U.S. Air Force Partners With IBM On Building Performance Mission

IBM today announced that the U.S. Air Force (USAF) has selected IBM smarter buildings software to help its civil engineers maximize energy efficiency and automate the management of its physical infrastructure portfolio — from buildings, vehicles, runways and other infrastructure across 170 locations worldwide.

BM has partnered with the U.S. Air Force to help its civil engineers maximize energy efficiency and automate the management of its physical infrastructure — from buildings, vehicles, runways, and other infrastructure across 626 million square feet and 170 locations worldwide.

This portfolio includes more than 626 million square feet of real estate, over 100 million square yards of airfield pavement and 10 million acres of land used by Active Duty, Reserve and Air National Guard personnel.

Presidential Executive Orders require executive branch departments and agencies to establish asset management plans, install performance measures and ensure the effective management of Federal real property assets through their entire lifecycle.

Additional orders require agencies to improve energy efficiency, reduce natural resource consumption and decrease waste production to reduce carbon emissions.

To meet this order, the Air Force Office of the Civil Engineer, whose mission is to provide, operate, maintain, and protect sustainable installations as weapon-system platforms through engineering and emergency response services across the full mission spectrum, will use IBM TRIRIGA software to gain greater visibility and control of its physical assets.

IBM’s integrated workplace management software, called IBM TRIRIGA, provides the Air Force with a standardized, powerful technology platform to analyze data about real property assets, streamline work orders and suppliers, and reduce energy use across thousands of buildings.

These tools will help USAF measure and manage its operational, financial and environmental performance to determine and prove effectiveness against government-wide and agency real property management objectives.

“IBM TRIRIGA software will help implement  our NexGen IT vision and give USAF a data-driven approach to manage its real property and physical assets, as well as help us predict issues before they impact service and safety,”said Alexander Earle, Chief Information Officer, Air Force Office of the Civil Engineer.  “Implementing IBM TRIRIGA will help strengthen our IT infrastructure by removing redundant systems, providing real-time analytics and optimizing core processes that enable us to make better decisions about how we manage our resources.”

Using IBM TRIRIGA, USAF plans to reduce operating costs, increase return on budget and reduce energy consumption through:

• Integrated Workplace Management: Provides a single system to optimize performance of all real estate locations, assets and personnel operations. By optimizing building use, occupancy costs are reduced, lease administration is made easier, and managers can evaluate future space requirements to make long term planning decisions.
• Energy Assessment Tools: Enables users to obtain environmental insights and pre-defined, automated operational procedures and processes to monitor and reduce energy consumption as well as waste production from real property assets operations.
• Condition-based Maintenance: Better manage the maintenance of property and equipment based on the age, condition and history of facilities. Having this insight can prevent costly repairs by allowing staff to pinpoint equipment that should be replaced before incidents occur.

IBM TRIRIGA improves the operational, financial and environmental performance of real estate assets and operations. The software provides a comprehensive suite of applications to manage the real estate lifecycle of an organization with pre-defined management processes and extensive web-based configuration management tools.

About IBM Smarter Buildings

Since launching its Smarter Buildings initiative in February 2010, IBM has created a portfolio of smarter buildings solutions that integrate with building automation software from across the industry.

IBM’s real-time monitoring and analysis, facilities and space management capabilities, and advanced dynamic dashboards helps property owners and managers reduce facilities operations and energy expense, and improve asset management and reliability.

Through IBM’s acquisition of TRIRIGA, IBM accelerated efforts to bring intelligence in the smarter buildings market. IBM’s smarter building solutions help clients listen to data generated by facilities. By collecting, managing, and analyzing data IBM helps clients gain intelligence and insight to energy, space and facilities management. TRIRIGA strengthens IBM’s smarter buildings solutions by adding key functions such as real estate, facility and energy management software solutions.

Mona Lisa Smile: IBM Helps The Louvre Become Europe’s First “Smarter” Museum

At Pulse 2012 here in Las Vegas, IBM announced today that it is working with the Louvre Museum in Paris to preserve and protect its facilities and artwork, which covers more than 650,000 square feet, making it one of the largest museums in the world.

Through its intelligent management system, the Louvre Museum can protect and maintain artwork while keeping galleries open to the millions of customers who visit yearly.

Established in the 18th century, the Louvre is home to thousands of objects and artifacts ranging from prehistory to 1848, including the most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa. To preserve and protect its facilities and world-famous artwork, the museum staff handles more than 65,000 repairs and maintenance visits per year. Through the use of IBM Maximo Asset Management software the museum’s staff has been able to streamline their maintenance processes to improve customer service as well as the efficiency and real-time operation and management of the museum.

As Europe’s most visited museum, with a record breaking 8.8 million visitors in 2011, one of the Louvre’s goals is to keep the majority of its galleries open daily. To meet that goal while managing over 65,000 repairs and maintenance visits, the museum needed to make its corrective and preventative maintenance more streamlined and efficient.

