Energy efficiency is one of the most critical factors in any building project. It’s estimated that commercial buildings consume nearly 20% of all energy in the U.S., the majority of which is used for lighting and indoor climate control. From site selection and layout to building materials and mechanical systems, energy efficiency is a primary goal at every stage in a building’s lifecycle. The McKenney’s Automation & Control Solutions (ACS) division provides systems that enable customers to manage their facilities for optimal comfort, cost savings and energy efficiency. One of the greatest challenges in achieving these objectives is integrating the data generated by a wide array of disparate systems and devices used to control discrete building and campus operations, including pumps, valves, thermostats, uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs), power distribution units (PDUs), variable air volume units and many others. The building systems from a single campus or site can be comprised of tens of thousands of devices—monitoring and providing analytics on these represented a big data challenge. “It can be very difficult to collect the data from all of these siloed systems, and the challenge multiplies when you have to then put it into another system for analysis,” explains Brian Gilmore, program manager for the Enterprise Intelligence Group within the McKenney’s ACS division. “Our goal is to provide a value-added layer of business intelligence to building control systems that allow facility managers, asset managers and other stakeholders to gain some actionable intelligence from the data coming from what can be many thousands of devices.”
