Xempla vs Hark for Building Operations: Do You Need Visibility, Action — or Both?

When facility or energy management teams look for technology to improve building performance, the search often starts with visibility and analytics platforms. You want to know what's happening with your assets and critical building systems. You want to monitor usage, catch inefficiencies, and keep everything running smoothly. That's where platforms like Hark step in — giving you real-time energy analytics, IoT device / data connectivity, and centralized dashboards that make it easier to spot what's going wrong.

But here's the thing: spotting problems is only half the story.

Once you've seen the issue, what happens next? Who triages it? How fast does the right person act? How many alerts pile up while your team is still sorting through priorities? How effective and informed are your decisions?

This is where Xempla comes in. While Hark gives you visibility, Xempla gives you the ability to act — with intelligence, automation, and scale. It’s a system built to drive corrective actions and solve issues faster, with more precision, less effort, and in a way that keeps improving over time.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at both platforms — what they’re built for, where they shine, how they differ, and how they can even work together to help you go from data to decision to outcome without the operational bottlenecks.

Let’s start with a brief overview of both platforms.

What is Hark?

Hark is a real-time energy analytics and IoT connectivity platform built to give organizations greater visibility into the performance of their buildings and energy systems. It connects seamlessly with a wide range of devices — from HVAC and lighting to solar panels and refrigeration units — allowing teams to monitor usage, detect anomalies, and optimize operations through data.

At its heart, Hark is designed to unify and visualize data from across your built environment. It’s strong on connectivity, pulling information from assets, sensors, and building management systems (BMS) into a single platform. Once the data is in, Hark enables users to explore it through dashboards, detect energy inefficiencies, and make informed decisions that reduce waste and improve sustainability performance.

Hark is a solid fit for organizations that already have technical teams in place to act on the data and are focused on seeing and responding to what’s happening in real time, especially when energy performance is front and center.

It’s especially popular with energy teams and enterprises managing large-scale operations where monitoring and compliance are critical — like retail chains, supermarkets, and logistics networks.

What is Xempla?

Xempla is a decision intelligence and automation platform designed to help facility and maintenance teams move from just identifying problems to actually resolving them — faster, smarter, and without the manual burden.

At its core, Xempla is built around the idea of autonomous maintenance. That means it's not just flagging issues, but contextualizing them, deciding which ones matter most, and taking the next step—whether that's triggering a workflow, assigning a technician, or learning from what worked last time. It's a system that doesn’t just report performance; it improves it.

The platform is powered by a suite of AI-driven agents—each responsible for a different part of the maintenance journey. From identifying faults and planning resource allocation to assisting technicians onsite and building institutional knowledge over time, these agents work together to reduce noise, increase clarity, and make every part of your operations more efficient.

Xempla is ideal for organizations that want to stop firefighting and start focusing on long-term asset performance, better data-driven decision-making, and measurable reliability and operational improvements.

What Hark Is Good At — Controls and Visibility

Hark is built for visibility — and it does that really well. If your goal is to understand how your energy systems are performing, spot inefficiencies in real-time, and ensure your building assets are connected and monitored, Hark delivers exactly that.

It’s especially effective in environments where energy performance is closely tied to business goals. For example, supermarkets and retail chains use Hark to monitor refrigeration systems, lighting, and HVAC for operational efficiency and sustainability compliance. Similarly, solar asset operators rely on it to track generation, consumption, and anomalies at scale.

1. Energy Monitoring: It gives you real-time insights into how your buildings are consuming energy, helping you identify overuse, wastage, or unexpected spikes.
2. IoT and Device Connectivity: Hark makes it easy to pull data from multiple sources — BMS, sensors, HVAC, lighting, solar, and more — into one unified platform.
3. BMS and Building Controls Integration: It doesn’t just monitor systems; it also allows users to control connected devices, making adjustments where needed from a centralized dashboard.
4. Support for Sustainability Goals: With strong energy analytics and emissions tracking, Hark supports organizations aiming for better ESG performance or preparing for energy audits.
5. Useful During Commissioning or Post-Handover Phases: In periods like the Defects Liability Period (DLP), Hark helps teams monitor asset performance and flag issues early for contractors to address. 

That said, Hark's strength in visibility comes with a limitation: it doesn’t do much with the data beyond surfacing it. You still need a team to decide what action to take, who should handle it, and how it gets done. There's no automation of triaging or maintenance workflows — and no system intelligence that learns or improves based on what’s worked before. This manual layer could become a bottleneck if your team is small, stretched thin, or looking to scale operations efficiently.

