Roger Krulak: The Future of Modular Construction

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Roger Krulak, CEO of FullStack Modular describes a paradigm shift in construction that is revolutionizing multifamily development. Krulak dives into the benefits of modular construction and the overall impact it is having on the CRE industry.

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Roger Krulak, CEO, FullStack Modular

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hello I'm Roger Krulak. I'm the CEO and founder of full stack modular we are a fully volumetric solution for high rise multifamily buildings in a dense urban environment. So today I'm here to talk about the crisis of lack of productivity in the construction industry. There are three major drivers, one of them is that we are not meeting the current needs for housing for instance in the United States. There is at least a 10 million housing unit deficit as we speak today. In addition to that there is an increasing lack of labor for productivity for  the built environment, less people are going into the trades or the boce trades in this country.

Additionally the process of construction in the United States and frankly in the world is broken. Projects normally end up at least 20 percent over schedule budget and as much as 80 percent over construction budget. This is part of the reason why the productivity on site is completely disorganized the process of organizing construction by trades is nonsensical from a logical process perspective.

Everything else in the world is manufactured. Aerospace, airplanes, toys candy is manufactured but construction is not. Designed manufacturer construct which is what we do at full stack is the only path to success using offsite built solutions or using manufacturing to construct the built environment. Full stack modular utilizes technology and manufacturing processes to increase the efficiency by which we create the built environment.

Here you see an example of the traditional method of construction which is design bid build against design manufacturer construct solutions and you can see not only is there an opportunity to save time which is of course a major goal but you also can decrease the amount of time that it takes to get the cost efficiency. And that happens by creating a digital twin of the building before we ever build it costing it out and organizing it in a process that is as efficient as possible.

In addition to allowing you to build the foundations etc on site while we're actually manufacturing in the factory increasing both productivity, predictability and cost. Some of the benefits of modular construction and in our solution is that we build 80 percent of the building off site. It's 98 percent cost predictable, we only calculate in the factory labor material and overhead rather than organizing it by trades.

It's incredibly safe. Employees almost never get above 30 inches off of the floor. We have almost no waste. We have less than 70 percent of the workers on site making it a much safer solution and at a minimum you're gonna get a 25 percent increase in time to market. Additionally a full stack modular has some other advantages. We are made right here in the United States. We can build incredibly tall buildings with our solution forty five stories and a double loaded corridor and up to sixty five stories in a tower configuration.

We implement technology within our process. We have a cell ceiling facade solution. We have almost no or few workers on site. Once the once the modules leave the factory and get installed on site and we are always incubating new technologies in order to increase that efficiency.  It’s a value proposition for manufacturing in lieu of conventional construction. So if you always do what you've always done you always get what we've always gotten. So the problem is why isn't everybody doing this.

The reason everybody isn’t doing it is that it requires a significant paradigm shift in the process that we create the built environment and the roles change significantly. For instance the architect normally is involved at the very beginning of thinking about how the building is going to be built and then what it might look like and what the program is and we're trying to shift the role to architecture whereby they worry about the way that the building looks and reacts to the environment and the way that the people in it react to the building. 

We take care of all of the math of the massing of the processing. Technologically. And the role of the general contractor significantly changes and these are some of the ways they are the scope of work that happens. It starts with foundation and utilities which is generally conventional the crane in the stack of the models we bring the models from the factory they get stacked in about 12 minutes we do mateline work and the mateline work and you may not know what that is, there's a picture here describing it.

There's three modules, they're stacked on top of each other. the mateline work is all the connection pieces that are required that happen on site whereas all of that mod work, all the distribution mechanical electrical plumbing happens in our factory. This is a picture of our factory. You can see how the modules are manufactured, assembled as we call it. You can fit up to fifteen thousand square feet of a building in the factory at a time. We manufacture between 5 - 7,000 square feet of finished product a week which includes elevators, stairwells, all of the structure all of the facades toilet paper holders paint lighting fixtures everything except for the hallway.

Once our modules arrive onsite either by truck or by train or by water it takes roughly 12 minutes to stack. The advantage of that is that the building is almost completely finished including stairwells, elevator shafts, all of the finishes in the units including and down to the toilet paper holder, painting, flooring, appliances, anything short of people. And there's no scaffolding required.

There is no hoist required and the building gets stacked up just like it's going to be finished. Thank you very much. Roger Krulak CEO and founder of full stack modular. Thanks for listening today.

Cormac Crossan: Spare a Thought for Dumb Buildings

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By 2050 2.5bn more people will live in cities and our energy consumption will double. Of the buildings that will support our densified cities in 2050, 75% already exist. Cormac Crossan sheds light on dumb buildings and the infrastructure challenges we face today.

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Cormac Crossan, Director of Business Development, Real Estate, Schneider Electric

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I wanted to prepare a talk for DUMB buildings.  This will be my fiftieth marketing conference and these poor dumb buildings no one ever talks about.  So we're always talking about buildings like these. They all get their day in the sun they get prizes awards. But the reality is the overriding majority of buildings in the world are nothing like these. They're way more like this or maybe this one. And they deploy technology like this and here's an example of some interesting lighting integration. 

So you get my point right. So we've all had experiences of dumb buildings, that airport you love to hate or you know the office building you love to avoid, like the plague. That condo you should never bought, and like that.

I want you to think about the year 2050. Right. So given the pace of change in the world today I think we can all agree 2050 be a very different world. So the experts say it's going to be 2.5 billion more people living in cities. We will consume double the amount of energy we're consuming today. 

The demand for electricity will be growing at twice the pace of the demand for energy.  That's going to be much more electric in the world electrified and we need to reduce our carbon emissions by 50 percent to avoid catastrophic climate change.  So going to need a few things to make all that happen. And one of the ingredients I think you'll agree would be very very smart buildings right. 

But get this, seventy five percent of all of the buildings that will exist in 2050 are already here. Guys they're here and they've been they've been built. And unfortunately for us they are very very very far from smart. So while we're pondering this problem let me tell you a little bit about myself. My name's Cormac I'm obviously not from around here. Get that. Um I head global business development for real estate in Schneider Electric and I worked for 10 years in the datacenter business and in five years in real estate and I spent the last five years working out how we can apply the cloud that we built in data centers to build value in the real estate sector. 

I work for a company called Schneider. You can see the logo down here. Schneier is a French company with a German name with a CEO based in Hong Kong and we do most of our turnover in North America. So easy. 

In Schneider we spend over a billion dollars a year trying to solve questions like the one I just asked you “what do we do with all these dumb buildings?”  and the good news is that there are some promising signs right. So we're already applying technologies from this amazing tool box that we've inherited from the I.T. sector that I worked in for 10 years. Tools like cloud analytics machine learning, A.I., mobile.

We're seeing some very promising signs of what I'm going to do is for the rest of this talk we're just going to look at three ways,that we can address the dumb buildings and try and get them ready for this challenge in 2050. So let's start. 

Number one, we need to make them green. This is a no brainer right. So dumb buildings have a massive carbon footprint. So 30 percent of the world's carbon is produced by dumb buildings 40 percent of world's energy is consumed by those buildings and corporate occupiers don't want to move into them anymore. They're looking for sustainable spaces green spaces and the knock on effect from this is that these buildings are worth less. So studies show that the big buildings that do not have sustainability certifications are between 7 and 9 percent less valuable than their sustainable counterparts. So what do we do about that. Well the good news is we have lots of ways of addressing existing buildings that are not sustainable. 

