Remote - Spring 2014 - (Page 8)

Feature Article Facility Realities: An Inevitable Trend Centralized Facility Management (CFM) Tom Willie, CEO Blue Pillar Complex industrial and transmission sites, military institutions and multi-site geographically dispersed commercial enterprises are increasingly turning towards the corporate centralization of facilities management and operations in order to address the increasing challenges of economically and reliably orchestrating core facility-based operations. Today's facility management paradigm often involves individual on-site facilities managers fighting ever-increasing budget pressures to address a near perfect storm of operating challenges. Energy prices are rising while the reliability of supply is declining. There are 15 percent more power outages today than there were 10 years ago. Such outages cost the economy more than $125 billion per year, and that is increasing annually. Core electrical and mechanical infrastructure within the facility is aging and the workforce responsible for overseeing this critical equipment is aging along with it. In fact, according to the Sloan Center on Aging and Work, it is expected that more than 50 percent of facilities management personnel will retire in the next 10 years. Standard and Poor's further highlights that the average age of a military base is 20 years old. And most of the core electrical equipment inside these facilities was often installed when they were built. Combine this with the fact that an average facility can have dozens upon dozens of disparate vendors of equipment within their facility and even asking for help requires significant effort. Make no mistake; these challenges are nothing new within the greater "marketplace." Billions of dollars have been spent by power utilities on Smart Grid technologies to fundamentally address the same age-based concerns on infrastructure and linemen to protect our power grids. Before that, billions of dollars were spent by telephone companies deploying technologies that would replace aging telecommunications networks while ensuring these new networks did not rely on the long-term availability of the aging "phone company" workforce. The same core challenges that are facing core facilities systems today have been seen before, and addressed through new technologies and new operating approaches. Of course, opportunities do exist to pay for some of these technologies' needs by taking advantage of demand response revenue and/or energy efficiency programs to offset costs. Unfortunately, all too often the time and expertise required to enroll and implement these programs is in scarce supply in an already stretched local facility workforce. Inevitably local onsite facilities managers find themselves balancing the opportunities to implement money generating programs with challenges as rudimentary as replacing a roof. Time and budget simply will not allow them to do both effectively. It's important to note that these facility challenges encountered within critical facilities are not as simple as a few lights going off from time-totime. The can lead to major losses of revenue, critical research efforts, security and even lives. The impact of maintaining the status quo and failing is profound. Take these challenges up a level into complex multi-site, multi-building, remote and geographically dispersed operating enterprises and executives and leaders of utilities, nationwide data centers and worldwide military bases are exponentially confounded by the daunting challenges of managing their core facility operations. The pressures to do more with less continue to mount. Increasingly, leaders of these complex organizations are rapidly considering a migration to centralized facility management as the solution to their operating concerns. 8 www.RemoteMagazine.com The Implementation Path of CFM In order to address these multi-site / multi-building facility challenges, facilities management organizations and C-Suite executives are turning more towards centralizing the financial, technical and operational aspects of running these complex facilities. In most cases the migration to CFM involves a step-by-step implementation and consolidation approach around critical functional areas where the speed of the migration is governed by the degree of challenges facing the enterprise. This common path to CFM implementation is shown in the figure below: The starting point of almost all centralized facility management migrations involves the financial side of the organization. Complex organizations across numerous industries are already pulling the approval of facilities-related capital spending to the corporate level and eliminating this budget decision from local sites. This allows for true enterprise-wide capital prioritization based on critical need and not purely local value. Capital allocation is often closely followed by centralized procurement and vendor contracting. Shortly after, or in conjunction with financial centralization come the implementation of a foundational secure, vendor-agnostic, and highly scalable visualization, monitoring and control software-based platform where the control capability is often used as an enabler of demand response capabilities. Facilities systems integrated within this platform include anything within the local facility that consumes electricity, such as HVAC and lighting systems, to things that produce electricity, such as generators and on-site distributed generation, to things that switch and meter electricity within the facility. The selection of this vendor-agnostic software platform is one of the fundamentally most important undertakings for an organization as the traditional facility space is littered with vendor specific, "only can use it with my hardware," type systems. Or worse, with stick-built, highly customized legacy SCADA approaches which are highly susceptible to security issues (including cyber), do not scale to multiple facilities, and can cost millions and millions of dollars in customization costs. Once the technical platform for centralization is in place, corporate facilities directors can begin using such a platform with added analytics to begin centralizing operational oversight and management within each facility, and across the network. This takes many shapes including the use of best practice / worst practice scorecarding for capital prioritization to greatly simplifying the integration of any newly constructed or acquired facility, to complete centralization of facilities management reporting with the potential for central dispatch and a more mobile facilities workforce. What once was done over and over with a crew and a truck and a clipboard at multiple locations can now be done with a push of a button from a single location or even a mobile device. Lastly, facilities are migrating or virtualizing certain aspects of energy http://www.RemoteMagazine.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Remote - Spring 2014

Editor's Choice
Top 10 Security Tech Trends for 2014
Facility Realities: An Inevitable Trend - Centralized Facility Management (CFM)
Unified Push-to-Talk: The Future of Remote Site Communications
Using PAS 55 to Manage Oil & Gas Assets
Wireless Field Area Communication Networks for Digital Oil & Gas Fields
100 Tunnels Under Control
Unique Spacer Cable System Powers Renewable Energy Plant Pipeline
Internet of Things North America
SCADA
Networking
Security
Onsite Power
Industry News

Remote - Spring 2014