Facilities managers are constantly under pressure to reduce the ever increasing
cost of building and maintaining their properties. Often times, it comes down to making difficult decisions over competing priorities and discerning the difference between needs and wants. “Should I scrape by with what I need today or try to justify to senior management why we should invest more now, in order to be able to more easily accommodate future growth?”

Many decisions come down to preparing and presenting a strong return on investment (ROI) case, but even then, the financial equation is highly subjective.

This article doesn’t attempt to help you make decisions on where you should cut corners versus where you should invest. Rather, it takes a look at the facility engineering design, construction and maintenance life-cycle from a high level and holistic view and focuses on key processes and methodologies of project delivery that can have a significant impact on reducing both short and long term costs. Continued

The planning phase is the time to ensure that a structured cabling system will provide flexibility and reliability

Whether it’s voice, data, video, security or the building management system, information is increasingly critical to the productivity of building occupants and to the performance of the building itself. But the quality of that information flow can be no better than the conduit carrying it — the cabling system.

A structured cabling system is designed to ensure that information flows smoothly over the cabling network. It includes a set of transmission products applied with engineering design rules that allow the user to apply voice, data and signals in a manner that maximizes data rates. The structured cabling system is the foundation of a successful intelligent building network and the basic investment on which all other network equipment depends.

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Presentation media (such as video, multimedia, VR, and audio) are playing an increasingly important role in exhibit, themed, and architectural environments.

From kiosks and interactive displays to mixed-media theaters and exhibit galleries, sophisticated audio-visual systems are more and more prevalent. These technologies are changing so rapidly that one year often represents one or two generations of products! Further, these are no longer separate systems. There is often need to integrate the various media technologies into a seamless unit, and interactivity is becoming a common requirement.

It is not reasonable for an architect or exhibit designer to keep up with the trends and changes of the technology spiral. Continued

Structured Cabling is defined as building or campus telecommunications cabling infrastructure that consists of a number of standardized smaller elements (hence structured) called subsystems.

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