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HomeA View From The TopWhat's Now & What's Next for Smart Buildings

What’s Now & What’s Next for Smart Buildings

The commercial real estate industry has heard for some time now that buildings are getting “smarter.” But what does that really mean? And what about the building owners—do they need to get smarter, too? How can we be smarter about how to leverage connected buildings to make buildings more efficient, achieve better use of space, and provide occupants with the best experience possible?

Darlene Pope, WeWork VP and Global Head of Smart Buildings and Digital Workplace Experience shared her thoughts on the topic during her “What’s Now and What’s Next for Smart Buildings” keynote presentation at the ITEXPO in February. She touched on topics that should be at the top of every real estate owner’s mind when it comes to smart buildings, including space management, occupancy detection, workplace mobile apps, location-based services, connected workplace solutions, and of course, occupant experience.

“How do we use smart building technology to make people more productive, satisfied and efficient?” Pope said. “Occupant satisfaction and employee experience are the primary business drivers for investment in technology within our buildings: attracting and retaining tenants or employees, worker productivity, comfort and convenience, health and wellness, safety and security… It doesn’t mean that energy efficiency isn’t important – it certainly is. But if you look at each technology solution in terms of the value it adds in occupant satisfaction and experience, that’s a 100x better measurement of ROI than simply looking at energy savings.”

Darlene Pope

SPACE MANAGEMENT

Occupancy information is a critical data point to drive more efficient space management. Building owners need to know how many people are in their buildings on a real-time basis in order to effectively manage space. Do we need more space? Less space? More conference rooms or huddle areas? How are people using our space? Badge swiping is a popular way to measure occupancy, but if people don’t have to swipe out, there’s no way of knowing how many people are actually in the building at any given time—only how many entered over the course of a day. Also, badge data is typically evaluated in arrears, i.e. what happened yesterday or last month, not in real time.

A more accurate tool to measure location and movement of people within a space is the smartphone—it’s a building’s number one sensor for occupancy, temperature (yes, temperature), occupant satisfaction and more. Building owners can use smart workplace apps to identify how many people are inside at any given time, as well as how those people are actually using their space, in order to manage the space more efficiently.

“Mobile apps and location-based services are the top business drivers for use of cell phones in buildings,” Pope said. “I am not talking about separate apps for room booking, lighting, access control, HVAC, and service requests, but fully integrated smart workplace apps that share data and communicate with each other in order to best respond to the real time needs of the occupants. Worse than that, we still haven’t solved the problem of ubiquitous wireless coverage indoors. We need to start thinking about what real-time location-based occupancy data can do for all of our smart building and smart workplace functions.”

How can occupancy detection lead to a better occupant experience? If a building owner uses occupancy data to see which floors are the most heavily populated, they can send that data to the elevators, which will stay parked on those floors leading to shorter wait times for tenants. If that data is fed to a building’s HVAC system, the building will operate based on real-time occupancy, not on a time clock – resulting in added comfort and energy savings. If that data is fed to a digital floorplan or room booking platform, the employees can see which rooms are available, saving valuable time in trying to find a meeting room or a space to work.

“It opens up a whole new world of efficiency in terms of employee productivity,” Pope said. “Real time occupancy—that’s what every building needs to start solving for, and that impacts everything else.”

Building owners can also use real time, location-based occupancy data to reduce tenants’ temperature-related service calls. Pope pointed to a case study where a building’s tenants were all given personal control of the HVAC system via their mobile app. If they were too hot or cold, they could simply open their app and adjust the air flow in one click. The app communicated with the HVAC system, opened the damper overhead and instantaneously increased airflow to that space. In addition, the system began to learn trends and automatically adjust set points to proactively solve temperature issues. Pope said the monthly hot and cold calls dropped by as much as 98 percent.

BRING GPS INDOORS

Pope raised an interesting point during her presentation—we rely on GPS to get to where we need be outside of a building, but once we’re inside, that all goes away. That’s where an indoor positioning system (IPS) would be helpful—when we’re in an unfamiliar building and need to find a restroom, conference room or a cup of coffee. In the same way you follow a blue dot on a map all the way to the building, you can continue to follow that blue dot all the way to your conference room.

