The article discusses how the precise indoor navigation technologies, with a localization accuracy of 2 cm, can reduce operational costs by 30% and provide new services in the facility management industry, while the ability to create and update maps without installing external equipment has already reduced the cost of installing indoor navigation systems to almost zero.
Up until last year, indoor navigation technologies were inaccurate and therefore not useful for facility management.
Because of this matter, indoor navigation technologies were viewed as conceptually interesting but which doesn’t work for facility management purposes.
The emergence of new mobile phones with advanced cameras and new AI algorithms made it possible to achieve localization accuracy of up to 2 centimetres in buildings without using any external devices—only a built-in camera and additional sensors.
In this article, I will talk about new technologies of accurate indoor navigation and their use to reduce the cost of processes and personnel costs in facility management. The use of these technologies will become a competitive advantage in this market and can reduce costs of facility management companies by 20-30%.
New indoor navigation technologies with an accuracy of up to 2 cm
Until 2019, indoor navigation was mainly based on beacon wi-fi technologies, which had significant drawbacks:
- High costs of installing hardware
- Low localization accuracy (up to 5 meters)
These and other problems prevented the massive use of indoor navigation.
Starting in 2020, external hardware is being replaced by more advanced sensors in mobile phones and AI algorithms, which allow building crowdsourcing maps and have a localization accuracy of up to 2 centimetres without the need to install external hardware.
These and other factors make it possible to achieve the most convenient and effective implementation of the indoor navigation concept when the accuracy of localization begins to surpass the accuracy of localization of the human brain.
An example of how localization and indoor navigation works:
It means that indoor navigation will finally be used in real business cases, not just in one-time pilots.
Accurate indoor navigation in facility management
In the facility management industry, competition between companies goes in two directions— reducing costs through more efficient cost management (mainly personnel/contractors costs) and improving service through minimizing errors and better controlling.
Indoor navigation technologies, and especially addressing crucial issues and maintenance issue reports, allow achieving significant competitive advantages in both directions due to just two functions:
- Accurate geolocation reports
The indoor navigation system allows you to localize an issue with an accuracy of 2 cm on the created map, which means that any request for cleaning or maintenance can be created by indicating the exact place where it’s needed with an accuracy of 2 cm, spending 3-5 seconds on visual localization, which minimizes and simplifies the process of sending requests up to 10 seconds to “take a photo of the problem and press the submit button”.
The maintenance or cleaning personnel who receive this request, also don’t need to spend time figuring out where the problem is and even worse—visit the wrong location.
- Control over the movement of personnel and clients inside buildings and its optimization
The indoor navigation system allows you to track all the movement of personnel inside the premises (even if the cameras on their phones are turned off) during the day in passive mode and in the mode of performing work to support the building. The analysis of such movements allows the identification of inefficiencies, as well as the optimization of the facility management logistics.
The human factor is also important—employees, realizing that their movement is independently checked and analyzed, will effectively carry out their work.
There’s also the possibility of tracking the route of visitors/customers inside buildings. It allows optimizing the building plan based on visitor behaviour.
What new services can be provided in facility management with the help of accurate indoor navigation?
When interacting with clients on the implementation of our indoor navigation solutions, we see that more and more facility management companies strive not only to supply “people” to their clients but also to provide information services, integrating more closely into the business processes of their clients.
It allows to know customers better, their business, which leads to new services and business models previously unused in the facility management industry, as well as to raise services to a new level:
- Hassle-free invoices
The use of indoor navigation in the process of providing services allows facility management companies to avoid constant discussions about invoices with customers since the technologies provide full tracking of the time and movements of personnel in the process of providing services.
- Predictive analytics
Having accurate stats on requests using geolocation reports, facility management begins to predict more accurately the number of personnel and equipment needed on certain days or periods, on holidays, in the daytime or the evening.
This data is also useful for facility management companies when discussing the need to temporarily increase staff (especially during holidays, sales season, etc.).
- Minimization of personnel in public spaces
Accurate tracking of the movement of staff in the process of completing a task allows you to minimize the time spent in public spaces (and track cases if it happened unknowingly), which is especially important for luxury shopping malls and hotels, where costs are high.
- Shared service points (for two or three locations, for different clients with a guaranteed response time)
Since indoor navigation allows staff to quickly reach the place of work, the time costs for the provision of standard services are reduced, which, together with more accurate forecasting, allows facility management companies to minimize personnel at a particular location. It also allows the creation of intermediate bases of personnel and equipment for several sites and even customers, since they, due to navigation, fit into the required response time to requests.
Summing up…
According to use cases of our clients, due to the simplification of reporting and navigation, personnel can be optimized up to 30% for a shopping mall of 20,000 sq. m., and the number of reports can also be increased since this functionality can be included both in the corporate application and visitor app.
More globally, with a breakthrough in indoor navigation technologies (localization accuracy and ease of use) we believe that in the medium term the deep integration of indoor navigation into asset management processes will become a critical competitive factor in this industry.
Best regards,
Vitaliy Goncharuk
CEO and Founder of Augmented Pixels