Building Management Solutions:

What often sets building management systems apart from regular SCADA applications is the map. The map of the building provides an effective user interface to make the system operation easier. Fortunately, placing a map in DAQFactory is quite straight forward. You can simply cut and paste a drawing from your favorite CAD program into DAQFactory and overlay screen components from DAQFactory showing real-time live data on top of the map of the facility. DAQFactory supports unlimited pages, so for larger facilities you can easily break your map into multiple pages. DAQFactory also supports overlayed pages. This means you can create one page with common information that you want on multiple screens and overlay it with these other screens. This saves time in screen creation and reduces errors.

For example, one customer uses DAQFactory for toxic gas monitoring in industrial buildings. Values are displayed on screen on top of a map of the facility. When a value goes too high, the color changes giving immediate feedback to the problem. The map provides the approximate location of the sensor at a glance. Of course the values are logged for tracebility of employee exposure and email alerts are sent on alarm levels. This system has been used on multiple facilities. On some, there are multiple buildings each running a separate DAQFactory system. A central system also running DAQFactory receives real-time data from each building and provides a centralized display of the entire facility. Even on this central system, maps are provided to give the user immediate location feedback when a problem occurs.

Of course not all building management systems use a map. Another customer uses DAQFactory for the monitoring of the water system for multiple buildings on site at a resort. In this case, the customer utilized gauges and other screen components to provide a quick overview of the system in a format familier to the users. DAQFactory alarming was used heavily in this system to allow the customer to respond to problems before they became big headaches. For example, if the hot water heater failed in the middle of the night, an email or phone call was immediately dispatched alerting the appropriate maintenance staff who could get it fixed before all the guests awoke to find cold showers. Not only does DAQFactory save the customer the headaches of angry guests, but maintenance staff can actually go home at night, confident that DAQFactory will alert them if something needs their attention.

Here are a few of the companies in the building management field that use DAQFactory:

• The Buccaneer Hotel
• Digitize, Inc.
• eicher+pauli
• EnerTek, Tecnologías Energéticas S.A.