Prior to working with IBM, the staff managed its facility-related repairs and maintenance work by paper, involving hundreds of vendors. In order to keep the majority of its galleries open daily, the museum recognized that it needed a computerized maintenance management tool to make its corrective and preventative maintenance more streamlined and efficient.

The museum engaged IBM Business Partner SQLI to upgrade IBM Maximo software in order to create a single information database and shared repository for the museum staff. The software solution’s integrated database helps the museum visualize processes including the initial planning, cleaning, maintenance and disposal of the rooms and facilities systems such as the air-conditioning system, heating system, elevators, lights for each room or gallery, and the locking system for more than 2,500 doors,

“Managing thousands of repairs, cleaning and maintenance visits per year to preserve the facilities and artwork while keeping the galleries available and accessible to visitors is a daunting undertaking,” said Metin Pelit, department manager of computerized maintenance management system, The Louvre Museum. “Thanks to IBM software, we’re able to visualize our entire infrastructure and make better, more informed decisions about when and how to respond to problems — and about when to proactively address a potential problem that we otherwise wouldn’t have seen coming.”

Better Managing The Louvre, Making The Mona Lisa Smile

The Louvre’s management system can now aggregate data from individual systems within the museum, providing the museum staff and its vendors coherent and real-time information on each asset. Additionally, the software provides a predictive view into the performance and reliability of the facility equipment and systems, allowing museum staff to better determine which assets need to be repaired or replaced.

“Buildings are massive systems of systems, and these systems need to talk to each other for a building to become smarter,”added Pelit. “In the Louvre’s case, there’s the added challenge of being home to thousands of irreplaceable pieces of art which must be carefully preserved while trying to accommodate millions of visitors annually. By using Maximo software to monitor the condition of assets across the museum’s facilities in one single database, these systems begin to talk to one another, allowing staff to preserve artwork and facilities with more ease and efficiency. As a result the Louvre is now able to keep the majority of their galleries open to customers on a daily basis while simultaneously reducing costs and energy consumption.”

The IBM software enables the museum to gain better insight on what assets they have: how many assets they own, their location and the maintenance history log. The software helps the Louvre Museum staff to manage both planned and unplanned maintenance activities, from initial work request and work order generation through completion and recording of the actual work performed.

The software matched job tasks to available contractors, estimated and obtained approval of costs, established priorities and initiated maintenance activities throughout the museum and its individual galleries.  It enables the museum to better follow-up on the maintenance staff – especially contractors, who also work with Maximo. Based on this knowledge, the museum can tailor its tender offer, and consequently contractors can better align their offer to the customer needs.

About IBM Smarter Buildings 

IBM delivers technology that manages buildings from museums to office buildings, warehouses, factories, power plants, laboratories, campuses, apartments, resorts and more, to save costs, better manage systems, and reduce carbon emissions. IBM software, hardware and services help create, manage and maintain the world’s most intelligent and interconnected infrastructures from smarter buildings, cities, utilities, offices, transportation systems and operations in every industry.

Since launching its Smarter Buildings initiative in February 2010, IBM has created a portfolio of smarter buildings solutions that integrate with building automation software from across the industry. IBM’s real-time monitoring and analysis, facilities and space management capabilities, and advanced dynamic dashboards helps property owners and managers reduce facilities operations and energy expense, and improve asset management and reliability.

You can learn more about IBM Smarter Buildings here.

IBM Smarter Buildings Analytics Helps CFOs Prepare For Major Accounting Shift

You can tell we’re getting close to the Pulse 2012 event.

Just earlier today, IBM introduced some new analytics software to help CFOs and real estate executives accelerate their preparedness for pending compliance rules for leased assets.

Proposed accounting rules from the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), which are expected to be finalized in 2012, will require a company’s leased assets — real estate, vehicles, other equipment — to be added to their balance sheet as a capital asset.

That means S&P 500 companies would have to list the value of their leases on the balance sheet, weighing them down with an estimated average of more than $1 billion in new assets.

The pending regulation has the potential to dampen their financial performance as expressed in debt/equity ratios and return on assets.

The U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) estimates that the impact of these changes may approach $1.25 trillion dollars for U.S. publicly traded companies.

Visibility Into Your Leased Assets

IBM’s announcement today centers on issuing new software to help companies manage this major accounting change.

IBM TRIRIGA software has new analytics that delivers visibility into balance sheet and income statement impact; financial assumptions and audit controls for both real estate and equipment leases; and automates management review and approval processes, specifically to help companies navigate the proposed regulation.

The new software also delivers strategic facility scenario modeling to increase return on leased real property assets.

With a global view, the software can:

• Provide operational controls such as critical date alerts, payment processing and financial assumptions for leased real estate and equipment assets in a single technology platform.
• Provide balance sheet and income statement analysis of complex real estate lease decisions, such as 10 years with two renewal options versus 20 years, for instance.
• Help predict future demand for space and display gaps between demand and availability of real estate space.

