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How to Design the Right Smart Building Strategy for your Organisation

The real estate landscape is going through profound changes: occupier expectations are shifting and we are seeing a move from workspace as a commodity to workplace as a service. In this context, real estate management increasingly needs to go beyond real estate and facility management, and focus on the occupant experience. To do this requires a thorough understanding of how the built environment is being used and its performance both at a macro and at a granular level which are then the foundation of a holistic smart building strategy.

CRE services firms are partnering with IoT companies to offer personalised, hospitality-like services to building occupants. Using a condition-based approach, these teams are able to deliver a superior occupant experience in a highly efficient manner. For example, the “sensor-to-value” approach offered by Cushman & Wakefield and MCS Solutions evaluates more than 200 Smart Building scenarios to translate qualitative performance objectives and initiatives into measurable, quantitative ones. There’s more to Smart Buildings than just measuring. This novel approach allows organisations to enable new, outcome-based scenarios, such as activity-based working and predictive facility management (i.e. maintenance) and delivery. Knowing that addressing your IoT needs can be a daunting endeavor, given the number of options in the market and the speed in which technology evolves, we suggest the following five steps that will simplify how you can design the right Smart Building strategy for your organisation:

The underlying challenge results in having to drive productivity through a superior employee experience while still looking to trim operating and capital budgets. At the onset it may feel as if it’s counterintuitive to raise the bar in terms of service and experience levels while delivering bottom line cost savings. That’s where a smart building New ways of working that maximise the return on real estate assets are leading to a transformation in the way workplace services are delivered. A Smart Building strategy provides business intelligence about patterns of behavior and use of space, which enables facilities executives to anticipate the ever-changing needs of occupants. strategy delivers unprecedented value and ongoing productivity improvements.

According to Gartner, Inc., in 2017 there will be 8.4 billion connected things globally (up 31 percent from 2016) totaling $2.7 trillion in spend on endpoints and services. Interestingly, North America, Western Europe and Greater China collectively represent 67 percent of this installed base. Also, this trajectory of connected things is expected to reach 20.4 billion by 2020¹. While it may be tempting to focus on glitzy new technologies through small pilot projects (i.e. limited to lighting or HVAC), a holistic approach will yield much better results. An all-encompassing plan for assessing the cost and benefit of a range of technologies and processes represents the best way for a company to achieve its overall goals and objectives.

RAUL ESPARZA Senior Managing Director Global Occupier Services raul.esparza@cushwake.com

KOEN MATTHIJS CEO, MCS Solutions koen.matthijs@mcssolutions.com

56 The Occupier Edge

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