“I do a lot of traveling and when I fly to a city, I get notifications on my phone that says there are five highly rated restaurants near me now. But I walk into a building and I can’t find anything,” Pope said. “I use GPS to get to the building, but then have no active mapping inside the building. We use location-based services outside of the building all the time, and then we come into the building and it all goes away. Why is that? I would encourage you to start thinking about all the benefits of location-based services indoors.”

In the aforementioned case study, Pope said some of the most ground-breaking features were “find a room near me now” and the ability to check in or book a room just by walking into it. Using location-based services integrated with the room booking platform, an employee can step in a vacant room, book it instantly, and adjust the temperature to their liking.

“(If) you go into a shopping mall or airport or a sporting event, what do you start to see now when you walk into these facilities? ‘Download our app.’ But we still don’t see this for our office buildings.” Pope said.

SMART BUILDINGS CAN GET EVEN SMARTER

Smart buildings aren’t just about connected building systems such as HVAC and lighting. Smart buildings are about connected everything, including building systems, enterprise systems, and people. They have the capacity to learn tendencies and trends, such as occupancy levels one day versus another day. This learning capability allows building owners to operate their buildings based on predictive analytics.

For example, occupancy data can show that a building may be 80 percent occupied on Mondays, but only 40 percent occupied on Fridays. With that information, the building owner can run HVAC much more efficiently. Further, in a flexible space environment, perhaps you only open half of the building to save energy.

“Would you rather be 40 percent occupied in the entire building, or 80 percent occupied in half the building?” Pope said. “Think about what that does in terms of energy management and your carbon footprint. You could even start to predict how much chicken to order in the cafeteria on Fridays based on what your occupancy is going to be.”

“IoT is data being shared horizontally as well as vertically – system to system, machine to machine,” Pope said. “It’s about things communicating with things and those systems and things starting to learn and make decisions on their own. It’s when a car pulls into the parking garage at the P-3 level and automatically dispatches an elevator because it knows you’re going to need an elevator. If the building is smart enough, it also knows you work on the sixth floor and will automatically take you up to the sixth floor.”

THE INTERNET OF THINGS AT ITS CORE

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an oft-discussed topic in the CRE industry, but many people don’t understand what IoT actually is. For Pope, IoT is not the idea of pulling data from a sensor and feeding it into a dashboard to tell building owners what happened in their building the day before.

“IoT is data being shared horizontally as well as vertically – system to system, machine to machine,” Pope said. “It’s about things communicating with things and those systems and things starting to learn and make decisions on their own. It’s when a car pulls into the parking garage at the P-3 level and automatically dispatches an elevator because it knows you’re going to need an elevator. If the building is smart enough, it also knows you work on the sixth floor and will automatically take you up to the sixth floor. It’s when the lighting and temperature automatically adjust to your preferences, regardless of where you are working today. It’s when buildings optimize themselves based on actual occupancy.”

THE FUTURE OF THE WORKPLACE IN SMART BUILDINGS

When Pope is asked what she thinks workspaces will look like 10, 20 and 30 years in the future, she said she points to how our children work, play and communicate—through their mobile phones. Everything’s connected and voice activated.

“Look at the adoption of integrated smart home solutions, controlled either by mobile app or voice commands,” Pope said. “My kids don’t use light switches—they walk into their room and say, ‘Alexa, turn on my lights.’ My grandchildren won’t even know what a light switch is. My house is a ‘smart home’ – yet the vast majority of our offices lag light years behind. That is the way we need to be thinking—a voice activated, seamless experience from home to office.”

The cell phone has become the center of our universe and mobile applications drive our everyday lives. We use apps to book a flight, schedule an Uber, reserve a hotel room, do banking, pay bills, check the daily headlines, trade stocks… everything has an app! Except our buildings. We use digital maps and blue dot GPS wayfinding to get from point A to point B outside the building – but all of that goes away when we step indoors. Mobile devices are the #1 means of business communications, but they still don’t work in buildings. These are the issues we need to be solving for – this is where smart building technology investments really pay off.

Darlene Pope is an industry veteran with 28 years of experience in real estate technology and is globally recognized as a thought leader and visionary in the prop-tech space. The statements and opinions reflected in this article are strictly her own.

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