At Schneider we've worked on thousands of buildings to address the issue. I'm just gonna give you one example our own corporate headquarters is a 350,000 sq ft facility. And from the moment we moved in until today we have divided the energy footprint on a sq ft basis by 6 and we haven't replaced all the equipment in the building. Everything has been done by baby steps. So we add a variable speed drive here, we change a setting in the BMS here, yes we've added some renewables, we've done photovoltaic with geothermal but most of the changes have been added with a with a very short ROI in mind because we have a lease. So the message here is there really is a huge potential to make the buildings greener. 

Second thing I will talk about is making them flexible so the way that we consume space and square foot is changing radically right, we're all talking about coworking, this event is co-sponsored by We, workplace policies are changing and get this, dumb buildings have difficulty in adapting to this these changes. But we're working with some of the largest banks in the world and we're able to instrument their buildings with smart IoT sensors. It doesn't take months or weeks or even days, we can do this in a matter of hours and we can start to gather information about how these buildings are behaving and what the usage is and how we can improve them. 

Then we can take that data and we can start to improve the controls of the office buildings we have technology in on the control side that allows us to completely reconfigure an entire office in a matter of clicks with a fraction of the cost a fraction of the time a fraction of the loss of productivity.  We're also working on technologies like micro grid where existing buildings can become way more agile and way more reactive to the way the energy environment is behaving around them so really exciting things happening in this area. 

I left probably the single most important aspect to this for last and that is that we need to make existing buildings stickier.  Now I don't know if you would agree with me on this but I believe the buildings today are waging a war, for our time. In retail this is called footfall,  in offices this is called occupancy, It doesn't matter if we're talking about the same thing, getting us to spend time so that we produce and the biggest weapon in this war, the most important weapon in this war is something called experience. Just as up to now every building has a unique architectural footprint, every building going forward will have a unique and unique experience many times digitally rendered, which will typify it.  The race to provide that best experience is most definitely on. 

So I've been fortunate to have been involved in the corporate headquarters project of a large French bank Societe Generale and the experience that they provide in their building is absolutely incredible. We provided them with the mobile applications for every person in that building is given an android phone and that phone accompanies them through their entire day. As you're approaching the building it tells you if you can park in the building, where you can park in the building, it acts as your access control taking you through the turnstiles, you pay for your coffee with it, It will tell you using the phone.  No cash in the building, it guides you to the closest collaboration space and then you can control your environment with the phone. You can close the shutters, turn on the lights, change the temperature and if something's not working you can tell the FM again through your phone. This experience, It's like Pringles, once you pop you can't stop. So this is the way things are going. So making things sticky is yeah hugely important.

So parting question from you guys is probably how do we pay for this. So the good news is that is doesn’t have to be a zero sum game. So if we look at for example a world energy report,  they state that 82 percent of the global economic potential of energy efficiency is untapped. How long have we been doing green buildings? Long time, right. So we have a huge amount of potential value to create, money to be minted, gold to be mined, It's just waiting there.  The other soundbite I wanted to give you was from a European Commission funded report, which was carried out by the Wuppertal Institute in Germany and Cambridge Macroeconomics. They basically ran their survey across hundreds of buildings and they said the following. They said that smart connected commercial buildings typically command rents of up to 11.8% higher than non connected equivalents, and they transact for between 5 and 35% more. So these are massive amounts of capital that we can that we can potentially access. So my time is up. If you've enjoyed this conversation please reach out to me on LinkedIn and we can carry it on we'll be delighted to speak with you.  Thank you. 

Kanav Dhir: Powering the Future of Real Estate - Transforming a Trillion Dollar Industry

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Kanav Dhir, SVP of Product, Vergesense

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Good afternoon everyone I'm Kanav Dhir from vergesense. I'm a product manager here. I lead a lot of our product efforts in the hardware and software side and I'm gonna talk to you about how bird sense is helping solve a lot of the questions of today. We have of our spaces around how the spaces are being used and also preparing us to solve a lot of a question we're gonna have tomorrow 

So we all know the transformation that's happening in our industry right. So there's a trillion dollar asset class. We have millions a square foot in our corporations and the way these real real estate is being used is completely changing. We have more dynamic workplaces it's not individual offices anymore. We're designing spaces to be used for interaction. And with all of these changes we need a way to understand how these spaces are being used 

there's some data that shows that with coworking spaces the day old 200 square foot per person is now going all the way down to 75 square foot per employee. There's a big change and we need to understand how it's being used and what can we do about it. 

The industry has a problem it's a little bit of a mismatch in the slide here but there is a lot of different types of data sources available and they're disparate. They're complex they're not fit for purpose. We have manual surveys which are actually really insightful data but they're infrequent they're costly and we have a lot of companies spending a lot of money on Wi-Fi data badge data and they're trying to eat soup with a fork. They're just trying to understand how spaces are being used from data that's not meant for that. And then there's data that's related to low quality sensors. 

I'm trying to use sensor designed to turn on lights to understand how my space is actually being used 

so advert since we're designing sensors that allow customers to get the power of computer vision. 

The technology has made accessible responsible and relevant for understanding how spaces are being used. This technology is 100 percent wireless. 

It can be deployed in minutes is a cellular backhaul so bringing low I.T. friction and the data itself is ninety eight nine 10 percent accurate and a hundred percent anonymous and we're able to do a lot more with it than we would think so versus the one of the main models that virtuous is deploy the main kind of value that we're bringing to customers around people counting so would the single sensor over a pot of desks and six to eight desks we're able to get not just occupancy but person count down to the desk level we're also able to deploy the same sensors in any space whether it's a soft seating area cafeteria lounge and we're able to get a person count for that space and even spatial awareness of where in that space people are 

that's just the beginning. 

Here's an example of a new model that we deploy to the customer so a customer is using virtual sensors to understand how their space is being used for several several months and they actually brought in CBRE to do a manual survey during the time vertex was there and there was two purposes of this. One was to make sure Virgin's is working and we found that Vertex was actually with a double blind test 99 percent accurate. The other was to understand are there data usage that the data is not able to collect other things in the ways people are using the space that we're just not able to measure. 

And one really interesting insight that they found was 25 percent of desks and 10 percent of conference room usage was passive meaning no one was there but they're not available for people to use so with this customer with the same exact sensors they're using for personal count because they're powered by computer vision. We deployed a new model that allowed them to not just get a person count for space but also understand if their signs of life. So both from a historical analysis recycled back understand what percentage of usage is falling within this criteria so they can make behavioral changes but in a real time perspective for live addressing for real time understanding what's available they're able to not you know lose out on occupant experience by sending people to a place that may not have people in it but is still not available for them to use 

this is these are just some of the beginnings of what customers are able to do with our sensors we have customers that are working with us and figuring out for facilities use cases. Can you identify how messy a space is. How much has it changed so I can actually prioritize which spaces too and to not clean. Rather than having a cleaning service go out every single day. We have customers that are spending millions of dollars designing furniture and spaces designed for collaboration and they want to measure. Is it actually being useful or spending money on. So we're working with the customer to design a model that can actually put a collaboration score on these meetings these interactions are people interacting. 

