What do you want from your BMS - 1/3

Fresh out of uni back in the days, sitting on some cement bags with a makeshift cable drum as a table. Looking back, I appreciate those experience even more now than I realised then. My formative career years working for a D&C contractor has defined who I am as an engineer. Those were the days' when fundamentals were important: my manager, Ir T.T. Tang (aka Boss) challenged us to be a better version of ourselves tomorrow, be a better engineer today than yesterday. Many of his wisdom still holds today.

BMS was called BAS at that time; he resisted implementing BAS for our projects initially. Sales engineers came and went with their unique selling propositions, and none was able to convince him. The most fundamental question he asked was, "what is it that you are proposing that we can't do with what we have and the way we were doing?"; automation that was.

Then came Honeywell, with three value propositions

1. better automation --> save energy; save money
2. design insight --> design certainty no safety factor required; save money
3. preventive maintenance --> not crisis maintenance; save money

Boss was looking for the ultimate criterion to save money for the clients! BMS has since progressed by leaps and bounce, with better software and hardware; but why is it that proper BMS implementation is as elusive more so now than ever? Who is responsible? Where is the disconnect? You might hear some argue we need in house expertise, and I will emphasise not. It's the same argument, do I need to know the essential operations and functions of the car to drive? Or know enough to drive from A to B, and know when and where to fill petrol. Similarly, the design engineer must know where the B that we want to achieve is.

If we first do not know what we want from our BMS system, please don't expect the contractor to implement it correctly. What do you want from your BMS system? What about condition monitoring for predictive maintenance? And more so predictive optimisation, being proactive rather than reactive?

Check out part 2 of this post at https://www.hueyliew.com.au/bms/what-do-you-want-from-your-bms-2/. This post set the fundamental engineering approach to capitalise on the BMS for condition monitoring, hence predictive maintenance.