Our industry has transformed itself many times in the past fifty years and will continue to do so. As professional AV stakeholders, it is our responsibility to try to stay ahead of the changes and transform our business along with our industry. The latest revolution that is changing the landscape all around us is the Internet of Things (IoT).
IoT is starting to converge all technologies and expand across every industry and every market. It is safe to say that our industry and our clients will embrace this technology and look to leverage their existing partners. The real value of IoT comes from two aspects: a) Monitoring and Control of Devices, and b) Analytics to intelligently manage and coordinate various devices, people and processes around them. With the acquisition of Energy Metrics LLC in New York and Energy Metrics ULC in Toronto, we now have a platform to achieve both.
The Energy Metrics platform allows us to bring accurate and meaningful real-time data from across all IoT and non-IoT devices, user inputs and preferences, and help monitor/manage, analyze and coordinate various assets and operations to be more efficient—economically and environmentally. Providing a portfolio view across assets and locations, it’s perfectly suited to manage distributed properties and assets, helping facility managers to be more efficient. With an ability to retain and analyze very large volume of data from a vast array of devices, over multiple years, the system also brings an innovative capability to understand the relationship between various systems, processes and people.
We believe that this IoT solution will help our existing clients and new clients save money—on energy and maintenance bills, become more productive—with improved comfort. This solution will also reduce process cycle times—better real-time management and accurately plan for the future—with deep knowledge about usage/failures.
Today, IoT exists for an ever-increasing variety of applications, in many different forms with many different manufactures and standards. With the Energy Metrics platform, we are looking to bring all these manufacturers, industries, and standards into one place under one dashboard. This includes our legacy audiovisual industry products and installations. We can leverage this new technology to help our clients build smart work environments that will promote a more pleasant and productive work environment.
The key benefits this solution can help achieve include:
a. Energy savings on HVAC, Lighting and other appliances in work environments
b. Savings on maintenance expenses on all the equipment by reducing number of truck-rolls in the name of scheduled maintenance
c. Better comfort in work environments with real-time environment information, as well as collective user feedback instead of just relying on a single set-point
d. Better work efficiencies with automatic detection of faults, escalation to service vendors and coordinating service windows
e. Tracking of use of all the assets and mapping them to the right time for replacements, based on value and fault rates
With this solution, in the near future, we are looking to integrate advanced AV solutions, along with the other smart devices from various companies in the industry, to create a seamless digital experience, for employees, facility managers, IT administrators, vendors and other stake-holders. This, we believe, will form the backbone of the smart offices of the future.
Ralph Capria is the CEO/President of A-V Services.
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A-V Services
www.avservices.net
Energy Metrics
