FSG Smart Buildings Uses Rittman Analytics To Transform Facility Management With Advanced Analytics

The Download

Facility Solutions Group (FSG) is a leading provider of lighting, electrical, and energy management products and services, headquartered in Austin, Texas.

Founded in 1982, FSG has grown to become a top 20 electrical contractor in the United States, with six divisions, 42 branches, four regional distribution centers, and 2,300 employees serving customers across all 50 states, Canada, and Puerto Rico.

Their divisions include Construction, Lighting, Electrical, Technology, Signs and FSG's Smart Buildings division, established in 1998, that focuses on leveraging technology to optimize building operations and energy management.

The Challenge

In line with their commitment to innovation and service excellence, FSG had embarked on a Smart Buildings initiative with the objective of leveraging data to optimize their operations and provide superior services to their clients.

Until now, FSG clients and in-particular those in the convenience store sector had needed skills with spreadsheets and data extracts to be able to act upon the data provided by FSG. Moreover, this data was fragmented and limited their clients' ability to gain a holistic view of business operations, tenant behavior, and financial performance.

FSG's team had been directed to make the data they collected and generated more actionable and easier to consume for their clients, and a key aspect of this initiative was the development of a Proof of Concept (POC) for surfacing key performance indicators (KPIs) and reporting tables in their client-facing application.

FSG faced several challenges in this endeavour, including a lack of initial experience with new tools, a need to innovate quickly, a desire for perfection, an absence of a roadmap or procedures for the team, the need to ensure data quality and bug-free releases, tool overload, and poor development experience due to team silos.

Embeddable, a powerful embedded analytics platform designed to integrate seamlessly into applications, had been selected as one of the key enabling technologies for this initiative.

The Solution

As one of the founding members of the Embeddable Partner Program, Rittman Analytics were engaged by FSG to lead the technical implementation of Embeddable and guide FSG's team through the process of delivering these embedded application analytics.

The technical solution involved creating Embeddable KPIs that were initially placeholder measures that could be surfaced in advance of their specific business logic being agreed.

These placeholder KPIs could then be embedded in a prototype version of the customer-facing application so that all necessary KPIs were available before any client design workshops.

Once design was complete, business logic was added to each of the placeholder KPIs followed by user acceptance testing to ensure their accuracy and usability.

Rittman Analytics collaborated with Embeddable to gather and confirm requirements for the various KPIs and define a development roadmap for integrating Embeddable technology into FSG's client-facing application.

FSG and Rittman Analytics' teams worked-collaboratively to model and warehouse FSG's high-volume smart buildings event data and define a rich, descriptive business semantic layer over the warehoused data.

Finally and after conducting thorough testing to ensure KPI accuracy and usability, FSG's data pipeline was then orchestrated and scheduled using Dagster Cloud so that client data could be up-to-date as possible, ensuring that decisions would always be made on up-to-date buildings data.

Business Benefits Delivered

Rittman Analytics played a crucial role in not only implementing the technical solution but also in guiding FSG through the process.

The project significantly improved the way FSG's clients interact with the data provided, making it more accessible and actionable. Rittman Analytics' team were also able to lower the cost of operations down for FSG by employing advance data transformations, partitioning and by taking advantage of all the features offered by BigQuery.

The integration of disparate data systems provided a holistic view of business operations, tenant behavior, and financial performance, enhancing operational efficiency and enabling more effective buildings management.