The View From Above: The Benefits Of An AI-Powered Approach To Facility Assessment

Effective facilities management is integral to helping commercial buildings maintain value and remain viable for potential tenants. 

Regular assessments are required to keep properties up to standard and identify pain points that need to be addressed. These can take a lot of time and resources, involving multiple on-site assessments and requiring facilities managers to fill out mountains of paperwork, which can be a costly process that may still provide an inaccurate analysis.

Facility analytics platforms like SITE Technologies use artificial intelligence to perform virtual assessments, providing more accurate analysis while also saving time and resources, said Miles Kirkpatrick, chief revenue officer at SITE Technologies.

“SITE was born out of a need to streamline the paving assessment process,” Kirkpatrick said. “That process would require an engineer to travel to the location and spend hours walking a property before they can assess the damage and put together the scope.”

The idea was born in 2017, when co-founder and CEO Austin Rabine and co-founder and Chairman Gary Rabine came up with the idea while providing pavement consulting within Rabine Paving America, one of their family businesses. The vision was to provide their customers and partners with scalable assessments using drones, ultimately saving time and money while providing better data.

“With the rapid acceleration of AI and computer vision, the Rabines found they could analyze images and provide an objective and accurate paving assessment based on the level of degradation, far exceeding with boots on the ground,” Kirkpatrick said. “SITE has become the go-to technology for America's largest facilities owners and managers.”

Kirkpatrick said SITE can cover more ground than a few people doing this task on-site. When a contractor or engineer assesses a parking lot, they're usually only analyzing a small portion of the asset to find the degradation and then assuming that the entire parking lot is similar in its level of degradation.

“SITE is different because we analyze the entire parking lot using AI so that we can deliver back zone-specific ratings and repairs,” he said. “SITE is also objective in the sense that we're not providing the services or paving/roofing work.”

The company employs a technique called orthomosaic mapping, which creates an overlapping image of the site from a variety of angles. From there, SITE can separate the site image into zones, measuring different surfaces to determine what areas need repairs. 

Kirkpatrick said that on average, facilities managers gain 40% in capital expenditure efficiency and add back hours to their day when they don't need to manage these tasks in person. He added since the company can fly its drones, analyze the entire property and provide zone-specific data, it can come up with results in days rather than weeks or months.

“From that point, we then assign a pavement condition index, PCI, or roof condition index, RCI, to show clients what part of the property needs the most attention, helping them better prioritize and allocate their capital to the places with significant damage,” he said.

Kirkpatrick said since SITE’s images have more granular detail, from the small cracks on the pavement to the vegetative growth between panels, it can give a clearer perspective of what’s happening on surfaces and help facility managers devise a better repair strategy.

“We make it a simple process by providing managers a three-year capital plan per building so that they know where and when repairs need to be completed,” he said.

He added that this also saves a lot of time and cost because much of the groundwork is completed before a quality control engineer arrives on-site to do the repairs. This speed and scalability allow SITE to do “1,500-plus property assessments a month,” Kirkpatrick said.

After the assessment, repairs can be made where needed. SITE has a dashboard feature that shows what portions of the total property have the lowest PCI/RCI score. Once the repairs are made, the weighted average score improves, giving owners a real-time view into asset condition, Kirkpatrick said.

SITE’s data can also point to who is at fault for property deterioration, such as a previous tenant that may have caused structural damage. It can show how the property looked before the client arrived and after they left. This helps managers and owners recoup costs that otherwise would have gone missing, Kirkpatrick said. 

While SITE provides objective AI-powered analysis of pavements and roofing to help property owners and managers better deploy their capital, it also plans to create a fully functional cost-to-wait calculator to help them articulate the cost of waiting on a repair directly in the SITE platform. 

“We’re also working on rolling out a facade and landscape analysis next year so that owners and managers will have one platform that can provide a holistic exterior assessment,” Kirkpatrick said. “Our goal is to help our customers streamline their repairs across their entire portfolio and make better data-driven capex decisions.”

This article was produced in collaboration between SITE Technologies and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

Studio B is Bisnow’s in-house content and design studio. To learn more about how Studio B can help your team, reach out to studio@bisnow.com.