Are they using the space for individual work. Should we be designing different types of spaces and then anything from customer occupants using spaces that are probably not designed to be used to making phone calls and even down to. Does the water jug need to be refilled. 

All that is possible 

with a I so I allows us to have the power of not just what we can detect today but be able to expand that possibility into what we're able to detect tomorrow. I want to share a couple of interesting data elements with you now that we have a lot of you know customers Fortune 1000 that have generated really valuable and accurate person account data 

so across these companies these 10 companies you know Grant six months of data we polled 44 percent of meetings or one person meetings regardless it's conference room size 34 percent of meetings were two person meetings and only 22 percent of the meetings that we saw were three people or more. We all know there is a right sizing problem but being able to quantify it and attack it from actually how big the problem is it is pretty important data. We also do the same thing and understood a new trend of space which is unbreakable conference rooms. 

How are these performing so we found that you know unbreakable conference rooms collaboration rooms essentially are being used 73 percent of time by one person 20 percent of the time by two people and 6 percent of the time at 3 or more people. This is very insightful because while unbreakable spaces are significantly higher utilized than about conference rooms because you don't have ghost meetings you know squatters what you have to do is you have to design the space to account for the types of usage of these spaces they should have less square footage allocated to them because this is how architecture using it 

there's some very interesting data that we're starting to pull and see this. I actually found this to be pretty interesting for Book of confidence. We found that the most common meeting size is 30 minutes. And this is you know a lot along the lines of what you'd expect but for unworkable conference rooms because we're measuring person count and actually have this data reliable data. We saw that meetings were 10 minutes long most common. So maybe we should be using this design for better more comfortable furniture for short stays for poor standing meetings etc. 

So the last thing I'll leave you with is with the power of computer vision we're not only able to answer your question of today which is how our space is being utilized what are people doing. What is the experience how can we improve it but you can invest in an appreciating asset instead of a depreciating hardware device that can actually answer your questions tomorrow. Thank you 

Alan Ni: Smart Building Connectivity: Is 5G the Panacea?

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Filmed in partnership with Realcomm | IBcon this talk navigates the current climate of CRE connectivity - noting the vast majority of misconception around 5G connectivity and what the future may bring.

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Alan Ni, Director, Smart Spaces & IoT, Aruba

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Afternoon I'm Alan Ni,  I lead innovation strategy on smart spaces in I.T. at Aruba. I'm here to talk about smart connected buildings and specifically around 5G. There's been a lot of conversation about 5G at this conference and being a leading vendor in Wi-Fi Networking and the de facto way of connecting mobile devices within buildings. We obviously have a point of view here and really wanted to talk with you today to address the question. 

So in my talk I'm really going to talk about these four specific topics right. What is 5G?  at this point the marketing, it's been in beyond overdrive and you know frankly we don't know what the newspaper is going to say, so I want to talk a little bit about that. But more importantly as real estate professionals what are the use cases that we should really care about as we design buildings not only for tomorrow but for today. Then I want to talk a little bit about the technology investments that we're seeing not just in 5G but just in mobility in general. 

And then finally a lot of the new things that allow the new technologies are coming to fruition now and actually should force a lot of us to rethink the status quo, and can be disruptive. So I want to just leave you with a few parting thoughts in that area. So let's talk about 5G what is 5G. As I said you look at the mainstream press whether it's business press technology press every day there's some other form of 5G and it is funny I was at dinner yesterday and one of my colleagues said 5G is like Whatever the carrier selling this years can be 5G. 

So you know we hear about fake 5G real 5G etc. So you know if I had to summarize it I see 5G as these three things right. It's really a set of performance targets and I'll talk a little bit more about. That fundamentally at the end of the day provide faster speeds faster really shorter latency is a much better experience for all the new applications that we need to serve users, things, systems buildings. But also I think no one everyone could agree here.  

There's a lot of marketing around this. I turn to Wikipedia you're not always the authoritative source but if you look at the definition Wikipedia it’s actually written very very carefully right. 5G is generally seen as a first generation cellular technology. The industry association the industry being the Cellular Association defines it as this thing called 5G new radio. But then you look at the bottom there's this cryptic thing particularly for folks that maybe are in the technology world here. 

They talked about these requirements around the international telecom union this I.A. 2020 standard. And when I think about it I think about it from that perspective. So what is that standard? when you know every G you know whether it's first generation sector operation third generation forget about the technologies, they go in they mean say hey we want to actually hit a couple of benchmarks.  I love this diagram here. It's actually a chart despite your chart of you know all the key pieces that they were trying to achieve. 

What you see in the middle of this thing called LTE is basically fourth generation technology the stuff that we're using every day. And as you can see as they move to fifth generation technology that pie has expanded and they want it to really improve a lot of these things some of these things that you know the non technologists wouldn't know. But let me decipher for folks that are in real estate in the process of trying to build buildings. These I would argue are the orange ones are those things that we should care about if we're starting to build new Smart Connected Buildings. 

We want to obviously have greater user experiences whether that is faster speeds, shorter latency. We want to design for higher capacity within the building and we'll talk a little bit about the end points right.  Because we realize it we're starting to get to an area where as we say wireless if you can, wired you must but I'd argue the most important thing is really to make sure that we can support more use cases. And one thing I do agree with, within 5G there's a radio layer and that's a lot of where a lot of the press is.  You know where the peak speeds etc. 

But there's actually a lot of investment in what they call the core of the network to say regardless of what radio you're coming on whether it's a cellular radio whether through Wi-Fi the experience that I have as I transition and move around is consistent. 

So let's talk a little bit about the use cases. I took this picture because I love this as I see it. This is the marketing Ray and this are market 5G. You know how fast can you download every episode of The Simpsons or 500 episodes probably  4K etc. and know 5G could deliver to you in seconds or minutes right but let's think about that. That's not really a practical use case as we're starting to build buildings. These I would argue are really the use case that we need to think about, user mobility, user mobility in buildings right. 

We spend probably about 70 to 80 percent of our time within buildings. Wi-Fi as I said is the de facto way of connecting most people whether in your home in a commercial office building et cetera. We hear a lot around Das, CPRS you know those are connected just one piece which is prior phone the thing that has a SIM card but as you know many of you in the room here you're probably carrying possibly a tablet, a laptop. I would probably venture to bet that most of you probably don’t have a SIM card associated with that device. 

So that's typically been something that the tenant actually provides. There's this other thing now if you think about it is building IoT and that's the heart of what Smart Connected Buildings. It’s  no longer just the people in the building and the smart experiences but the building itself that's being connected. The vast majority of these devices are very low power, they probably won't take a SIM card.  If you talk to any vendors in these spaces, every penny matters are trying to make a sensor as cheap as possible and they're not using SIM cards or any license technology. 

In many cases they're not even using Wi-Fi. They're using other lower power sort of technologies. Fundamentally, you see a big shift right in the past connectivity was a responsibility of the tenant.  Now as you start getting into building IoT you know is it the lights maybe that's provided by the owner the operator the developer. Is it the windows? maybe that's the owner operator or developer. You’re starting to see iPads, smart furniture, that's the tenant right. So how are you going to support all these things in this new paradigm. 

