Facility Resource Management Solutions: Emerging IT Tools Reshape Building Energy Management

Leading corporations and institutions have made energy efficiency and sustainability strategic priorities, with facilities representing a key area of focus. Commercial facilities account for as much as 50 percent of electricity used in the United States, nearly 30 percent of which is wasted through inefficiency.

Historically, building management systems (BMS) were designed primarily to manage occupant comfort and building operations, and have lacked the advanced analytics necessary to optimize resource use. Over the past decade, however, technology has improved significantly in environmental monitoring and control systems. Advances in IT have made it more cost-effective to collect, analyze, and operate on vast amounts of building control data. Facilities professionals now have access to a wide range of new system- level software and service solutions for enhancing efficiency. These solutions augment existing BMS functionality, and support such capabilities as advanced system control and optimization, continuous commissioning, automated demand response, and tenant engagement. And while ROI varies widely by implementation, such solutions are demonstrating attractive efficiency gains of 10 to 30 percent or more.

In this report, we describe 12 advanced Facility Resource Management (FRM) capabilities, and profile 25 vendor solutions. Vendors include recent market entrants such as Agilewaves and SCIenergy, as well as major control systems incumbents Honeywell and JCI. We frame FRM capabilities in the context of a six-level reference architecture for enterprise sustainability, and present three case studies from leading- edge commercial customers. We conclude with a series of recommendations for how organizations can approach planning and implementing new FRM solutions within their own facilities.