Custom Data Integration and Collection

Unique Problems, Solved Efficiently

All workplaces have unique circumstances, and sometimes unique data needs to manage them. A complete management solution might require the flexibility to integrate one-off data sources, or accommodate a unique data collection method. FacilityQuest was founded on the expertise of such data integration solutions, and the FacilityQuest software architecture efficiently accommodates them. An elegant, simple, custom solution may be just the final puzzle piece for your unique environment.

Data Integration Challenges

Here are just a few typical data challenges. Yours might be a one-time import, or your system might require ongoing or even real time data exchanges. A quick consultation might reveal more than one solution.

• Legacy data: How might data from an unsupported or outdated system be incorporated and made relevant again?

• IoT data: It’s likely that some of your maintenance systems have data flows that can be accessed from Internet-based providers. Would that data be helpful to understand or control other aspects of your facility?

• Real time integration with other systems: integrating data from other systems for new visualizations, such as heat mapping

• Non-traditional data: photos are a potential data source and can imported or collected in a way that ties them to context such as floor plans. Audio or temperature data may also have an important role to play.

Example: Heat mapping Injury Data

Workplace hazard mapping is increasingly cited as an effective tool for workers participating in gathering information about the hazards which affect their health and safety. Workers who participate can gather knowledge about hazards from their co-workers. For a workplace hazard map, a team of employees might perform a risk assessment of the work environment and then annotate floor plans to document what they found. A picture is worth a thousand words. The map or floor plan visually communicates—with context—where hazards exist.

FacilityQuest natively supports data gathering such as hazard mapping. However, in the fall of 2020 FacilityQuest was contacted by the environmental health and safety (EHS) department of a food products company asking whether the heat maps we generate for utilization data could also represent incidents of injuries. The “heat” of colors to represent concentrations of injuries would add a new layer of context to hazards mapped on floor plans. The heatmap result highlights the concentration of injuries. There will be fewer red locations than any other color because of the higher number of injuries in each location. Orange will identify the next highest density of injuries and will therefore have the next lowest number of locations. Yellow, blue, and gray colors indicate the lowest concentration of injuries, hazards but with no injuries.

Example: Photo Mapping to Compare Facility Features

An architecture company brought us the challenge of structuring the collection of 1000+ photos. Their government services client needed to compare amenities and branding across multiple outlets for their service in the Los Angeles region. The goal was for a phone app to prompt the photo collector for the exact location and angle of the service space. The resulting FacilityQuest app allowed the architect/photographer to quickly navigate through a hierarchy of locations and buildings, and show gaps where photos were not yet taken.

The result was a structured database of photos that allowed comparison of “the left-facing view of the client waiting area” or the “front-facing view of the parking lot” across 20+ service locations.

While this application was a solution to a unique problem, FacilityQuest has integrated certain features of this project by enabling photos to be taken of a location while in the context of on a floor plan. The results can be exported in a structured format, or browsable within FacilityQuest.

Example: Daily Data Syncs

Built into the heart of FacilityQuest is data transfer technology. To synchronize admin data with a software provider’s system for hospitals, FacilityQuest built an automated data transfer that translated data from one of many different client systems into data types needed by the software provider. This system did its repetitive daily job for over 10 years.

FacilityQuest can do similar bespoke automation for data transfers between HR or IT, or import machine data (Internet of Things/IoT) to integrate with floor plan or system heat maps or other analytical reporting.

The example report shown here depends on maintaining the information of desk assignments within FacilityQuest, which is an expected work flow. However, if that information is already being maintained in some other department’s database, it may be advantageous to set up a transfer between the systems.