Are we going to buy point solutions for every one of these products and build separate infrastructure. Or are we going to think about it from a platform perspective? Then the last piece you may not think about it from a connectivity standpoint but there's a lot of interest at this conference around experience and there's this idea of a tenant base or building base experience and in a lot of that is being driven through location and if you think about that I need an infrastructure once again to provide location. The cellular network 4G, 5G does not give me indoor G.P.S. 

So how do I do all of this. We can talk a little about the next generation Wi-Fi access point but I won't even call it the next generation Wi-Fi access point. 

This is more than Wi-Fi, It's really the next generation access point. So wanted to talk a little bit about Wi-Fi and just a lot of this stuff that I've been hearing here and there's a lot of that information I'm hearing that is categorically untrue. When they talk about Wi-Fi you know a lot of people are not aware there's actually been six generations of Wi-Fi. But we've been just collectively calling it Wi-Fi.  Maybe you've been at best buy and you had to buy the next one you may have seen BAC and now these cryptic sort of names one of the good things this year is that the Wi-Fi Alliance came around and said OK we need to make this like understandable from a consumer perspective. 

So they started to actually brand the latest version is actually something called Wi-Fi 6. You're going to hear this more so a total of an X is Wi-Fi 6. They actually went so far to even go backwards to say AC which was introduced about five years ago as Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 4, et cetera. Now if I superimpose this on that chart I showed you before around 5G. This is how it lines up and you can see if we're trying to deliver that 5G experience the speed whenever within a building Wi-Fi delivers if not exceeds all those key metrics that we care about. 

Now there is one area here’s where it's more defficient than 5G and it's mobility. And I've heard a lot around people saying that Wi-Fi doesn't work it doesn't hand off etc.. And here if you looked at it would maybe crowd cooperate that but if you look at this when they talk about mobility they have that mobility moving 500 kilometers an hour. Now who moves in a building 500 kilometers an hour. Now who moves in a building at 500 kilometers an hour, I don't think any one of us does. This is really the envisioning you know I'm on that high speed train in Europe, you know, maybe browsing something and having continuity of service. 

Right. So if you think about this there's actually a lot of good senitry you know within a building. We feel that there's a lot of this real technology capability and Wi-Fi 6 delivers the promise and all the stuff that they're talking about for 5G now. Right. The latest Samsung Galaxy phones have Wi-Fi 6 baked in them now. The infrastructure and you'll see this access point that we have and a lot of our other folks in the industry we've been delivering Wi-Fi 6 access points since last year.

 And for the more technical folks here I'll be really quick, you know it's sharing many of those same technologies that 5G has. If you understand some of these things like, channel widths multiple antennas OF DNA technology, we're borrowing back and forth between cellular 5G and Wi-Fi. But really the more important thing is really the use cases right. And we're delivering them today. So this latest generation access point obviously has new technology like A X if we think about it from delivering voice one of the more interesting things is delivering voice in a building and as I said, I heard a lot of disparaging over Wi-Fi doesn't work well for a voice is too hard too hard to get people on. 

We have a very interesting technology called Pass point and we're demonstrating this downstairs, where individuals with a phone with your SIM card, the access point you're going to automatically join the access point. Right. So one of the big frictions in Wi-Fi as you walk into a venue I need to understand what the network name is, I need to go into my settings join it right and then at that point I don't even know if I have security it's prior open network. With this new technology called Pass Point which has actually been around for two years but now really coming to fruition and starting to get real carriers online. 

As I said if you have some of the major carriers answers when you walk by our booth you're just going to automatically associate to it, there's no friction. More importantly you're getting onto a secure network with secure credentials. In our view point is you know now voice which traditionally you've put a dedicated system in, right, at two dollars - two fifty cents a square foot  is now just a service that we could deliver into a building the next generation access point.  

A lot more interesting too is building IoT as I said lights, sensors you know furniture, people counter sensors, are not coming through Wi-Fi in a lot of cases, they're certainly not coming through cellular, 5G, cellular, they're coming through things like Bluetooth 5, Zigby this next generation access point is actually providing that sort of connectivity. Then you know indoor location we talked about it, this is now in the second generation same infrastructure effectively putting G.P.S. above your head in a building to allow people to navigate. 

And then finally the last piece you may have heard prior about a year or two ago, Wi-Fi hacks around Wi-Fi security standard WPA2,  WPA2 is actually over a decade old so it's like geriatric. the newest access points a new standard WPA3 that really closes a lot of those gaps are now in this specific sort of next generation access. 

So really the final thoughts now that I've shared with you a little bit in terms of the holistic development the use cases et cetera as real estate professional’s how does this disrupt how what should we be thinking about. So one is around voice services in this new building keeping people connected. Right. I think I still hear and why we're doing investments with this organization, with this group, is that up until now a one to one association is set to deliver high quality voice you have to do it through DAS or small cell etc.

Not to say that you can't deliver it right but making it exclusive, that's absolutely false. We're delivering that you're likely using Wi-Fi at home potentially for phone calls. Right. We're delivering much much greater quality of service within a building. We can deliver it to the majority of buildings where a lot of these DAS systems may cover 2 or 3 percent of all reasonable space. To this idea of IoT gateways if you actually deployed an IoT gateway to support your lighting system or something, you wanted to avoid you may not have heard of the term shadow IT, if you're doing it you are shadow I.T. 

These are actually devices we have in our building now they're just sitting on the carpet sitting plugged in then if someone just tripped over I have no idea how to manage them, where they are, you know are they a security risk or not. They're really the final piece here, and it's around you as a real estate developer even us as a vendor. Traditionally a lot of this coverage right whether it's networking coverage you kind of placed upon the tenant and the tenant in his or the organization suites you may have connectivity but now the expectation to have consistent experience throughout the entire building is a lot more social services you know club lounges whatever that a lot of developers are now putting into the next generation of buildings. 

So you as one of those developers really need to start thinking about the services that you need to deliver holistically and oftentimes in the past as an afterthought.  The only thing that had to do was deliver DAS or deliver if you could afford it and that would provide cellular services. But what about all those other IoT devices right. You would do smart parking or door locks and other things right. You need to start thinking about a much broader infrastructure play for that. Right. So we're encouraging really commercial real estate to start thinking about this not just for shared spaces but potentially for tenant spaces and for us as a vendor that's disruptive to us to. Our core client has always been and we focus really on the tenant occupier less so on the commercial real estate folks. 

So that's that's really going to wrap it up here. Thank you very much. We've actually done a lot of thought leadership this week. Feel free to reach out to our website. We've published a lot on this and we're just coming out. Thank you

Greg Fasullo: Empowering Multi-Site Owners & Operators Through Technology

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By elevating the level of transparency within a portfolio of mixed assets, owners and operators can use actionable insights to improve the performance of their portfolio. WATCH to learn more.

Filmed in partnership with Realcomm | IBcon.

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Greg Fasullo, CEO, ENTOUCH

WEBSITE | TWITTER | LINKEDIN

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Good afternoon everybody, my name is Greg Fusillo, I am the CEO of Entouch.  Entouch is a smart building automation platform currently focusing on the large number of multi side distributed facilities, portfolios are not large centralized buildings and what we view that we do is we enable the promise of smart energy technology in facilities that they are mostly left behind by smart building tech and the infrastructure. 

