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Data‑Driven Facilities Management

The benefits of networked lighting control extend far beyond energy savings. Advanced wireless lighting control systems enable facility managers to take data‑driven decisions to maximize operational efficiency, occupant comfort, and overall predictability. Cosmicnode co‑founder, Sanu Davis, outlines how wireless networked lighting control ushers in a new era of intelligent data‑driven facility management.

Facility managers play a pivotal role in the transition to smart buildings, often with the goal of achieving greater sustainability and improved energy efficiency. Wireless network lighting controls are becoming a key component of smart buildings, offering significant benefits in terms of energy efficiency, cost savings, occupant comfort, data analytics, system integration, environmental sustainability, and security. These advantages make wireless lighting controls an essential technology for modern building management, driving the evolution towards smarter, more efficient buildings.

Smart buildings need enterprise‑level building management applications that enable the centralized management and integration of multiple building management systems. A unified platform offering centralized control and monitoring would be ideal. Facility managers can access real‑time data and analytics from all integrated systems, enabling immediate decision‑making and proactive maintenance.

 Intelligent wireless networked lighting controls transform each luminaire into a digital data point, empowering the facilities management team to collect building data, analyse it, and make informed decisions

Expanding on this, facilities managers can also oversee other systems within the workspace to maintain optimal conditions for healthy and happy occupants. In addition to air quality, humidity, and temperature, lux levels are crucial for creating a healthy and productive working environment.

Evidencing this, a report from UKGBC and the World Green Building Council explored the factors that comprise a healthy and productive workplace. The main elements were good indoor air quality, thermal comfort, good lighting conditions and the minimisation of unwanted noise.

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Building automation can play a key role in achieving this; these systems can be connected through smart sensors to collect key environmental metrics. This information can be used by building managers to make key decisions – based on real‑time and historical insights. The tracking and improved oversight of these assets undoubtedly delivers better management of the building through the elimination of inefficiencies.

Furthermore, by being able to control, regulate and optimise these operational aspects of a building, adapting working conditions is now very straightforward. Building automation also makes it easier to respond to concerns and requests for change – something that historically has required costly and lengthy interventions to deliver.

This level of automation across multiple areas of a building’s environment is made possible through the integration of IoT‑enabled smart systems. This technology helps to achieve improved operational efficiency alongside significant energy savings. By combining together automated control, temperature and air quality – based on occupancy levels – leads to impressive results with regard to energy reduction and reduced costs.

Further benefits that can be achieved by utilising IoT data analytics include improving maintenance practices and enabling predictive decision‑making to achieve cost savings. Predictive maintenance covers a huge spectrum of information and data - from battery life, luminaire health, life expectancy and temperature monitoring to prevent premature burnout. It also supports the detection of other potential failures – before they occur.

This level of autonomy allows facilities managers to adjust their workloads according to the requirements of the systems they are responsible for.

Taking all of these benefits into account, it is clear that the use of smart technologies has a key role to play in driving forward more advanced building management. This is true for both new buildings when being designed, and existing stock which can be upgraded through technology that is retrofittable.

For facilities managers who are able to embrace these systems, the rewards are clear to see. And with organisations such as Cosmicnode committing to developing robust solutions that offer these benefits, there is a positive way forward to introduce these changes.