Top 6 Challenges in Facilities Management for 2025: How Digital Twins Can Keep You Ahead
3DMart is an expert in digital manufacturing and spatial scanning solutions! Contact us to schedule a consultation for the latest digital twin technology! Learn more about Matterport
In 2024, Dublin Airport announced an $1.8 billion modernization investment plan. Over 140 projects will use the Autodesk Construction Cloud platform, and as part of this initiative, the airport is piloting Tandem—a Digital Twin platform to create a connected ecosystem for managing its assets, spaces, and systems.
Dublin is not the only airport adopting digital twins. Major airports such as Vancouver YVR, Amsterdam Schiphol, and Singapore Changi are already using this technology to transform how they operate and manage their facilities.
Managing a complex venue like an airport—or any large facility—means handling many things simultaneously: keeping systems running, ensuring safety, and controlling facility management costs. Manual processes might get the job done, but they are slow, inefficient, and prone to errors.
However, digital twins are changing the status quo. These immersive digital replicas of physical spaces provide you with real-time data and insights for any facility. For facility managers, digital twins make tackling the most complex environments and responding to any challenges along the way a breeze.
6 Major Challenges in Facilities Management (and How Digital Twins Solve Them)
Facility managers face increasing challenges, such as unexpected equipment failures, downtime, safety concerns, fragmented building data, and high costs. Here's how digital twins can help you tackle these challenges head-on.
1. Challenge: Unpredictable Equipment Failures
Sudden failures of critical systems like HVAC or security are not uncommon. For example, incorrect building pressurization, underutilization of energy-saving settings, and excessive ventilation are just some of the reasons for HVAC malfunctions. When these systems suddenly stop working, operations can be disrupted for hours or even days, leading to increased repair costs, operational hindrances, and frustration for everyone involved.
How Digital Twins Help:
Predictive maintenance powered by digital twins can analyze performance data (such as equipment age, usage, and history) to issue alerts before problems escalate. This means facility managers receive early warnings, allowing them to schedule repairs at appropriate times, avoiding costly surprises. This not only keeps operations stable but also reduces costs and downtime.
2. Challenge: Downtime Due to Maintenance Disruptions
Even routine maintenance can be disruptive, making it difficult for facility managers to schedule without impacting tenants, employees, or production. Without clear data on system performance, these disruptions can drag on longer than expected, eroding your bottom line.
How Digital Twins Help:
By providing predictive insights, digital twins can accurately show when and where problems are likely to occur. This allows managers to strategically plan maintenance, scheduling work during low-occupancy or off-peak hours. For example, if equipment shows signs of wear and tear and is expected to fail in a few months, repairs can be coordinated in advance to minimize downtime.
3. Challenge: Ensuring Safety and Emergency Preparedness
As a facility manager, you bear the heavy responsibility of ensuring personnel safety and emergency preparedness, facing evolving threats—whether natural disasters, fires, or security threats. This means you must develop and maintain comprehensive emergency and disaster management plans, keep staff trained, stay abreast of changing regulations, and adopt advanced security technologies.
How Digital Twins Help:
Digital twins allow managers to access critical safety data in real-time, such as occupancy levels, temperature, air quality, and potential hazards. In an emergency, they can identify the safest evacuation routes and coordinate responses more effectively. These virtual models also support better emergency planning by simulating drills to keep staff ready for any situation.
Many people around the world have recognized these applications.
The World Economic Forum gives an example:
“[Digital twin models of urban rivers and their surrounding built environment] would enable local authorities to simulate changes in water temperature, level and flow, helping them to better understand flood risks and devise the most appropriate responses to ensure more efficient and sustainable water management.”
4. Challenge: Lack of Real-time Monitoring and Insights
Many facilities rely on independent systems to monitor operations (such as HVAC, lighting, or security), but these systems rarely communicate with each other. Data scattered across different platforms makes it difficult to get a complete picture of overall performance or quickly address urgent issues.
How Digital Twins Help:
Digital twins integrate real-time data from sensors, building management systems, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices into a single central platform. Facility managers can view everything they need in one single, easy-to-read interface. Real-time analytics also send instant alerts, allowing managers to respond immediately if an HVAC system malfunctions or a security alarm sounds.
5. Challenge: Incomplete or Fragmented Data
Accurate decision-making relies on reliable and complete information, but in many facilities, data exists in silos. Spreadsheets, outdated CAD files, and unconnected software platforms create gaps, leading to inconsistent records and communication breakdowns.
How Digital Twins Help:
Digital twins integrate data from Building Information Modeling (BIM) files and historical records into a single 3D documentation platform. By centralizing all information in one place, you can visualize facility layouts, track assets, and monitor performance more effectively. This streamlined setup enhances team collaboration and provides greater peace of mind during management transitions.
6. Challenge: High Operating Costs
Utilities, maintenance, and staffing can quickly drive up expenses, especially without clear methods to optimize resource use. Small inefficiencies—such as improper lighting arrangements or not shutting off heating systems during downtime—can accumulate into significant costs over time.
How Digital Twins Help:
Digital twins can analyze resource usage and identify inefficiencies, helping you make more informed, data-driven decisions. They allow you to simulate various scenarios (such as reconfiguring layouts or adjusting cleaning schedules) to predict how changes will affect energy use or staffing. In turn, you can avoid guesswork and reduce waste, lowering costs and increasing your return on investment (ROI).
Barriers to Adopting Digital Twins in Facilities Management
While the benefits of digital twins are clear, there are also challenges to adopting this technology:
- Knowledge Gap: Many facility managers are not fully familiar with digital twins or how they can transform operations, hindering high-level funding support.
- Cost Concerns: Decision-makers often focus on the upfront costs of new technology, overlooking long-term savings. A clear ROI analysis helps drive investment.
- System Integration Difficulties: Many facilities rely on fragmented systems, and integrating digital twins with existing systems can seem overwhelming.
- Employee Resistance: Some employees worry that digital tools will replace their roles. Providing training and demonstrating how digital twins enhance, rather than replace, human work can help alleviate concerns.
Success Story: Central Lincoln People’s Utility District (PUD)
Central Lincoln People’s Utility District (PUD) faced a major challenge: upgrading its power transmission system across 45 facilities spanning 750 square miles without impacting schedule or budget. By partnering with Burns & McDonnell and using Matterport’s digital twin technology, the utility achieved significant results: in four years, PUD reduced over 250 duplicate site visits, cut travel costs, and completed the entire project on time and within budget.
How Matterport Simplifies Facilities Management:
-
With Matterport for facilities management, you gain highly accurate and detailed visibility into physical spaces, streamlining operations and planning for any challenges you may encounter.
With the Pro3 camera, the application range of digital twin technology extends far beyond indoor spaces. It uses LiDAR technology to capture millions of precise measurements even outdoors and can handle various environments from low light to direct sunlight. The Pro3 captures 3D data up to 100 meters away in 20 seconds per scan, speeding up scanning and giving you more time to focus on collaboration.
Combined with our advanced cloud processing platform, the digital twin models provided by Pro3 are more accurate, detailed, and realistic than ever before.