In particular our clients are either operators or tenants in these facilities. They could be the landlord as well. What we enable to do is connect the building take data and enables sustained reductions on energy maintenance and capital expenditure. I'll focus a little bit on energy to Star because energy is a great opportunity. You hear the speeches here. There are significant opportunities to address energy efficiency in buildings with relatively modest capital investments and process investments and very large returns.  So we all know there is about 6 million commercial buildings in the US, about 90 billion square footage. 

Those buildings use a lot of energy. I actually put this slide together 7 quadrillion BTU’s. I don't even know how many zeros you had to put on an excel spreadsheet to calculate what a quadrillion was I had to look it up. About 1.2 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity which again big number. How big is that?  the equivalency in coal fired power plants 360 coal fired power plants are required to power all the commercial buildings in the US today there are only 359 of those plants in existence. 

So essentially at buildings we're 100 percent efficient. We can eliminate all of the coal usage in the United States, a fairly audacious goal.  On top of that, if you look at EIA government estimates, a large portion of energy and buildings is actually just wasted. Wasted due to inefficiencies, its wasted due to lack of people and processes in those buildings. While we hear a lot about smart building technology, the building to connect the assets in a facility, the climate control the lighting to use database on occupancy to drive changes in behavior in the buildings and optimize energy efficiency, the rally is electricity consumption in buildings is actually going up. 

So why is that. If we've got all these great technologies if they have fantastic ROI’s why are we having issues where energy efficiency is not catching up with buildings. And the dirty secret is, most of these smart building technologies are designed for facilities teams they're designed for organizations that have people on the ground, that have people and process to drive change. They're not designed for the majority of buildings that do not have onsite facilities. 

Those organizations are distributed typically geographically they're centralized from a small corporate facilities team but they simply lack the people, the processes and the priority to focus on energy efficiency at the regional. 

Now we think of buildings we think of large buildings like the one we’re in.  Typical class A building here where there's a hotel or it's an office very large square footage, buildings with significant infrastructure, but the reality is that it's just a small portion of commercial buildings. Most commercial buildings are actually small less than 1% of buildings by building count are greater than 200,000 square feet that only represents 20,000 or 20%  of the available square footage and buildings. What are these smaller buildings?

Well their buildings and services that you know well.  They are retail stores they are restaurants they are health and fitness chains there are financial services the small facilities that are distributed geographically that have very unique pain points very unique operational priorities from a large building that has onsite facilities and can be operated in a different way with a smart building technology platform. Many of these organizations do not have the onsite facility, they've got a remote team. If it's a thousand location enterprise a health and fitness chain you do have people in corporate who are thinking about energy efficiency. They're thinking about investments in technology but locally they rely on essentially maintenance people. 

Occasionally you'll have regional tech or a facility person. But the people are thinking about energy and efficiency are not on at the buildings. In addition there is a trend to rely on outsourced services. You may have an onsite maintenance tech you probably rely on somebody that provides IFM to actually do the work in your facilities. So an organization in charge of keeping the lights on and keeping that facility running. But the line item that they touch on maintenance is a very different line item for a strategic item like energy. So they're fundamentally dis aligned with an incentive to reduce energy consumption. 

Then you rely on the manager so the P&L typically rolls up to the regional manager or the local manager the store manager, that individual to some degree, has visibility to energy inefficiency because in their P&L they have much bigger priorities running the organization dealing with staffing and the top line issues at that location. 

To put that in perspective a Navigant study multi site operators in 2016 essentially talking to folks and these people have building automation systems they've got a range of technologies roughly a quarter felt that they had a smart building technology strategy for their organization. So even though they've adopted a building automation system or a BMS or an energy management system the past their disconnected assets and they really didn't feel they had a connected smart building technology strategy. 

Sixty percent were aware of the pain point they're aware of energy they're aware of sustainability challenges they are looking to do better and operate more efficiently.  They're just now starting to evaluate what they want to purchase. And over half of them, when they're surveyed will tell you, they'd actually like to outsource this in the service. So what they're telling you is they also realize we have other priorities as we're outsourcing non core services energy management optimization of our energy footprint probably something we're not the best at and we're looking at providers that can do that for us as a service. 

That's where Entouch comes in. What do you have to do to solve this problem? Well at heart it's not a technology, it's not a hardware, it's not a systems level problem. It's a holistic software and services problem. The buildings may or may not have a connected system. You need to deploy some way of connecting and access and those are the equipment in those facilities. The buildings when they're connected you've got a commission. So if you connect the system is built you've got to know the various conference rooms you've got to know where occupants are. 

You have to know how that building is supposed to occupy. Think about doing that over a suite of outpatient health care clinics that are all different in size of different assets on the roof have different operating hours in different parts of the country. How do you deploy at very low cost very high quality has to be done with software. Now it connected that building and I've got this firehose of data and all is great information coming in. I can figure email alerts on every time there's a problem. The next thing I know is I my email box is filling up. I turn off the alerts. There's got to be a process that you can take that data coming in. You can analyze it and you can quickly enable support for the ongoing operation of the site.

It has to be integrated. So I've got a services provider I've got an IFM provider. They are the boots on the ground they've got the work order system seeing the mess that I use. Any new solution cannot be a point solution that requires additional work, to extract value it has to be integrated with the existing workflow. That's probably the most important point on this slide. Most legacy systems were independent point solutions. They were not integrated. They were not open and essentially people have deployed these systems and they're a little bit stuck. How do I extract value out of what I've already invested. 

They're very basic users has gotten very easy to use and then ultimately to effect change in these distributed facilities. You don't have a facility team that can optimize HVAC temperatures or do maintenance initiatives to try to improve the efficiency of the rooftop that the systems have to be autonomous to be able to adjust. They've got a watch. They've got a rack based on user behavior and ultimately affect the change to drive real change. 

Entouch does this through a software platform today, we've got about fifty thousand of our systems deployed in the US leading multi site operators.  We start with the ability to deploy and commission. We are a software platform so this third party tech shows up on site, he's got the Entouch app on his mobile device. You can install our platform. He can connect with existing assets and then we can remotely commission that design. Now we've got a high quality installation and we're collecting data. We're streaming it to the cloud. We start doing things with it. So we collect that data we analyze that data. We apply machine learning. We help you optimize the operation of the building autonomously. And now as a facility individual you move from having no intelligence of what's going on and having real time data and the reactive tasks that are associated data. 

We've integrated with your third party services provider and ultimately you can take this organization. You can start pulling the young in you can start feeling figuring out opportunities to optimize and continuously improve. So what we enable in organizations that traditionally were reactive there are maintenance and support they're keeping the lights on of these facilities but they don't fundamentally have the ability to optimize to transform that facility organization into one that can be strategic that could be thinking long term and frankly could be pulling levers to optimize and reduce energy in those facilities. 

So in addition to the operational benefits most of our customers are the facility organization and corporate they love the fact that now they've got an automated enterprise ultimately the business case is driven by energy because that is a large line item this year. Our average customer today saves about 13 percent on their energy bill. Not bad. It's about two hundred million kilowatt hours and over 4000 tons of carbon that we are saving today on an annual basis across our clients. And what they really like because that's equivalent to about 20 million dollars a year of economics. 

So that's Entouch. We enable and frankly we deliver on the promise of smart dollar technology and multi site organizations. Great. Thank you very much for your time. 