Where Xempla Goes Beyond — Visibility to Action

If Hark is about helping you see what’s happening, Xempla is about helping you do what’s needed with it — and making that process smarter over time. Where traditional analytics tools stop at dashboards and alerts, Xempla picks up the baton and runs with it. It contextualizes the insight, decides what needs to happen, routes the task, supports the technician, tracks the outcome, and learns from it — automatically. That’s the difference between visibility and outcome-driven autonomy.

✅ From Alert to Resolution, in One Flow: Once an issue is flagged (even by a system like Hark), Xempla can triage, prioritize, assign, and track the task to closure — turning insight into outcome.

✅ Smart Prioritization and Decisions: Xempla evaluates not just what’s wrong, but how critical it is, what it will cost if ignored, and the best course of action — so your engineers don’t have to sort through every alert manually.

✅ Execution-Ready Intelligence: Instead of just highlighting inefficiencies, Xempla supports technicians with SOPs, context, and collaboration tools to execute the fix effectively.

✅ Cross-Asset and Cross-Site Scalability: Unlike platforms focused only on energy or HVAC, Xempla applies its intelligence across all major systems and standardizes workflows across your portfolio.

✅ Continuous Learning and Knowledge Retention: Every action taken — what worked, what didn’t, who resolved it, and how — feeds back into the platform. So over time, your maintenance strategy evolves with fewer mistakes, faster resolutions, and less dependence on individual expertise.

If visibility is the first step, Xempla ensures you don’t stop there. It bridges the gap between knowing and doing — bringing structure, speed, and intelligence to your operations.

How Xempla’s AI Agents Run Your Maintenance Operations on Autopilot

What makes Xempla truly different from traditional platforms is its use of AI-driven agents — each built to own a specific part of the operations and maintenance workflow. These agents don’t just automate isolated tasks; they work as a coordinated system to deliver end-to-end maintenance that’s intelligent, efficient, and self-improving.

Here’s how it works:

Omi – The Reliability Engineer Agent: Omi constantly monitors asset health data, detects anomalies, predicts potential failures, and raises the right flags — not just based on thresholds, but with context and foresight.

Nira – The Planning & Allocation Agent: Once an issue is identified, Nira gets to work. She decides what needs to be done, when, and by whom — balancing workload, urgency, and skillsets. Nira ensures that your technicians aren’t just busy, but productive and focused on the right tasks.

Luma – The Onsite Assistance Agent: Now that the job is scheduled, Luma supports the technician onsite with visual SOPs, step-by-step instructions, and all the context they need to resolve the issue correctly the first time. She reduces confusion and boosts quality in the field.

Lex – The Reporting & Compliance Agent: Lex takes care of documentation and compliance. Whether it’s inspection tracking, SLA adherence, or internal reporting, Lex ensures everything is captured, organized, and aligned with your standards — without burdening your team.

Neel – The Strategy & Analytics Agent: Neel looks at the big picture. He analyzes trends, patterns, and asset histories across sites to uncover risks and opportunities. Neel helps your executives and leadership teams make smarter portfolio-level decisions and continuously improve strategy.

Remi – The Feedback & Learning Agent: Remi listens and learns from every job completed. He captures technician feedback, job outcomes, and asset responses to improve future recommendations as well as the intelligence and precision of all the other agents. The result? A system that self-optimizes and adjusts to changing scenarios.

Each agent is focused, intelligent, and purpose-built, but the real power lies in how they work together to transform maintenance from manual and reactive to data-driven and autonomous.

Can Xempla and Hark Work Together? Absolutely!

You don’t have to think of Xempla and Hark as competing choices. In fact, for many organizations, the ideal setup is using both together. Why? Because they address different parts of the same challenge — Hark gives you visibility, Xempla delivers action.

This is especially important for teams that are already collecting a lot of operational or energy data but are struggling with what to do next. Dashboards can show you where things are going wrong. But without a system that helps your team triage, assign, act, and learn, you’re still relying heavily on manual processes. That’s where Xempla becomes the missing piece.

Let’s say you’re using Hark to monitor your building’s HVAC and solar systems. It flags an anomaly — a spike in energy usage, a failing sensor, or inconsistent output from a solar inverter. That’s important. But what happens next? Here’s what the integration with Xempla can look like:

1. Data is shared with Xempla through APIs or backend integration.
2. Xempla's Autonomous Maintenance Agent evaluates the issue—not just technically, but operationally (Is this critical? Who’s available to handle it? Has it happened before?).
3. A task is automatically created and assigned to the right person, with context, SOPs, and instructions.
4. Once resolved, Xempla captures technician feedback, learns from the resolution, and updates its logic to improve future decisions.
5. Meanwhile, the insight loop remains intact — Hark keeps monitoring, Xempla keeps executing.

