Webinar: Smart buildings and facilities: Real life value from IoT solutions
Smart buildings and smart facilities are big buzz words, and companies and enterprises all over the world are considering implementing IoT to their operations.
Join Haltian IoT webinar about smart buildings and facilities, which will introduce real-life IoT use cases and ways in which smart buildings and smart facility management can create actual business value and better user experiences.
Presenting with Haltian are our partners: global facility service company ISS Group and technology company TietoEVRY with their Empathic Building service.
Watch the recording of the webinar:
Panelists
- Pasi Leipälä, CEO and co-founder, Haltian
- Jari Tiirikainen, Head of Digital Excellence, ISS Finland
- Tomi Teikko, Head of Empathic Building, TietoEVRY
Q&A
Q: What are the drivers for companies implementing these kinds of smart services for facilities and buildings?
A: (Jari) The use cases vary a lot from customer to customer, but I would say that most commonly it is around occupancy and understanding the usage of the building. Our customers want to have an understanding of how many people are using the building, at what time, the basic coverage of their work stations and does their facility actually meet the needs of the facility users.
Q: Construction companies have not been in the frontline to build smart buildings, but smart systems are typically implemented afterwards. How do you see this could be changed for cost-efficiency?
A: (Jari) IoT and smart buildings are a relatively new thing to the construction business, but it will change fast. I see that the demand for intelligence in building s will rise and thereby forcing the industry to adapt to the change. Many building owners in the future, and not even that far away in the future, will want to own only buildings that can be smart. That drives the construction companies into enabling smartness. But at the same time sensors get cheaper and it is also easy to retro-fit sensors just like Haltian sensors. It is interesting to see how and where these two worlds of construction and maintenance of buildings will meet in this journey.
Q: In the current economic situation, what’s the best approach to push these solutions into the market place? Are there any ROI calculators for business decision makers to gauge the ROI?
A: (Janne) Each business is slightly different from each other but in general there are many ways you can calculate the ROI from savings (e.g. better utilization of space), employee wellbeing (e.g. less sick leave), energy savings (e.g. use heating/cooling only when necessary) and so on.
(Jari) Naturally, we do have our own ROI-calculators for understanding the financials. But as important as they are, there are also a lot of “softer” values that can not so easily be calculated in. Such as employee well-being, building user satisfaction of the building, bringing services closer to the users, being able to understand better how the building is used, and so on. The best approach, in my opinion, is to listen. Listen to the customer and the users from the customer´s site and try to understand where could you help. After that, it is a lot easier to think about a solution and ROI`s, etc.
Q: What is the type of sensor or how you can get data which people are where?
A: (Tomi) In Empathic Building we use indoor positioning, and there are several ways you can do indoor positioning. You can use Bluetooth Mesh, Bluetooth peakons, Ultra Wideband… the technologies are there. From the Empathic Building perspective, we just care about the data and show it to the end-users.
Q: Do people not have an issue with being monitored?
A: (Tomi) When we collect data from the desks, we are using a ‘very stupid’ movement sensor, i.e. a sensor that detects movement only, not the particular person, so that’s the occupancy data we collect. Of course, if you monitoring a desk that is dedicated to one person, then that can be turned into personal data. But I don’t see any use case for collecting data from dedicated work stations. The real use case is for activity based working where people can choose their working station according to their needs. When we’re talking about the indoor positioning, the Empathic Building has a tool that you as the end-user can share data, it’s not a tool to track you. Tracking is the wrong mindset. Indoor positioning is a tool where you can create your own digital twin and share information with your colleagues. It works as a volunteer tool.
Q: Typical IoT sensors are wireless. How do you tackle coverage problems?
A: (Pasi) The information from the sensors is typically sent over a mesh network. We’re using Wirepas Mesh developed by a Finnish a company called Wirepas. The system works so that the data is sent to either the gateway device or then to another sensor close by. The sensors can communicate between themselves and the data can be easily related from one floor and room to another. The data will be sent to a gateway. This way the gateway can then be positioned to a place where cellular connectivity is available. If there is no cellular connectivity, we have a LAN gateway available. This way we have been able to solve the connectivity question even in the most demanding places.