Joe Du Bey: The Experience Era - Sweeping Major Industries in the US

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Joe Du Bey, CEO of Eden helps navigate The Experience Era and how the nature of experiences are transforming industries across the US. This talk showcases how different demographics of people value experiences and how that value is fundamentally shifting the business of entire industries. With real estate taking center stage, Du Bey brings forth examples from industries such as fitness, music, retail, coffee, enterprise offices & more.

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Joe Du Bey, CEO, Eden

WEBSITE | TWITTER | LINKEDIN

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hey my name is Joe Du Bey and I'm going to talk today about the experience era and how it's affecting commercial real estate. So what is the experience era? The main thing to take away is that the world is changing. It went from before being where it was something that you know you served any one industry and maybe sold a specific product and service. Today we're all actually in the experience business to think about commercial real estate today versus what's going to happen. It's a largely offline world. And that's it's something that is focused on the space and less on the people and the experience of them.

And that's something that's about to dramatically change. So what is causing the experience era in one word millennials today. Millennials are the biggest cohort of any population. This is a really substantial shift. And this is something that is affecting the preferences of the workforce itself. And the reason why that's so is because millennials are different. They actually value experiences over products. And this is a critical thing to understand once this is grasped. It all starts to make sense.

But the majority of one else would rather spend money on an experience than a thing. They're wired differently even when it comes to work. The majority of millennials would take less money. If they're able to have a better experience at the office if they felt the experience reflected themselves. In contrast in case you don't think that's different. Only 9 percent of baby boomers would do the same. They are wired a bit differently and we need to adjust to their preferences. So what makes something fit the experience area we've discovered there are six hallmarks to this new time.

Specifically you can see involves enabling technology. It's at least made more efficient through technology. Any one of the major experiences that consumers in enterprises are going through in the experience area users are empowered they have voice they're able to customize their experience. This is critical. It shows up in amenities. It shows up in services inexperience error people care about community and they're building community around these experiences that were previously about a service or product. It's really the community that wrap around it. Things have meaning. It's not just about the coffee for instance it's about why it's ethical inexperience era quality matters a lot especially because these millennials are investing in the experience so it makes sense that their since they're shifting money to that they'll care more about the quality of it.

And the last thing is design inexperience error. You'll notice that if it starts to feel to you like more and more things look like the inside of an Apple store it's because more more things do look like the inside of an Apple store. Millennials care a lot about design and it's showing up everywhere. So let's talk about a few industries and how they've been transformed already in the US. There's the music scene if you remember from 20 years ago when you show up to a concert there were a few people playing music and that's what a concert was. Now when you go to a music event it's really much more about the experience. You walk in and it's a crowd of people who are seeking like minded folks.

It's immersive. There are lights there's artisanal food. Yes someone's playing music somewhere but that's not actually the primary thing. You might take away from being at a music event these days and is popping up across the US. Now let's talk about retail. When you used to go to a mattress store it was a roomful of bunch of mattresses. Now you go in and it's actually limited minority might be a mattress. We're walking into is a place that's beautifully designed full of narrative really speaks to millennials. When you used to walk to a gym it was a place full of heavy weights. Now it's if you walk just like Soul Cycle what Barry's Bootcamp.

It's a group of people who are building community. They might feel even you might send something almost religious around the dedication to this specific group. This room and it's beautifully designed. If you think about consumer coffee it's again something where you know it's the kind of thing where people use to go and literally just get coffee from a diner. Now it's a beautifully designed room. Starbucks even calls itself your third place. Recognizing that there is a different kind of feeling that comes in to a coffee shop today and now you can start to see it in commercial real estate just that just starting to.

And that's something because in the past it was really a place where you got work done. If you look at this market leaders Historical Office now with Google there's a climbing wall. They care about customization choice services and they know this is critical for them to actually hire the very best talent. And what is an overheated talent war. The thing to keep in mind is that 99 percent of commercial real estate is offline. This is just starting to happen. And over the next couple of years you'll feel this in a really big way. This beginning it's experience matters because in the first couple of years whenever there's a tectonic shift those who adapt early those are the ones who get to have outsized influence and kind of pain in the future whereas we fast forward or in five years.

The folks who haven't become the laggards they're the ones who threaten the actual performance of whatever their underlying asset is. How will this change commercial real estate. What tactically do you need to do to enter the experience era. Well specifically think about your building across a bunch different dimensions. A big primary one is how do you think about lease terms. It's something where in the future people want to have duration of lease that reflects their actual needs which isn't decreasingly two to 10 years and much more let's say nimble outside of that space controls today it's something where people have almost no control almost no voice that is changing rapidly through technology email to enter from from accessing the building itself to requesting services.

You can now actually have control over almost anything. Tenant feedback historically ignored with a landlord or building and you're really thinking of it places us as a space as opposed to thinking of the people inside of it as customers in the future and experience first building. It actually solicits feedback. It cares how its customers are doing outside of that the brand of the building itself. This is something that's critical in the past people might not even know really what kind of building they're in who the owner is who's managing it. The future is a much more white labeled experience where the building itself has a brand that people care about outside of that something that's really critical is what do you provide in terms of services.

In the past nothing going forward amenity rich people should be able to get any kind of service they want from food to any sort of wellness and like yoga or whatever they might want they need to be able to access through their building. And the final one community. Right now buildings are a missed opportunity everyone in it could feel something. It could build loyalty. Instead today it's mostly a box that has no connectivity the experience era has arrived and there's no turning back at this point.

Over the next couple of years everything will change. Commercial real estate and it will no longer be about the space it's providing an experience with space attached. Eden is ushering that in for all of the commercial key stakeholders from the occupiers and the companies to the landlords and the property managers and we're enabling you to provide an experience first building for your tenants

David Unger: Full Transparency through IoT

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Filmed in partnership with Realcomm | IBcon.

From the edge, through the fog and into the clouds - a deep dive into the core components of IoT in commercial real estate today. David Unger, CEO of Sentient Buildings helps navigate current pain points in IoT and cloud infrastructure as well as how technology is bringing forth new solutions.

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David Unger, CEO, Sentient Buildings

WEBSITE | TWITTER | LINKEDIN

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Good afternoon everybody, My name is David Unger. I'm the CEO of Sentient Buildings. Sentient Buildings is a wireless IoT device infrastructure company where we integrate wireless devices to traditional BMS systems, platforms and we bring all of that data up to the cloud securely and reliably. 

So my presentation today is going to be on creating full transparency in buildings through IoT technologies in the subtitle - from the edge through the fog and into the clouds. 

How do you get full transparency of your data in/and controlling that data from the cloud back down to the edge.  So you're just looking at how we put these pieces together, what are the core components of an IoT network or design? You have the cloud the cloud's where you know the data is going to ultimately be pushed too, you have your subject here in the middle, the building, the edge is your edge device network. 

So how does that network function?  How are you getting data from the very edges of your building and not just from your central plant systems or from air handlers or from other operational technologies in the building? How do you get into the tenant spaces and collect data on temperature, humidity or how do you control individual terminal units in apartments and other things?

How do you get bi-directional with monitoring and control to the edge? then the fire concept here is all about distributing that computing power, right. So how do you distribute your computing power between the cloud and the edge?