The Result?

✅ Faster resolution times
✅ Fewer things slipping through the cracks
✅ Less manual triaging for your team
✅ A smarter, continuously improving operations system

Rather than replacing Hark, Xempla helps you get more out of it — unlocking the value of the data you’re already collecting.

When to Use Hark

Hark is a great fit when visibility and control are your top priorities — and when your team already has the resources and processes in place to respond to what the data reveals. It excels in energy-focused environments where real-time monitoring, diagnostics, and centralized control are essential.

Use Hark on its own if…

• Your primary goal is energy efficiency, not end-to-end maintenance optimization
• You need to integrate and monitor multiple building systems through one platform
• You’re running short-term projects like audits or DLP assessments
• You have an internal engineering team capable of interpreting data and acting on it manually
• You're managing sustainability goals, compliance reporting, and BMS-driven control

In these scenarios, Hark provides the insights you need, especially when you already have the people and systems in place to handle the execution side. But if you're looking to reduce manual effort, automate actions, and scale operational performance… that’s where Xempla adds its edge.

When to Use Xempla Alone — or Alongside Hark

If your team is spending too much time triaging faults, assigning tasks manually, or chasing outcomes across different systems, it might be time to consider Xempla. It’s designed for organizations that want to reduce operational friction, optimize resources, and build a smarter, self-improving maintenance system.

Use Xempla on its own if…

✅ You’re managing diverse assets across multiple sites and need a standardized system to scale operations
✅ You need to move from reactive or scheduled maintenance to predictive and autonomous maintenance
✅ Your team is lean, stretched thin, or looking to do more with the same resources
✅ You want real-time issue resolution, not just visibility into the problem
✅ You're looking to institutionalize knowledge and make your system smarter over time

Use Xempla with Hark if…

✅ You’re already using Hark for real-time monitoring and analytics
✅ You need a way to automatically triage and act on the insights Hark provides
✅ You want to connect energy monitoring with automated maintenance workflows
✅ You see value in having both insight and execution working together, with minimal manual intervention

In both cases, Xempla acts as an intelligent execution layer — automating what happens next after a fault is flagged or an inefficiency is spotted.

Xempla vs. Hark: Comparison Summary

Both Xempla and Hark offer real value — but they focus on different stages and aspects of the operational journey. Hark gives you real-time visibility into what’s happening with your building and energy systems. Xempla takes that information, puts it into context, and drives the right action to resolution. Here's how they compare across key areas:

Category	Xempla	Hark
Primary Focus	Autonomous maintenance and decision intelligence	Real-time energy monitoring and IoT connectivity
Core Strength	Turning insights into action—triaging, planning, executing, and learning	Providing visibility into asset and energy performance across systems
Automations	High – Tasks can be prioritized, assigned, and tracked automatically	Low – Alerts and insights provided; action must be taken manually
Asset Coverage	Cross-asset (HVAC, electrical, solar, and more)	Strongest in HVAC, solar, BMS, refrigeration, and lighting systems
Integration Approach	Works alongside BMS, CMMS, FDD tools, and analytics platforms	Pulls data directly from BMS, IoT sensors, and industrial devices
Learning & Optimization	Learns from outcomes and technician feedback to improve over time	Static insights based on rules and thresholds
Team Impact	Reduces manual triaging and decision fatigue	Provides data that engineers must act on themselves
Best Fit For	Teams looking to scale, automate, and reduce operational workload	Teams focused on energy tracking, real-time diagnostics, and device monitoring

Conclusion: Do You Want to See More, Or Do More?

The choice between Hark and Xempla isn’t about which tool is better — it’s about what your operations need right now, and where you’re headed next.

If your priority is real-time visibility, energy monitoring, and centralized control, Hark delivers. It’s built for teams that want to see what’s happening across systems and sites, and already have the internal bandwidth to act on that information manually.

But if you’re looking for more than insights — if your goal is to reduce manual work, improve team productivity, and close the loop between fault detection and resolution — Xempla is the platform designed to get you there. Whether you use it alone or in tandem with Hark, it helps you scale intelligently, act faster, and make every maintenance decision smarter than the last.

So the real question is: Are you happy just seeing the problems? Or do you want to solve them proactively and with less effort and more precision?

If it’s the latter, book your demo of Xempla and talk to our product and maintenance strategy expert today!