Modern Building Services

28 MODERN BUILDING SERVICES MARCH 2022 VERTICAL FOCUS BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE? FEATURE VERTICAL FOCUS F ear of automation is nothing new. When William Lee threatened to revolutionise Britain’s textile industry with an automated knitting machine in 1589, Queen Elizabeth refused the patent, arguing: “thou aimest high, Master Lee. Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.” These issues are far from foreign to us. The threat of automation to blue collar jobs is still as real as it was four-and-a-half centuries ago, and careless job disruption has left many thousands of workers with chronically unstable futures. Critics warn of the so-called ‘Uber economy’, with technology pushing for efficiency by destroying jobs as new tools become available. While Uber drivers may make more money than traditional taxi drivers, workers find themselves constantly wrestling with the possibility that technology may very suddenly replace a part of their job. It is easy to sympathise with the Luddite position: the cost to the individual is not always worth the gamble for abstract eventual success. We can also understand that technology is the only sure- fire way to improve productivity and living standards for individual’s long term. But there is a third way… The ThirdWay Building operations are strongest when they harness the power of both technology and the people that operate it. The goal is not to replace our engineers with robots that can do their job in half the time. The goal is to find a way to use technology to support and facilitate the quality work that only a human mind can learn and achieve. The companies that survive this volatile era of digitisation will not be those that use technology at the expense of their workers, but those who can use it to empower them. WeMaintain’s solution uses Internet of Things-style sensors to talk to each other about how buildings are being used, which gives engineers the information they need to do the best possible job. Sensors attach to a lift or an escalator and then measure how they are used to anticipate risk and inform engineers in good time. The collected signal data is then analysed and made available to the engineer on an app, who can use all the relevant information to direct his work. Ultimately, this translates into faster response times, faster repair times, fewer emergency breakdowns and fewer interferences with building users. Better information means engineers can arrive with exactly the tools they need and schedule repairs at times that will have the minimal impact on traffic, while avoiding the expense of costly emergency repairs. At every stage, technology is used to support the engineer– not to replace them. Scaling Up This is one thing in a residential building. With larger commercial buildings, companies will start to look for ways to save costs. Leaders start to replace workers with technology when they no longer see the value of human judgement to the task; this is more likely to happen when fixing the problems of large vertical buildings in which human interaction and relationship building seems far less of a priority. But companies get it wrong when theymiss the value their engineers add. There is only so much information you can collect by repeatedly recording how and when devices are used– and this By Tom Harmsworth , Managing Director UK, WeMaintain Tech won’t replace humans in building operations in our lifetime