These types of analytics are critical as an IBM study issued today shows 92 percent of those surveyed believe they are not prepared to implement the pending rules.

The IBM survey, conducted by CFO Research Services, a research group sponsored by CFO Publishing, polled 179 senior executives from global companies with revenue in excess of US$1 billion.

About IBM Smarter Buildings
Since launching its Smarter Buildings initiative in February 2010, IBM has created a portfolio of smarter buildings solutions that integrate with building automation software from across the industry.

IBM’s real-time monitoring and analysis, facilities and space management capabilities, and advanced dynamic dashboards helps property owners and managers reduce facilities operations and energy expense, and improve asset management and reliability.

Through IBM’s acquisition of TRIRIGA, IBM accelerated efforts to bring intelligence in the smarter buildings market. IBM’s smarter building solutions help clients listen to data generated by facilities.

By collecting, managing, and analyzing data IBM helps clients gain intelligence and insight to energy, space and facilities management. TRIRIGA strengthens IBM’s smarter buildings solutions by adding key functions such as real estate, facility and energy management software solutions.

Register to watch this video about these new lease accounting solutions from IBM, and next week, be sure to follow #ibmpulse and #smarterbuildings for some exciting news on smarter building management emanating from the IBM Pulse 2012 event.

Live @ Pulse 2010: Second Day Buzz

Greetings from 5:47 A.M. Las Vegas time, live in my room at the MGM Signature.

Yesterday was a great start to Pulse 2010, I must say.  There was quite a buzz in the air, and even though I was stuck in the MGM “biosphere” for the entirety of the day, I found the content of the opening session and Al Gore’s keynote to be quite compelling.

And the demo of The Venetian and its “smart” city-within-a-city was particularly compelling, and judging from the Twitter comments I saw, you all in the audience really enjoyed it as well.  If you wish to show the demo to your colleagues back at the office, you can view it here on YouTube.

As part of yesterday’s festivities, IBM made some key announcements, including around the notion of building smarter buildings.

As I already posted, IBM has partnered with Johnson Controls to optimize energy usage and improve security for clients in more than 150 countries.  This new smart building solution will help clients improve asset performance, sustainability, productivity, and safety across buildings and portfolios of buildings.

“Smarter buildings are key to the economic and environmental sustainability of urban environments,” said Rich Lechner, vice president, Energy and Environment for IBM, about the announcement. “Real-time infrastructure data coupled with analytics can enable better economic decisions and environmental outcomes. Together with an array of partners, we are delivering this value to clients today.”

IBM also announced it is working with Ricoh on an advanced device and printing management system which infuses office devices with real-time tracking and monitoring to help firms significantly reduce their print-related costs, improve service and also cut back on carbon emissions.

Gartner has estimated organizations can save between 10 and 30 percent of their printing costs if they better manage their printer, copier, and fax fleets.

You can keep up with all the Pulse-related announcements on this page here.

As for getting Tuesday off to a similarly roaring start, don’t forget this morning’s keynote session will be co-hosted by IBM Chief Privacy Officer and VP, Security Counsel, Harriet Pearson, and IBM System and Technology Group GM Helene Armitage.

Harriet and Helene will explore how integrated service management can meet the needs of a smarter planet, with a particular eye on the practical concerns of managing growth, reducing costs and ensuring security.

See you at the MGM Grand Arena!

Building Smarter Buildings

If you’ve visited this blog with any frequency, you know that I’ve visited a few cities around the globe in my time — four of them in the last week alone (Stuttgart, Madrid, Milan, and now Las Vegas).

For several years, I lived in a big city (New York), and opted in 2001 to move to a smaller, but still vibrant, city, Austin, Texas, where I worked for several years on Tivoli’s Web site (see today’s CNN Morning show for a feature on how Austin’s economy has thrived during the recession!)

With an estimated 60 million people around the world moving into cities each year, experts predict population in the world’s cities are going to double by 2050. As populations grow, civic leaders and businesses alike are looking for ways to help cities and their buildings cope.

Too often today, many of the systems that constitute a building — heat, water, sewage, electricity — are managed independently and, typically, inefficiently.

Buildings alone are a source of huge waste.  They account for 70 percent of all energy use and 38 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S.  That’s a lot of hot air!

That means, ultimately, that each year buildings emit more harmful CO2 emissions into the environment than do our vehicles (and as Al Gore mentioned in this morning’s Pulse keynote).

The culprits leading to such inefficiencies are varied: Poor planning and maintenance, inadequate energy management, the heating or cooling of unused space, and the inability to collect and analyze operational information.

Today, IBM and Johnson Controls have partnered in a joint initiative called Smart Building Solution, which combines the power of business analytics from IBM with the building technology and energy efficiency solutions of Johnson Controls to help address some of these inefficiencies.

This partnership is intended to help improve operations, lower costs, and reduce energy and water use in buildings and will be targeted at public sector, education, and large commercial real estate owners and industrial facilities.

Read more about this expanded partnership between IBM and Johnson Controls in this post by earth2tech.