What is a building management system (BMS)?
A building management system controls and monitors a building's plant — heating, ventilation, cooling and often lighting — and generates alarms when conditions move outside their set points.
Its alarms are maintenance information nobody reads. A BMS generating hundreds of alarms a week has trained its operators to ignore all of them, including the one that matters.
Set points drift and get overridden, usually for a good reason at the time, and the override outlives the reason. A building running on manual overrides is not being controlled by its control system.
It is a source of energy and condition data that most FM teams under-use, largely because getting it out of the system and next to the maintenance data is awkward.
In practice
A BMS with two hundred active alarms.
Nobody looks at it, because nobody can. The alarms that matter are indistinguishable from the ones that have been standing for years.
Alarm flood is the normal end state of an unmanaged BMS, and it removes the value of the system entirely while leaving it apparently operational.
Rationalising alarms is unglamorous and is the single highest-return piece of work on most estates.
What goes wrong in practice
- Alarm volumes so high that alarms are ignored as a matter of routine.
- Temporary overrides left in place indefinitely.
- BMS data never reconciled with reactive call patterns.