May 01, 2023. Managing Today’s Castles. By HD Vo & Sri Peruvemba, InMapz.
A thousand years ago when the first castle or palace was built, they probably had ushers to provide directions and instruc- tions. 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, and 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 that 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 per- sonnel to manage if you are using printed floor plans, 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.
Most of our industry is using blueprint floor plans and spreadsheets to track assets and it takes an ungodly amount of time to find a shut off value in an emergency if you must ruffle through paper. We have contractors that get to the site and cannot locate the right mechanical, and you are still billed time and mileage; worse yet, they fix the wrong mechanical that was sitting next to the broken one. If you are constantly looking for assets that are on paper, but you can’t find them onsite and the auditors take days to finish the inspection and certify, clearly the process is not working.
So, what is the solution? Recently introduced indoor mapping technology that converts static floor plans into the building’s digital twin through an automated process. One such solution is provided by InMapz. Each structure shown on the floor plan becomes a smart object with its own attributes such as GPS location, serial number, photographs, and description. Confer- ence rooms, HVA C 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 mobile app, in seconds. Want to manage today’s castles better? There is a way.
About InMapz
Founded by MIT and Caltech engineers, InMapz created indoor mapping technology to convert static floor plans into digital twins through an automated process. Each structure shown on the floor plan can become a smart object with its own attrib- utes such as GPS location, model number, serial number, photographs, and so forth. For example, conference rooms, HVAC equipment, IoT sensors, etc. can be extracted from the floor plan. Users can easily add, edit, and delete other mechanicals. Rather than having to go to the office to pull up paper floor plans and cross-reference spreadsheets, users can access their building’s digital twin via the InMapz app or web browser on the phone, tablet, or laptop. Through selection and filtering options, users can both visualize on the digital twin and see a list of whatever smart objects are specified.
InMapz saves time and money for facilities managers, building auditors, third party maintenance teams, emergency responsepersonnel, airport travelers, trade show organizers and attendees. The company has mapped hundreds of millions of square feet, including over 300 international airports, 1500 worldwide malls, hospitals, schools, universities, trade shows, office buildings, data centers, factories, and hotels. To InMapz your building, please visit www.InMapz.com.