How do you maintain it, manage your security, how do you maintain data across all systems across both the cloud and the edge? So there is talk about how those pieces get put together but let's just talk about some of the traditional kinds of problems that we try to solve for building owners and operators. The first one is wires. Wires are very constraining in buildings, in wired systems and wiring up sensor data and wiring up devices and control points. It becomes expensive to maintain those systems and you don't typically deploy to the edge in a way that makes sense for the building. Wired is a mass infrastructure, it's expensive to install maintain upgrade and extend. 

What we find is while you could potentially control every tack in a building, every electric baseboard heater in a building while you could do these things they're not economical or feasible in old construction or in retrofit projects. Paybacks for the owners to deploy to the edge are too long for them to even consider.  

What we really look at is how to achieve this full visibility and do it reliably with wireless. Wireless technologies typically in a lot of ways, is unreliable. It might be okay to monitor a temperature sensor but if you're controlling somebody pee tac unit or if you're doing something that needs to be done reliably and consistently you know you can't be subject to wireless interference or other problems that might arise with wireless device networks. 

So the way we look at this is we've divided wireless networks into two typologies. We look at the Star Network as having a central hub right that can coordinate and monitor devices that communicate directly to it. That Star Network provides basically a local area or a personal area wireless network within its face. 

So within a specific space it could be an apartment could be an office space but you have this local area wireless network and you could actually deploy on this network because it's now very short range. When I say short range I mean like 30 to 40 feet. 

If you could deploy low to no power and end nodes at the edge that can be powered by ambient light can be powered by kinetic energy so you don't even have to put batteries in those devices and it could be as simple as peeling and sticking something on a wall like a thermostat and getting readings back to your hub. The mesh comes in where these hubs act as repeaters on a mesh. 

So you have your star network at each node and each hub becomes a repeater in there you form a building wide area network where all the mesh nodes communicate with one another and they report back to a central gateway or central system in the building and that way you achieve full reliable coverage across the entire site. 

Once you have the wireless network in place, what you can do with it? What kind of devices can you deploy and you could deploy these devices very cost effectively, temperature sensors actuators  hours occupancy sensors energy meters and you could deploy them without having to run power or communication wiring to them. So it becomes a very inexpensive deployment and not only that it becomes reliable in terms of wireless range and communication. 

Now you're bringing all of the wireless data back to a central point. That's great. But now what typically happens is the data still remain separate from existing building management systems. Wireless IoT data should be simply extending existing BMS platforms. They should not be their own platform or their own system. The latest IoT device networks are typically proprietary. You have to use some specific kind of sensor, they might have their own portal platform or their own local client to access the system. So you want to basically build a platform that allows for extension of this IoT device system so that it can be used by other systems in the building.

The other thing that happens across multiple systems is your data definitions are not in sync. They're not homogenized. They're not normalized. The way that you define your data is different across multiple systems so you need a simple way to bring all that data definitions together so that they're defined correctly across all your platforms so that you can identify systems and platforms consistently to perform analytics, to run alarming and create issues across the system. 

It's very important to get that straightened out. Where  these edge to fog gateways that bridge the divide fit in is, you create this fully secure VPN network to your cloud. So now you've secured your network of all this data. You have integration of your IoT receivers into that network and then you also create onsite data storage and edge computing power through a central fog gateway.  

Now both the wireless network and the IoT device network can communicate to the other building systems and the same goes for the building systems that were traditionally not connected to these device networks. 

Then pushing that data right up to the cloud so you have your IoT systems and you have traditional BMS platforms all coming together in a central system. 

There are many cloud platforms that are out there, you know performing analytics against the data or providing other services against the data,  it becomes a problem because you still don't get a comprehensive view of operations. Many users have to log into multiple systems in order to evaluate and analyze their data. So really what's needed is a central system to aggregate the data at scale with a suite of API eyes to these external systems in the cloud. 

There needs to be the single pane of glass where the data exists in the cloud and is moderated and controlled in the cloud. Then you have integration so all the other systems that you might need to retrieve data from provide a standard compliant data integration platform with a single pane glass view into that system and then you integrate the value chain of all of these other providers in the cloud. 

Eventually what you'll get is a method of setting the stage for full integration and collaboration across all cloud platforms so that you can easily share data across systems,  distribute data to your engineering and energy consulting firm so that they can evaluate that data and help the building owner make decisions on capital projects, for example the tenants and residents can gain access to their thermostats easily. 

The owner operator could grant access to the thermostat without them having to put their own nest device in or some other type of Wi-Fi device hvac service companies could gain access to enact this. This access control system where data is shared so that they can evaluate problems with your air handler or your boiler plant or your chiller plant.  You get full transparency all the way down to the device level and now you're providing full transparency to all the collaborators who actually need access. 

If they had access they can provide better services to the building, so what is this roadmap to transparency look like?  wireless start a mesh remote control nodes that connect seamlessly to existing building systems. So really designing your wireless IoT device network so that it’s standardized and compliant with existing systems. You want to support standard compliant edge devices while maintaining this from robust backhaul. You want to eliminate the need going forward for power communication wiring. 

We recently did a project in a 2 million square foot building where you can put a device now anywhere in that building, a sensor, thermostat, any control point, you can just place the device in the building and it will come up on the network and be visible in the cloud. So that really allows complete flexibility. The types of sensors that you use and you could use at much lower costs than was traditionally available and then really getting this open protocol cloud platform that's able to not only receive the data from the building systems but also fully integrate with all other cloud based platforms for a fully robust platform in the cloud that has multiple data sources and can really give you a single glass pane into the view of operations.

Deb Noller: Facilities Management As We Know It Is Dead

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Deb Noller, co-founder & CEO of Switch Automation discusses how owners and developers can take advantage of the new business models and revenue created by digital facilities management.

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Deb Noller, Co-Founder & CEO, Switch Automation

WEBSITE | TWITTER | LINKEDIN

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

This video was filmed at a Peerspace, the leading online marketplace for meeting and event spaces. Click here to Learn More.

Very shortly, facilities management as we know it today will be dead and a whole new digital model will spring up and take its place.

All across the property and the real estate industry, people are adopting new technologies and using data to create really interesting new digital business models. I'm Deb Noller, I’m CEO of Switch Automation, and we have a smart buildings platform, and we're seeing a rapid transformation towards digital F.M. (facilities management). We're really excited about this digital F.M. because what we think is better building management will lower the impact that buildings have on our planet.

Research and experts have all indicated that there's going to be more than 3.5 billion new data devices posting information out of commercial buildings over the next two to three years. All of this new high quality data is going to create new business models and new revenue streams.

Real estate, as an asset class, is our largest asset class on the planet. We spend more money there than anywhere else. And real estate and the adoption of technology is being very slow. It's not just last across all of the industries it's dead last, and all of this is beginning to change. But why now? What's causing the industry to change now?

So the incentives are actually lining up to create these new business models, new technologies, and the adoption of data is causing new businesses and existing businesses to really understand how they're going to innovate for the future.

If you look at Uber as a company they didn't build technology and bring that into the market and try and sell it to the taxi drivers. What they did was they created really interesting, easy to use tech that scaled and it created a whole new market. So their drivers. And the customers adopted that technology and they adopted it in droves and they built a whole new business model. In this very similar vein, this is what's going to happen in real estate.

So the technologies are more available. They are more cost effective. They’re more deployable and increasingly interoperable. And this is being recognized right across the industry by the property companies themselves and also the service companies that are servicing the industry. They are looking at those technologies and bringing those in and creating interesting new business models and also brand new revenue streams.

