What’s Better in a Smart Building World? The BIoT is rapidly changing the Building Management game as we know it. Presentation by Aaron Lapsley, Vice President of Global Engineering Services at Switch Automation.
Data may exist, in a literal sense, but that doesn’t mean it’s being used to help your business.
Scale can mean a lot of things. It can mean connecting a portfolio of class A office buildings across the country. And that is a big improvement by itself. But…
But real scale also means connecting buildings that have been underserved by the traditional BMS industry. In this case bank branches. These buildings never had BMS or even digital controls…they were just too small for it to be economical. But with a well developed smart buildings program, including a heavy dose of standardization, the average cost can be driven down to the point that the business case becomes compelling. This is a view of the controls for lighting, which can be accessed anywhere. That’s three locations, each broken into four zones. The biggest area of ROI, incidentally, not utilities or maintenance, but vendor management, particularly their enormouse facilities management outsourcing contract, which has a sneaky tendency to get more expensive every year.
There are several benefits of a more IT-centric approach to building management
These are the four big ones we often discuss with customers
…but one of the big ones is system integration. It’s not just about the IoT and new, shiny data-producing hardware. Five years ago Tridium was the only game in town for smart buildings—their solution allowed you to integrate your BMS networks. While important, only part of the picture. Hardware-based solutions like Tridium are just not built as enterprise IT solutions. This was data from three sources pulled in for 7000 properties. The utility data is sent monthly in csv files from a billing service provider. The sustainability group was able to verify that a program with a smart-irrigation vendor had resulted in about 30% savings on water at those sites.
Portfolio visibility. Rapid access to information.
The user experience of traditional BMS is probably it’s biggest shortcoming.
It can be MUCH better.
Here’s one of my favorite examples since joining Switch…
More people with more skills and more information paying more attention to more buildings and making them work better.