Supercharge your engineering strategy with data and AI

Ever thought that a deeper understanding of your facilities and assets would transform your organisation's engineering and technical services? You're not alone. It's the eternal challenge - the need to find new efficiencies, operate with fewer disruptions and use your engineering partner in the most effective way. And this is all while balancing budget and resources.

The answer, increasingly, lies in the insights you can pull from your estate's data. And there's plenty of data flying around that teams could use, from individual asset performance to energy usage statistics.

With ongoing advancements in AI and machine learning, now's an exciting time for organisations like yours to be sitting on a treasure trove of engineering data. Yet many haven't realised its potential and are missing out on the benefits it can bring. Let's explore how these technologies can be applied for engineering, maintenance and upgrade teams - and how Mitie is working to make supercharged insights available for every customer.

AI this sophisticated has been a long time coming

AI has been around for decades in various forms; its progress is iterative and some of today's most exciting technologies are increasingly complex evolutions of models and algorithms.

For example, we've been using machine learning for years, taking structured data to enable predictions and recommendations. This sits at the heart of the shift from reactive to predictive maintenance. But more recently, improvements in computing capacity have led to the growing popularity of large language models, a kind of machine learning which allows you to derive insights from unstructured data.

Let's think about this in context: engineers are constantly submitting digital reports and notes about the assets they're installing and maintaining. Usually, this information is scattered across organisations' various asset management tools - nearly impossible to consolidate "by hand" and far too difficult for humans to make sense of without hours of work.

Large language models can bring all that disparate, unstructured data together and extract insights that can inform your engineering strategy. They recognise patterns in the engineers' reports and warning signs in the text that aren't always reflected in the numbers.

Similarly, many estates are now heavily populated with connected sensors, whether they're an intrinsic part of the equipment or a separate monitoring tool. As well as recording vital metrics, these offer helpful insights into estate performance and health using capabilities such as detecting anomalies in equipment function.

For example, Mitie uses these data streams to monitor the operating parameters of air conditioning units and identify if a unit is behaving unusually. It may be starting to vibrate or using more power than it should. These are often signs that the asset is headed for failure. Identifying them means estate teams can repair or replace the unit before it breaks or affects the performance of the whole facility. And of course this applies to all sorts of equipment, from refrigeration to lighting systems, electrical infrastructure and more.

Trying to influence change with tech? You need data

There's one major problem that can stand in the way of these insights. Many organisations don't have a centralised source of high-quality data, which means they don't have the foundation required for trusted, effective AI.

This isn't a problem unique to facilities management; organisations across plenty of industries struggle to consolidate their various data sources into a format that's usable and valuable.

In the first instance, you need to understand where your data lives - which assets and systems you can pull from to build a holistic picture of your estate. With that context, you can start thinking about what you want to achieve with your data; having clear use cases to guide your use of data and AI will help you recognise which data streams to prioritise and where you have gaps.

To tackle this challenge within Mitie, we've created a data lake, a highly-secure resource for our teams where we store and process all the data from our services. This creates a continuous loop of feedback and improvement that enables us to shape our offering into the best version of itself across engineering, maintenance, decarbonisation, projects and more.

Because we own the data, we can achieve more with it, understanding engineering needs and capabilities in a more granular way. This also gives us a rare opportunity to create industry benchmarks, which are based on anonymised real-time information from organisations from all sectors. There's no more guesswork involved in whether there's a better, more efficient or more cost-effective way to work - it's all contained in the data.

Data and AI offer a more intelligent route for engineering resources

This is all about identifying the best route towards improvement for your engineering strategy - whatever that looks like. For some customers, that means AI, for others it might involve digital twins or defining a new approach to maintenance.

At its heart, the transformational power of technology in facilities management comes from making sure you can have the right person in the right place, exactly when you need them there. With the right approach, there's no more stretching resources to their limit, or wasting an engineer's time on checking an asset that's operating perfectly just because the schedule says so.

AI and other technologies are helping engineering, maintenance and project teams understand their facilities in greater depth than ever before, and delivering the insights leaders need to match expert skills to estate demands. They're helping automate monitoring, plan out work and improvements proactively and maximise engineers' time in the field.

With Mitie, you'll get exactly what your organisation needs

Right now, Mitie is on its own journey of AI maturity. Our team is always experimenting with new ways to deliver. That means our customers will always benefit from the latest in facilities management AI - whatever the application.

We're working with industry leaders like Microsoft to explore what's possible with AI. Our technology investment of over £160m in the past six years, together with our self-delivered approach, means we own and manage a vast amount of superior FM data. We also build on our partners' expertise, using our domain knowledge and experience to create supercharged services.

To learn more about our engineering and technical services offering, and how we can help you supercharge your estate's strategy with data and AI, visit our Engineering and Maintenance page.

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