weeks back, as the New York Post covered Local Law 97 and featured Prescriptive Dataâs Nantum software.
While the coverage is exciting, the article only skimmed the surface of the issue. Â If the spread of benchmarking ordinances and mayoral commitments to the Paris climate goals are any indication, this law is coming to a city near you.
So letâs go deeper with 5 details you need to knowâŚ
+ The EcoDomus Digital Twin (YouTube)âAs a leading âLifecycle BIM companyâ EcoDomus is well positioned for the digital twin market because theyâre already in the practice of transitioning as-built BIM models to O&M teams. This 1 hour video walks us through their digital twin platform.
For those that donât have an hour, use this link to check out a couple minute demo of the Sydney Opera Houseâs twin.
I learned some new use-cases for Digital Twins:
Finally, since we defined the modern digital twin a few weeks back, I had to compare my definition to theirs. Their definition of digital twin (BIM + IoT) is missing two key parts of the definition:
Regardless, this video is well worth the watch.
+ Augury: A Sign of What Might Happen in the Future (Forbes)âIâve had a lot of questions recently about AI (where is it applied in buildings?) and proactive maintenance (can you give me some examples?). One startup that checks both boxes and more people should know about is Augury.
They install sensors that monitor vibration, temperature, and magnetic field data of heavy machinery like pumps and chillers. The data is uploaded to cloud applications that run machine learning diagnostics to detect malfunctions (before they occur!) and issue actionable alerts as necessary.
The machine learning prediction algorithms compare each piece of equipmentâs unique vibration signals to that of a large database of equipment that has malfunctioned. In other words, they know what a pump sounds like when the shaft is about to break.
Auguryâs software can be integrated with other software, allowing automatic parts ordering, work order scheduling, and budgeting. I'd imagine it could be used to send a command to stop the system thatâs about to fail.
OK, thatâs all for this weekâthank for reading Nexus!
If you have thoughts on this weekâs edition, head on over to LinkedIn:
đ Welcome to Nexus, a newsletter for people applying analytics and other smart building technologyâwritten by James Dice.
If youâve been forwarded this email, you can sign up for your subscription here:
This is an experiment, and Iâd love your feedback. If you have thoughts, questions, ideas or tips, join the discussion on LinkedIn or hit reply.
+ When analytics insights fall flatâOne of my essays was featured on the Gridium blog. Hereâs a taste:
If youâre finding cool stuff with your analytics and itâs falling on deaf ears, it might be time to take a step back and consider this: EMIS is an exploratory analytics tool. We use it to find the needle in the haystack and to understand what the data is hiding in our buildings. But to get stuff done, we need to transition to explaining what the data means, including who, what, where, why, and how.
+ The latest on LinkedIn:
Itâs commonly accepted in our industry that O&M staff are âin fire-fighting modeâ practicing âreactive maintenanceâ.
Personally, I think the âfire-fighting" narrative is true (seen it for years). Itâs also getting stale. Every seller of solutions claims to enable building operators to see the future and spend their time preventing problems instead of fixing them.
And yet, I havenât seen maintenance practices or this stale narrative change in my 10 years in the industry.
One potential reason: I think we create confusion with what weâre proposing as the solution to reactive maintenance. We have:
- Preventative maintenance
- Prescriptive maintenance
- Proactive maintenance
- Condition-based maintenance
- Reliability-based maintenance
- Predictive maintenance
How do you define these? Whatâs the difference?
+ NYC buildings prepare to drastically reduce emissions to avoid penalties (NY Post)âitâs not often building analytics software gets into the newspaper. Thatâs what happened a few weeks back, as the New York Post covered Local Law 97 and featured Prescriptive Dataâs Nantum software.
While the coverage is exciting, the article only skimmed the surface of the issue. Â If the spread of benchmarking ordinances and mayoral commitments to the Paris climate goals are any indication, this law is coming to a city near you.
So letâs go deeper with 5 details you need to knowâŚ
+ The EcoDomus Digital Twin (YouTube)âAs a leading âLifecycle BIM companyâ EcoDomus is well positioned for the digital twin market because theyâre already in the practice of transitioning as-built BIM models to O&M teams. This 1 hour video walks us through their digital twin platform.
For those that donât have an hour, use this link to check out a couple minute demo of the Sydney Opera Houseâs twin.
I learned some new use-cases for Digital Twins:
Finally, since we defined the modern digital twin a few weeks back, I had to compare my definition to theirs. Their definition of digital twin (BIM + IoT) is missing two key parts of the definition:
Regardless, this video is well worth the watch.
+ Augury: A Sign of What Might Happen in the Future (Forbes)âIâve had a lot of questions recently about AI (where is it applied in buildings?) and proactive maintenance (can you give me some examples?). One startup that checks both boxes and more people should know about is Augury.
They install sensors that monitor vibration, temperature, and magnetic field data of heavy machinery like pumps and chillers. The data is uploaded to cloud applications that run machine learning diagnostics to detect malfunctions (before they occur!) and issue actionable alerts as necessary.
The machine learning prediction algorithms compare each piece of equipmentâs unique vibration signals to that of a large database of equipment that has malfunctioned. In other words, they know what a pump sounds like when the shaft is about to break.
Auguryâs software can be integrated with other software, allowing automatic parts ordering, work order scheduling, and budgeting. I'd imagine it could be used to send a command to stop the system thatâs about to fail.
OK, thatâs all for this weekâthank for reading Nexus!
If you have thoughts on this weekâs edition, head on over to LinkedIn:
Head over to Nexus Connect and see whatâs new in the community. Donât forget to check out the latest member-only events.
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