We're working with a number of companies that we see as world leaders in the adoption of technologies. So this is a Canadian real estate company largely recognized as being best in class. They are using data to drive a better occupant experience. They passionately want to be the landlord of choice, and what they're doing is they're using data to proactively manage occupant comfort, and to understand where they have hot and cold spaces, and to address those before their customers are even aware of it.

We're also working with a large coworking space that is growing very rapidly, and they are really interested in using data and technologies to understand how space is utilized. So what they're really interested in is the design and the use of space around employee productivity and employee collaboration, that ultimately leads to workplace innovation.

So here's our three tips for how to survive this digital transformation of our industry.

First of all, you need to get your strategies right. So starting with a data strategy, you need to think about how you're going to harness your data, where you're going to host your data, who's going to own your data, how are you going to share that data with all the various stakeholders across your organization, but also outside your organization. You're going to have to think about data privacy, data governance, and data protection.

The second thing is, you need to get some really basic infrastructure right. So this is about getting your cyber security policies right, getting your architecture right, getting your data policies right, not just trialing every bright shiny I.T. device that's in the market.

And thirdly, make sure you're looking at your existing data and your existing systems, because you already have quite a lot in your organization that you can take advantage of. And if you get these things integrated first, and start to take advantage of those, you'll get really quick early are ROI (return on investment). So you'll get those early wins, you'll get the buy in of your management and the organization, and you'll get those wins that support your program going forward.

So commercial buildings are generating more data than ever before. This is going to be a brand new lucrative opportunity for many people in the industry. But what we would say to you is don't wait. Start now.

Shannon Smith: Does A Building Have A Mission?

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Buildings need to have a mission. Shannon Smith, CEO of PointGuard says the mission of a building is not to save energy but rather to serve occupancy comfort. Smith shares how to weaponize your building management system by harnessing the wealth of data it holds and turn it into meaningful insights.

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Shannon Smith, CEO, PointGuard

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hello everybody, I'm Shannon Smith, I'm glad to be here. I'm the CEO of Abundant Power now known as PointGuard. At PointGuard we're committed to innovative and impactful technologies for building teams to help them realize higher building performance. But I'm not here to talk about me and hopefully here to talk about something that's important to you and not often discussed. And that's a question of whether or not buildings have a mission? How many of you have mission statements? I know we do at PointGuard. Missions are important. It helps you determine where you're going, what you're all about, and what's your purpose? I believe buildings do have a mission and if building is complete their mission, they will have an amazing impact on your businesses and on the people who come to work and to live in them every day.

So this conversation we're going to have today is going to be about what is a buildings mission? What are some of the things that are keeping buildings from completing their mission, and how certain older technologies maybe are failing on the job and what new technologies, new software like PointGuard can do to help buildings complete their mission. So let's get going.

Now one of the things has always found curious in the conversation about analytics and building and building software is that so much focus is on energy analytics. But we don't build buildings to save energy do we? We actually build buildings to provide an amazing workplace experience and to last as long as they can at the lowest possible operating and capital costs. Energy costs just come along for the ride. So if your building completes it’s mission and does those things, great workplace experience at lowest capital and operating costs. What happens? Profit for the owners and great enjoyment for the occupants and the tenants. So I want to talk a little bit now about what can be done or what stands in the way of buildings completing their mission. They're really six things that come to mind to me and I want to talk about it and maybe some you know. But here listing them out can tell you a little bit about why it's so hard for building to complete their mission. And then what and why software sometimes doesn't really do the job.

What is time? It’s a tyranny of the urgent today. We have so little time we had one building manager say I have one click in one minute. The next is talent. There's a major talent gap today saying a recent study by RIBEX says that there are more people over the age of 70 in facility management than under the age of 30. The third thing and this is really builds off of time and talent, is stability. We have less time and less people. You're moving teams around more and the knowledge is embedded in the building and how it performs is being lost. There's a lot of lack of stability today. Comfort is an important aspect of a building's mission. We found at PointGuard buildings are not within three degrees a set point, one out of every five days during occupied hours. It's the one thing you can’t control in your operating of a building and it's the one thing you don't. Knowledge everyone knows in the facilities space that knowledge is reactionary, it’s static is based on the things that the vendors are telling you to do and is still visual today so little data is being used deeply in buildings to help them complete their mission.

And the last the most important thing that keeps buildings from completing their mission is action. Nothing good happens in a building unless you know exactly where to go to turn a wrench and so much of energy analytic software and software is being used a day in facility management doesn't have any idea where to tell people to go to improve their buildings. So here's your analytics, is a long way away from helping millions complete their mission. Recent Energy Star score recalibration might even tell you that even more, the average office building lost 12 points of Energy Star score in August. Energy analytics is just a small part of the data opportunity deeper building analytics is the real picture that you have today. So what can be done? How do you begin to take technology and help a building complete its mission?

We believe at PointGuard to the answers right in front of you. What you already have invested in the building, you're building management system. There's a wealth of data there that is underutilized. It may be the most important asset you have in this journey. How does that work? You start with your energy bill data, that's a very small part of it. Then you take all your BMS data. The next most important thing is having some form of software solution that can help you process said data. But it has to do the most important thing of all and lead to meaningful action. If it does that the building can complete their mission. If you take a look at all the pieces of equipment that are available and you're BMS you can begin to look at it in terms of comfort and asset health and with the right kind of software tools you can take all those pieces of equipment and move them into the highest asset life in the highest possible comfort delivery.

So at PointGuard we think that the next platform has to meet a number of goals and that’s how we designed our facility management platform. It has to maximize time, has to be intuitive, straightforward, easy to use, it has to solve the talent gap. It has got to allow one person do a lot more work than before and also attract younger talent into the facility's space. And if you're outsourcing your facility services, they're facing the same challenge. Using a PointGuard software, one person can manage over 20 million square feet. That's over 20 times the current rubic used by facility management today. It needs to remain with your building. It has to amplify local knowledge all the people that have come through all the people that know that building, that information has to be captured and algorithms and machine learning, and it has to stay with that building for the next owner and the next management team. We have to eliminate comfort mistakes. You have to be able to deliver 100 percent comfort 100 percent of occupied hours. If you do that you eliminate over half of your comfort complaints. It's an amazing outcome and it's something that building management is not doing today at all.

Instead of focusing on energy we've got to move to something bigger and more important, something in the mainstream of what real estate is all about. It's about your assets. It's about operating expenses. You want to extend your asset life. You want to replace assets when you want to replace them, not when the vendors tell you to replace them. Operating data is single most important piece of information missing from building management. They were the only asset class it doesn't replace equipment based on operating information, replacing static nameplate maintenance information that's not accurate and billions of dollars are being wasted today. Lastly it's got to be precise. It’s got to stop wasting time, tell people where to go to turn a wrench to improve your buildings and help them fulfill their mission. And those are the six points that we designed our platform around to deliver that kind of value to the people that use it. So it's time to go beyond energy Analytics. In my opinion it's time to for buildings to help complete their mission to provide maximum occupant comfort. To have the lowest possible capital and operating costs and as a result, help you have maximum amount of profit and have the occupants have the most enjoyable workplace experience possible. We can do that and PointGuard.