Smart Building Technology Leads to Efficiency Gains

By Georganne Benesch

‍‍These are just a few reasons why CEO Deb Noller cofounded Switch Automation, a global real estate software company.

Coming from a logistics background, where Noller tracked freight and containers in distributed purchasing environments, she saw firsthand the challenges with manual tracking. Companies were losing visibility of their procurement purchases—causing projects to run behind schedule. She and her cofounder developed solutions for automating everything from tracking of materials to customs integration—keeping projects on time and within budget.

“When manual, paper-driven processes become digital, it leads to enormous efficiency gains,” says Noller. “Not just money savings but time, and making people’s jobs easier. And when I looked at the world of buildings, it was the same opportunity.”

Building management for retail stores, bank branches, and fleets of office buildings have traditionally relied on a large workforce performing low-skill—and likely unenjoyable—tasks. Noller foresees an entirely data-driven way of managing buildings: “I think there’s an opportunity not just to save money but to save energy, make buildings more efficient, and lower their impact on the planet.”

Data-Driven Retail Banks Become Digital Facilities

A great example of this is within financial institutions, which tend to be early adopters of smart building technology for everything from energy savings to visitor comfort. Switch Automation worked with a banking customer that operates and manages hundreds of retail branches in-house. The bank wanted a data-driven solution that highlighted problems and opportunities in every building, while having this data available in a central operational center. In deploying the Switch Automation Building Optimization Platform the bank continually collected actionable information about each branch that enabled significant efficiencies and cost savings.

Noller found this customer to be a great standout, with a forward-thinking operational team that understood from the start that hardware and software should be decoupled. This allowed them to take advantage of the pre-existing hardware deployed in all of their buildings—such as smart thermostats, access control, and lighting systems—and just put a software layer over the top—leveraging earlier investments. As a result, the bank can start a digital program immediately, select different vendor solutions, upgrade hardware more gradually, and not be locked into decisions they made in the past.

For another banking client, Switch Automation partnered with the bank’s cybersecurity provider and integrated its software onto the solution. “The bank has remarkable high-end headquarters in New York and London,” says Noller. “These are modern, state-of-the-art buildings, with all the bells and whistles, and some really advanced use cases.”

For example, the company deployed on-demand climate control for conference rooms, which increased overall efficiency and energy savings. Instead of heating or cooling every room all day, the system activates the meeting room thermostat only when it’s booked. If the occupants don’t show up, climate control is turned off after 10 minutes. This one technology investment expanded to demand-driven maintenance for smart cleaning, and even space utilization planning, like closing floors on low-use days, which led to increasing ROI over time.

While it may seem relatively simple, data integration is broad and complex—including both IT and OT systems. On the IT side, room booking systems integrate with email and calendars. On the OT side are occupancy sensors, HVAC, and lighting systems.

The Building Optimization Platform software takes all of this disparate information, then aggregates, normalizes, and transforms it, empowering the teams responsible for maintaining and operating buildings with insights they can act on.

In general, the payback on data-driven buildings is impressive. “One of our banking clients saved in excess of 20% in total energy across their entire portfolio. Over the last five years, that has amounted to $12 million,” Noller says.

Building Automation Depends on Reliable Performance

The value Switch Automation brings to its customers is not only the software and data that uncover cost-saving opportunities but also the company’s partnerships, which allows it to do so at scale. With clients operating anywhere from 100 to 5,000 buildings, Switch Automation relies on Intel and its OEM partners to develop high-performance and affordable systems that are reliable, inherently secure, and scalable.

The Building Automation software runs on an Intel-powered IoT gateway that controls sequences and runs the analytics, with computations performed in the cloud and then deployed to the edge.

System installations are also automated, with gateways being discovered and centrally commissioned at remote sites. “We discover all the systems, we discover all the data points, and then we start to ingest and tag that data, and map it into our system,” Noller says. “It has to be this way to scale, but of course behind all of that there’s 10 years of R&D work to get to this point.”

Building Automation Is the Future, Today

While sustainability is an important motivating factor for organizations to embrace building automation, it’s equally about efficiency gains and saving money. Market leaders deploying automation at scale run their buildings at a fraction of the cost per square foot, unlike those who do not.

Going forward, Noller expects data-driven automation to become mainstream and one of the big technology growth sectors over the next decade: “There’s just so much opportunity to save money and save energy, and I’m driven at the end of the day by the fact that we need to resolve, and fix things for climate change.”

This article originally appeared on insight.tech: View Full Artical

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