Using the Internet of Things to save money and boost productivity
In Canada, an average city has around 75% of its workforce engaged in field activities. Canadian field or maintenance workers are often referred to as ‘blue collar workers’. Our observation is that they do not use technology as part of their day-to-day jobs. In many instances, that’s because our cities have been reluctant to equip them with technology.
Cities, hospitals, and educational institutions have many different assets that are maintained by fieldworkers. These assets are core to the running of their business and include things such as heaters, buildings, roads, lighting and water systems.
Wasted Energy and Lowered Productivity
By not giving its blue collar workers technology tools, cities are actually contributing to wasted energy resources and a lack of productivity. Let’s look at those two areas in a little more detail:
- Energy Consumption. In terms of energy consumption, facilities could be wasting large amount of energy to heat or chill buildings, and this discovery happens after the fact – resulting in long periods of wasted expense on energy. An example is a broken thermostat, or a dampener stuck open.
In fact, studies show that up to 30% of an energy bill is wasted energy. In a city like Vancouver, which spends $28 million on electricity alone, this could account for up to $8.4 million wasted annually.
- Workforce Productivity. Without technology proactively reporting problems, the workforce is spending large amounts of time trying to find what is causing problems, or they are engaged in fixing unforeseen events.
By addressing problems in a proactive and timely manner, institutions could tackle problems before they become severe or have a spillover effect. Examples of this are replacing a pump before it breaks, or fixing a key escalator in a transit system before rush hour. If the escalator fails during rush hour, this causes large disruptions in the movement of people, resulting is numerous spillover effects, such as missed appointments or traffic slowdowns.
Using Technology to Address the Issues
Technology is currently being used to address the issues of energy and time wasting.
The Microsoft 88 Acres story , for instance, talks about how we at Microsoft built a facilities management solution to manage our building assets across our Redmond, WA campus. This solution:
- Tracks over 2 million endpoints today
- Cut our power consumption by 30%
- Started paying for itself on day one
- Paid itself off completely within 18 months
- Allows us to manage our workforce to proactively support our business
The Power of the Internet of Things
So what exactly do we mean by the Internet of Things? The Internet of Things (IoT) allows one to collect information from sensors, which can now be placed on almost any asset. These could be sensors for motor controls, heating units, and even sensors that will alert when roadways are wearing out. In essence, the sensors generate large amounts of data, indicating the state that an asset is in.
This data can be collected in order to ascertain basic information, such as a light being on or off. But the real power comes when one has powerful computing that can cross reference multiple sensors and come to conclusions.
An example is a window being open while a heater is on and the outside temperature is freezing. Each of these component information pieces on their own give the user value. Knowing that it is freezing outside and that the heater is on, the person can see that the heater is operating due to weather conditions. However, when the third piece of information – the open window – is added to the equation, the real power starts to come into play. If a window is open, thus allowing the heat to escape, the question now becomes: should the heater be on? Or should the window be closed and the heater off, thus saving money? It is the ability to combine these different pieces of information that demonstrates the power of the IoT.
There are also benefits around workforce management.
If we follow along the same example, after several month or weeks, the operations arm of an organization might notice that they are spending higher amounts on energy. This would lead to an investigation of the problem, taking people hours to perform and possibly requiring movement of these people over large geographical distances. (Such as a maintenance worker at a school district who may need to travel hundreds of kilometers). With the IoT, the problem can be analyzed and shown in real time, and labor can instead be deployed on more critical tasks.
The Impact on Blue Collar Workers
The IoT offers cities the ability to prioritize their workforces more effectively. This would allow them to focus on trouble areas before they become disasters and prioritize their work based upon needs. An example is how ThyssenKrupp is using IoT to monitor its elevator and escalator assets worldwide. Based upon the reporting by sensors and the use of machine learning, ThyssenKrupp is able to identify faults that will occur in their products before they actually occur. This in turn allows for them to deploy their workers to attend to issues before they become real problems.
Aligning the IoT with workers can be a massive productivity output to organizations. Through the use of better information, workers are proactively fixing issues and/or are prioritizing work in a manner that deals with the severity/cost of the issue to the organization.
Conclusion
The Microsoft Internet of Things platform is built on a scalable, secure enterprise system that leverages an ecosystem of more than 650,000 worldwide partners.
The platform helps Cities, Health Institutions, and Education facilities to take advantage of their existing infrastructures, yet optimize their performance. This optimization will lead to cost savings around energy usage and workforce management and will benefit all parties that use the institutions’ infrastructures on a collective basis.
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