How Automating Your Life Safety System Can Help Protect Your Building and Reduce Costs

Maintaining the safety of assets, occupants and facilities is paramount to operations for most businesses, which is why facility managers work around the clock to keep their sites running as they should.

For a long time, facility operators have had to directly access and manually test fire and life safety equipment in hard-to-reach places like high ceiling atriums to stay compliant on regular testing and maintenance. This often means using ladders or renting equipment, such as lifts, to access devices located on high ceilings.

Manually inspecting and maintaining device logs is costly and time consuming. Fortunately, today, the digitalization and automation of fire and life safety equipment can help facility managers keep maintenance tasks and disruptions to a minimum while addressing potential compliance gaps so they can focus on other priorities. Here’s how automating your life safety equipment can be beneficial: 

Enhance your building compliance 

Keeping fire and life safety systems functional is essential to comply with local and national guidelines. Having a technician walk from room to room to test and inspect devices manually can be time consuming and laborious.  

New building technologies such as self-testing smoke and heat detectors paired with cloud-based systems can help building managers automate the testing process.   

Automated solutions can also help building technicians gain critical insights regarding the functionality of fire and life safety devices to make sure they're tested thoroughly and working to minimize compliance gaps. Leveraging these types of digital solutions can also help automate reporting. This allows building technicians to act sooner against malfunctioning devices and eliminates the need to compile reports by hand, which can sometimes include human error.

Improve your building’s operational efficiencies

Manual testing and maintenance inspection can take days, with early mornings or late evenings or even weekend work. It also means multiple technicians on site for days at a time requesting access to occupied rooms and disrupting day-to-day operations. This is often not ideal.

For facilities like hospitals this type of compliance testing can cause disruptions to areas like emergency rooms, high-traffic walkways or even rooms with sensitive information and limited access. 

Adopting an automated approach and using a cloud-based solution allows facility managers to minimize the disruption to daily operations while reducing the number of technicians needed on site. It can also help limit the time spent on inspection. Leveraging automated solutions offers building managers real-time insights that can help predict the maintenance of devices, enable corrective actions, reduce potential equipment failure, enhance operational efficiency and save time.  

Trim Costs Associated with Traditional Fire and Life Safety Systems

When there are multiple instances of building disruptions, downtime, lengthy compliance audits, and corrective actions to resolve compliance gaps, the costs can add up quickly with a traditional fire and life safety system. 

Cloud-based solutions can help reduce costs with greater consistency and accuracy of life safety equipment; require less manual intervention by streamlining manual inspections; and lessen maintenance to keep equipment running more efficiently. All of this can help reduce the potential of downtime and unscheduled service calls as well as lower the risk of compliance gaps and associated costs.

Help your building remain safe, compliant and become more efficient

Keeping fire and life safety systems properly operating is critical to keeping your people, assets and buildings safe. As automation continues to mature, so do its capabilities so you can better protect your building, keep accurate maintenance records and quickly identify and repair issues before they become problems.

Honeywell’s new all-in-one Integrated Life Safety solution delivers the reliability and flexibility required for modern fire protection applications. The suite consists of the XLS400 fire panel; the Honeywell Self-Test, which automates and revolutionizes the way systems are commissioned, tested and maintained; and Connected Life Safety Service (CLSS), a cloud-based service application which offers real-time visibility of equipment health from your mobile or desktop device.

To learn more about Honeywell’s integrated approach to fire and life safety, connect with one of our experts today to learn more.