Trend IQVision upgrade for Dunraven School

ABEC have supported Dunraven School since a new Trend BMS project in Aug 13 and commencement of maintenance from Jul 14. As part of our proactive approach to ‘lifecycle planning’ we have strived to deliver a whole site BMS strategy across the School’s various buildings. The IQVision upgrade represents a further step forward in ensuring the School keep its facilities modern, sustainable and fit for purpose.

The main purpose of the IQVision project from the Customer’s perspective was to upgrade the 963 Head End supervisor package with a modern, future proofed and secure IQVision supervisor from Trend Controls. Whilst the old 963 package was still functional, the availability of IQVision with its enhanced and secure capabilities in comparison with the declining support available for the less secure 963 made the upgrade a sensible and wise decision.

Given the complexity and number of the various buildings that constituted the School geographical foot print, time was taken to ensure the upgrade went smoothly. Various issues were discovered during the upgrade process and these were resolved prior to migration of data and graphics. The School FM team were content with their existing graphics pages in 963 and so it was important to ensure they migrated across without degradation onto the IQVision platform. Overall, the process ran from 5 Mar to 10 Apr (non continuous) during which time

the Customer was kept fully informed of progress, given early sight of the new IQVision pages and on completion received a full demonstration.

Much of the work to implement the upgrade was conducted from remote which made for more effective working by ABEC without excessive need to travel to site. As the upgrade moved into its final stages on site working was adopted to ensure that graphics displayed correctly on the main FM Office VDU monitor.

All work was contained to normal working hours, though some out of hours monitoring was conducted to ensure alarms were being received on a 24/7 basis.

Lessons learnt from another early implementation of IQVision allowed ABEC to provide a front “pane of glass” that showed the occurrence of alarms from across the whole site using simple “alarm” graphics that were eye catching for FM staff.

As part of the IQVision upgrade various equipment issues were found with the existing Trend BMS which had previously not been fully recognised by the on site Facilities Management team. This included resolution of a long standing issue on a building controller and some equipments that were regularly alarming. This allowed on site FM staff to investigate these matters.

ABEC’s Special Projects Department delivered the upgrade without interruption to the existing 963 supervisor and with a smooth transition and handover to the ABEC Maintenance and Support Engineer for the site who was present at the handover to Dunraven School. This ensured the FM team on site enjoyed a seamless switch over from 963 to IQVision and from ABEC Projects to ABEC Maintenance.