Every engineering discipline has a theory of reliability. For civil engineers, it lives in load calculations and redundancy specs. Aviation earned its safety record through obsessive incident review. In the software industry, reliability has become the practice of assuming things will eventually break: what happens when you stop treating failure as an anomaly, and start preparing for it as a certainty? The answer to this question has become known as Site Reliability Engineering, or SRE.

SRE originated at Google in 2003 when Ben Treynor Sloss founded the first site reliability engineering team. The discipline produced the Google SRE Handbook, which sought to answer one question above all others: how do you keep massive, complex technology infrastructure running reliably when the people operating it are human?

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One of the most common and costly frustrations in facilities management is the revolving door of service calls. A facilities manager calls a service contractor because the AC isn’t keeping up. The contractor sends a technician, diagnoses the issue, performs the work, and closes the ticket. A week later, an occupant complains again. The FM calls the contractor again. The cycle repeats.

From ACE IoT’s perspective, this cycle is a function of how building service relationships are structured. Most service contracts are built around hours and visits, with outcomes left unverified. The contractor is paid for showing up and performing work. Whether that work actually solved the problem in any durable way is rarely something either party can verify with confidence, because the data infrastructure to do so simply has not been part of the picture.

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In a large building, deploying a full-scale building automation system (BAS) makes sense. The size of the facility creates enough operational complexity and enough savings potential to justify the investment, and there is usually someone, or even a team of people, on the hook to run it.

When one considers deploying a BAS in smaller buildings, it rarely pencils-out. According to a recent study published by PNNL, roughly 90% of all buildings in the United States are under 50,000 square feet. Just because the buildings are smaller does not mean they don’t have opportunities for efficiency gains or wouldn’t benefit from the functionality a BAS offers the same way the large commercial spaces do.

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