AutomatedBuildings.com Interview - John Bishop, Industry Leader, Facilities Management Solutions, Invensys Operations Management

John Bishop is an Industry Leader for Invensys Operations Management, overseeing the facilities management and transportation infrastructure markets for the company’s Global Industries Solutions business. He joined Invensys as a consultant in January 2003 and became the company’s full-time senior systems consultant in July of that year, supporting technical sales for the central United States.

Bishop began his career in building automation systems working for Robertshaw Controls in its Control Systems Division. He has held numerous positions associated with facilities management, energy management and intelligent building applications.

With almost 30 years of global industry experience, and having held engineering, marketing, sales and management positions, his domain knowledge is essential for expanding Invensys technologies into the facilities management and transportation sectors. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia State University.

Bishop: Integrated facilities management, the theme of our exhibit at the recent AHR Expo 2011 in Las Vegas, refers to the orchestration of various building automation systems within one or multiple facilities, through a common layer of control and connectivity across all the infrastructure systems.

The commonality comes from open software architecture, such as that which Invensys employs in its system platform. This not only simplifies development, deployment, maintenance, support and the administration of facilities applications, but also provides flexibility in vendor selection, as the solutions work with common standards-based products and solutions from a variety of sources.

We build our facilities management solutions on an advanced set of tools that enable the easy creation of facilities management applications. This helps integrate the facility infrastructure into a cohesive operations management solution.

For industrial building owners, facilities include the manufacturing areas as well, and solutions for facilities management in industrial operations can extend the capabilities of the manufacturing automation and management solutions. For example, one could incorporate, manage and optimize energy use within the entire facility, not just offices or just manufacturing areas. So the integration can contribute greatly toward optimizing the complete operation.

Sinclair: Why is integration important in building systems?

Bishop: In today’s environment, facility managers are faced with several significant challenges as they struggle to manage the needs of their organization. They are facing increasing costs for energy, service and maintenance, additional and more complex security and regulatory requirements with fewer knowledgeable resources. With all these challenges, they are constantly looking for ways to streamline their operations and reduce costs.

One major issue, according to open communications protocol organizations like LonMark is the proprietary distribution models offered by the established building automation system (BAS) suppliers. Often exclusively provided by a single contractor for a specific territory, these models can eliminate competitive bids for installation, maintenance, service and support. Facility managers worldwide echo this sentiment, signifying the need for more choices in the selection of products and services.

Addressing this distribution issue, we provide our facilities management software offerings through an open distribution model to the largest independent systems integrator network in the world without exclusivity for product or territory. This model enables competitive choices to end-user customers in their selection of contractors, service, support and maintenance which overall helps provide the lowest total cost of ownership.

Operationally, integrated building automation addresses technical issues of trying to work with disparate products, systems and solutions based on different communication and operating foundations.

Sinclair: What technologies make integrated Facilities Management Solutions possible?

Bishop: For facilities managers trying to orchestrate various building automation systems within a single or multiple facilities, Invensys technology for facilities management provides a common layer of control and connectivity across all infrastructure systems.Our facilities management solutions are built on an advanced set of tools that enable the easy creation of facilities management applications.

At AHR Expo 2011, we demonstrated our new Industry Application for Facility Management Solutions (FMS), version 3.0, with our endorsed software partner ConneXSoft. This enhances our established capabilities for FMS solutions built on the Wonderware System Platform. There is now deeper integration for the major FMS protocols already supported. And, there is increased connectivity and integration to new protocols and devices, which means that system integrators and customers now have resources to build and deliver more advanced and broader FMS solutions.

This new solution improves integration and supervisory control of Building Automation and Control network (BACnet) compatible devices, including native integration of alarms and events and support for embedded calendar and schedule application objects. Features for hosted supervisory control of calendars and schedules provide additional capability for managing time-based events.

The new software can collect and process building automation information from large distributed campuses or multi-building/multi-site operations to allow central supervision. To manage heterogeneous building automation system environments, the FMS Integration package supports the leading, open industry communications standards such as BACnet, i.LON, SNMP and OPC, and provides a new class of industry-specific application generators, application objects and engineering tools.

Invensys has combined its Wonderware FMS solutions with ConneXSoft technology to provide facilities managers a better choice when it comes to installation, service and maintenance of their operations. The FMS integration package makes Wonderware System Platform an open SCADA system choice for facilities management solutions in a market that is dominated by closed-proprietary systems.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Sinclair: What are the benefits of integrating building systems?

Bishop: Organizations of all sizes, including industrial manufacturers, benefit from automating their facilities management by enabling holistic control of disparate building systems. This translates into safe, energy-efficient and lower-cost facilities operations, helping manufacturers achieve better profitability, productivity and operational excellence.

Integrating facilities management and manufacturing systems realizes costs savings in consistency, training, maintenance, operations and overhead, throughout the plant, site, region and enterprise. Additionally, this permits a total manufacturing cost calculation, because the typical overhead expenses for energy are monitored in real-time and recorded to the historian, for information analysis within contexts such as energy costs per batch, per product, per shift, normalized for square footage and degree day effects. By associating this information with time of day rates, one can analyze product runs and make necessary changes according to the most efficient and cost-effective schedule.

In addition, industrial facilities managers can apply standard manufacturing optimization algorithms in the operations sector of the business. Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) downtime analysis, maintenance management and asset management are typical applications that cross between operations and manufacturing. In a total integrated solution, managers can visualize, optimize and standardize these applications for deployment across the enterprise.

The Invensys Industry Application for Facility Management Solution provides customers with a competitive choice for products, services and maintenance and can leverage the largest global network of independent system integrators. The freedom of choice that an open system allows reduces total cost of ownership by lowering project costs and risks, as well as reduces the long-term costs of maintaining the deployed systems.

Sinclair: What other Invensys solutions contribute to facilities management success?

Bishop: The new FMS integration capabilities can be used with many other products and solutions to improve facilities management. Among them are Avantis PRO enterprise asset management (EAM) software, which facilities collaboration among operations and maintenance teams by providing timely asset utilization and availability information. On the control side, the Foxboro programmable automation controller (PAC) provides distributed control and recording functionality at the price of a PLC. Functionality includes continuous analog, logic and sequential control, combined with secure data recording at point of measurement. For energy management, Wonderware Corporate Energy Management (CEM) software can be employed to monitor energy usage and indicate when demand and usage limits have been exceeded, exposing inefficiencies in manufacturing and commercial operations. In dispersed locations, Wonderware mobile solutions, including the IntelaTrac mobile workforce and decision support software, has proven to reduce costs while improving system reliability and maintenance productivity.

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