November 04, 2022.
If you are managing a large facility using blueprint floor plans and spreadsheets to track assets, this article is for you. If, the last time you had a water leak during off hours and it took the emergency repair tech a half hour to get to it after wading thru paper maps, this is for you. If the third-party maintenance crew could not locate the empty sanitizer dispenser after 3 weeks of complaining, you will find this interesting. If your HVAC repair technician got lost on the roof while looking for unit #34 that required maintenance, this might be useful. If your employees must accompany the auditors for days and you regularly find assets that are missing or assets that aren’t recorded on paper, please read on. If your employees have your facilities management team on speed dial, then we wrote this for you.
A thousand years ago when the first castle or palace was built, they probably had ushers to provide directions and instructions. Do they remind you of today’s airports and large malls where they still have ushers and hard to read printed maps on the wall? A thousand years ago the role of a facilities manager was to provide safety and comfort, that is still the major requirement in most buildings today. A thousand years ago, the facilities manager in a palace provided lighting using candles, heating by burning wood or coal, cooling by opening the windows and doors, water for drinking, cooking, and bathing, hygiene by pest control and routine cleaning, space allocation plus management and navigation. These are still the bulk of the services provided by the facilities manager albeit with newer tools like air conditioning, modern plumbing and devices run on electricity. Yet, most of today’s facilities managers still rely on paper maps that are usually dog eared, stained and hard to read, with lots of notes and cryptic markings usually denoting the changes they made the last time they upgraded a panel or relocated a safety valve.
Today’s skyscrapers, malls, airports, hospitals, factories, and warehouses are quite a bit sophisticated, they have hundreds of rooms and destinations, thousands of assets, doors, elevators, safety equipment and sensors; they require an army of personnel to manage if you are using printed maps, spreadsheets on someone’s computer and signs on the walls. In addition to providing safety and comfort, today’s facilities managers are tasked with conserving energy, reducing carbon emission in an ever-changing environment of regulations and code.
So, what is the solution? Introducing InMapz, a company founded by MIT and Caltech engineers, who created fundamental technology to convert static floor plans into the building’s digital twin through an automated process. Each structure shown on the floor plan becomes a smart object with its own attributes such as GPS location, serial number, photographs, and description. Conference rooms, HVAC equipment, IoT sensors, etc. can be extracted from the floor plan. Users can easily add, edit, and delete other mechanicals. Next time you get a maintenance call in the middle of the night about a pipe leaking, rather than drive to the office, pull up floor plans and search spreadsheets, you can simply locate the shut off valve on your InMapz app, in seconds. Want to manage today’s castles? Just InMapz it.