Define, Design and Deliver a More Effective Smart Building Strategy
Part One in a Four-Part Series
Facilities managers are increasingly turning to smart building technology as a solution for reducing their operational costs and enhancing building performance across a wide range of factors. In many locations, technology is proving an essential tool for achieving the energy reductions set by local building codes. From Washington D.C. and New York City to the Pacific Northwest, localities are establishing stringent requirements for energy efficiency and water usage. Technology has promised to help facilities managers comply with these regulations.
Yet what is often missing from these solutions is a clear strategy to guide smart building design and deliver. Without a clear strategy, facility managers are unable to realize the promised returns on their technology investments. Instead, systems can be duplicated, leading to excess expenses. Data remains siloed, making it more difficult to make informed decisions. Over time, systems prove burdensome to monitor and maintain and fall into disuse.
To prevent this problem, building owners and managers need to switch from thinking about technology to thinking about the experience you want that technology to create for building stakeholders. This shift in mindset can lead to a more holistic approach to technology design and deliver, an approach that can reduce upfront and long-term costs and achieve operational goals.
It’s a mindset shift that facilities managers need to make today. With advanced planning, facilities managers can build a foundation upon which to add future functionality within their preferred timeline and budget, rather than when it’s required by local regulations.
Build smart building strategies around the user experience
The first step to a successful smart building strategy is to define the user experiences you want the technology to create. After all, every system in your building impacts the people navigating and interacting with your building. These interactions tend to fall within the realm of six areas, as defined by UL Solutions’ SPIRE Smart Building Assessment:
- Power and energy systems track energy use and provide analysis, but also account for demand response, grid interoperability, and distributed energy resources.
- Health and wellbeing related systems manage indoor air quality, thermal comfort, visual human comfort, light and noise control, potable water quality, and odors.
- Life safety and property security systems drive situational awareness and enhance emergency communications while strengthening building emergency plans.
- Connectivity ensures accessibility to the world beyond the building while accounting for security, coverage, expansion, and resilience.
- Cybersecurity includes practices that identify threats and ensure protection, detection, response, and rapid recovery.
- Sustainability can be measured using criteria provided by leading global sustainability programs.
Thinking intentionally about how technology shapes building occupants’ experiences across each of these areas opens the door to a smart building design that eliminates system redundancy and data silos.
How to define user experience
Defining user experience begins with identifying all individuals who may interact with the building and then exploring their journey through the building. This can be done through conversation involving all stakeholders, including the owner, as well as residents, tenants, and representatives of various departments, depending on the building type. The experience of visitors and vendors should also be considered.
Any given building might be subject to action by dozens of separate users. For example, a hospital’s users may include patients, visitors, clinical and administrative staff, building engineers, consultants, vendors, and more. While there will be overlap in some experiences, some actions will be unique to specific roles.
The value of this approach is that it allows technology designers to focus on outcomes, not individual technologies. This leads to a number of advantages for building owners and operators.
The advantages of defining user experience
In conventional buildings, separate systems deliver data to separate control systems. This makes it difficult to get a complete picture of how the user journey impacts building operations and vice versa. By organizing technology around user experience, technology designers can establish the level of integration and data aggregation needed to achieve specific goals. In some cases, smart building software is able to pull data from across disparate building systems over an owner’s entire portfolio.
As more systems are connected, it becomes easier to compare information on how much energy is being consumed against occupancy patters, HVAC and sunshade use, and other system data. This complete picture can be used to automate energy-saving performance.
In addition, facilities managers gain greater access to historic data on system performance and insight into trends across regions or building types. This data, backed by machine learning algorithms, can tell facilities managers when systems need maintenance or replacement before an issue ever occurs, reducing downtime and extending equipment’s lifespan. Looking at the performance of systems across a real estate portfolio gives facility managers even more data to drive decisions around maintenance, recommissioning, and more.
Of course, this same technology can deliver a more valuable experience for building occupants. For example, rooms can be programmed to return to preset temperature and lighting preferences for a more personalized experience for building occupants. This turns a building into an asset that can be strategically leveraged to attract users, support productivity, and build valuable brand loyalty.
How to design for the desired experience
With specific use experiences in mind, the design team can begin to select the technology necessary to deliver the desired experience and functional features. The more integration required, the more complex this design task becomes. It becomes essential to have a technology designer involved in this integration process, as smart building design falls beyond the purview of most architects and engineers.
Under conventional approaches, the architectural and engineering teams may address system integration at a basic level, but won’t have the expertise to ensure that the mechanical equipment uses the same communication protocol as the lighting control system. It’s this design gap that leads to siloed data later in operations. Bridging this gap, with the expertise of a technology designer, ensures the level of integration needed to deliver all data and system controls – from HVAC to lighting to access control and everything else – to a single pane of glass.
An experienced technology designer can also identify opportunities to save on upfront construction costs. In a typical design scenario, designers will specify each individual technology system to deliver a specific benefit. With a more holistic approach that focuses on functionality first, technology designers can identify areas where a single system sensor or cable can collect data to serve multiple functions. One sensor can be used to trigger lighting and security functions – and to activate shades or adjust temperature, among other functions. With one sensor, facilities managers can gather data on occupancy, activity patterns, temperature, daylighting, and other building data. This approach reduces the number of systems installed, which in turn lowers upfront construction costs even as it expands functionality.
Achieving this level of integration requires an investment in technical documentation that defines how systems must connect. In an ideal situation, a Master Service Provider (MSP) would be hired to write the Division 25 specification document that spells out the level of integration required between every piece of cabling, hardware, and software required to achieve your desired use cases. When done well, Division 25 specifications refer to other divisions to provide a comprehensive picture of how to execute this integration during construction.
How delivery for smart building solutions needs to adapt
A lack of integration can prevent facilities managers and building owners from maximizing the advantages possible from their smart system. It can also lead to significant costs and frustration during the construction process.
Following the traditional design-bid-build process, technology installation might be divided among electrical, mechanical, and security contractors, among other partners. Design drawings are passed along to partners who will install their portion of the design, potentially with overlapping cabling and sensors. Without strong coordination between design and installation partners, the designed user experience is unlikely to be delivered.
However, much like smart building design, smart building installation tasks are incredibly involved, technically complex, and require a higher level of coordination. Integrating smart building systems requires more specialized skill sets and greater coordination among tradespeople. Moreover, these systems often involve materials that may differ from what contractors are used to installing. Earlier involvement from qualified systems integrators and contractors is often necessary to develop more appropriate bids.
In an ideal technology installation, your MSP partner could work with the general contractor to find and vet specialty contractors experienced in achieving the specified level of integration. This Master Service Integrator (MSI) would be vendor-certified, have experience installing low-voltage networks, and be fully prepared to deliver the user experience you expect.
Conclusion
It’s easy to think that more technology can lead to a smarter building. However, without effective integration, systems deliver more data without driving better decisions. Facilities managers gain more systems to maintain and none of the insight that could reduce labor and operational costs.
A truly smart building connects systems into a single view of system operation while requiring less infrastructure and human interaction. With the right upfront planning, a smart building can ease the burden on facilities staff while improving building operation, lowering costs and environmental impacts, and enhancing occupant health, safety, and comfort. Achieving these advantages, however, may require a shift in how you approach design and construction projects. It may also require the support of a technology-agnostic smart building consultant who can help shape a strategy to guide appropriate technology investments.
Each of these areas can be complex. Over the course of the next several articles, we’ll dive deeper into how crafting smart building strategies around user experience can deliver greater advantages and how your design and delivery strategies need to evolve to accommodate this change.