Simon Britton MIET, BMSI looks at building management systems.
As buildings evolve toward a smarter, data-led operating model, the Building Management System (BMS) remains the logical and necessary core of that transition. It is already the only system permanently embedded into the plant, designed for long-term operational responsibility, and directly governing the actual control outputs that determine building performance. A smart building is not a replacement for the BMS — it is an evolution built around it.
Where some approaches focus on layering cloud-based IoT platforms over the top of an estate, these often stop at data aggregation or visualisation. They can provide useful insights, but they do not hold responsibility for safe or immediate action. The BMS does. It closes the control loop locally, deterministically and without dependency on external connectivity or third-party platforms. For this reason, the BMS must remain the central authority — but its reach and intelligence can and should be expanded.
One of the most effective ways to do this is through additional LoRaWAN sensing. These low-power wireless devices allow new data points — such as occupancy, CO2, temperature, humidity or door/window state — to be added without running additional cabling or installing new physical BMS input modules. This reduces cost, disruption and the constraints of traditional fixed-point architectures. The BMS can immediately use this additional data to optimise control strategies in real time, not simply to visualise or report on trends later.
This is the key distinction: when new data is routed through the BMS rather than bypassing it, it becomes actionable intelligence, not just observational telemetry. If air quality drops, the system does not merely highlight it on a dashboard — it reacts, by modifying fan speeds, damper positions or plant sequencing instantly. This keeps the control layer local, safe and accountable, while still enabling higher-level analytics or portfolio dashboards to access the same data via secure integration pathways.
Smart building maturity is therefore best achieved by extending the BMS rather than attempting to work around it. The BMS provides a stable engineering framework, lifecycle certainty and a defensible audit trail — all essential for estates where reliability, compliance and energy performance are non-negotiable. Complementing it with modern sensor technologies such as LoRaWAN is not a departure from traditional approach, but a natural next step.
The smart building of the future keeps the BMS firmly at the centre — orchestrating control, maintaining resilience, and increasingly enriched with data from additional, non-intrusive sensing that avoids heavy infrastructure cost. This enhances both operational efficiency and decision-making, without fragmenting the core control responsibility that must always remain on site, under the BMS.