Frequently Asked Questions

Our main focus is on Scope 1 emissions, the emissions as a result of owned building assets (which account for 40% of global energy consumption and 33% of greenhouse gas emissions). 

For those unfamiliar with what these Scopes represent, Scope 1 is classed as emissions from owned sources, so your buildings and vehicles. Scope 2 relates to indirect emissions born out of the suppliers of utilities, so your electricity, heating etc.. Scope 3 includes all of the other indirect emissions that are a result of your activities, so suppliers downstream, throughout your supply chain, that could be paper merchants, food producers, waste processers…the list is endless and depends on your activities, but it relates to you as a business choosing the right partners who limit their contribution to emissions. 

We are hardware agnostic, as we believe in re-using the control technologies that are in situ and complementing them when required.  We do use our own software to help centralise and control. This is where our IP sits.  But it is based on open standards, promotes an independent data layer and is API enabled.  As system integrators, we don’t push a single solution.  We  source a combination of the right solutions in the market from our knowledge and experience enabling us to meet a wide array of client challenges. 

While a SMART infrastructure is certainly the best approach to getting new levels of control and insight about your assets, it’s not always the logical and/or financially sensible option. If the payback period is too long based on simple and established financial modelling, we tend to use a combination of behavioural change with data and smart technology. Our approach is to assess your requirements, your assets, your ambitions, your financials, and recommend an energy saving program, with quick wins along the way, that fits within your strategy. 

So much energy is consumed where it’s not needed, whether this is overnight or during the day. Our energy saving programs (whether SMART or behavioural) provide centralised control and real time energy usage data, visualised in dashboards built with stakeholder engagement in mind, allowing them to see effects of activities and make the required changes ways of working. 

Pre-energy crisis, we didn’t have as much of a requirement to understand where energy is consumed and why, it’s was a relatively insignifant cost to the bottom line. Because of this, a huge proportion of organisations just don’t have a grip of consumption and thus don’t know where to focus their efforts to now reduce the impact of increasing rates. We can provide this insight, even if that’s all we do, to then allow you to make required changes. We offer ownership, which acts as a catalyst for change. 

The investment is funded by the savings in energy bills.  If we cant build a commercial business case in line with acceptable payback periods, we won’t do it. 

From the outset, we plan an energy saving program with a payback period that is short, and it’s getting shorter as rates are increasing significantly and show no sign of normalising. 

Your energy bills in 2022 compared with 2019 will be or soon will be 3-4 times the cost.  If you could reduce this by 15-35%,  would they warrant action?  

Data is ever important in business today, we all know it, in this particular scenario there are three core uses for data:

(1) To provide granular insight into your buildings operations, where energy is used, where it can be optimised, any red flags to address. Ultimately it allows a view into the progress of energy saving programmes. 

(2) We repurpose the SMART infrastructure to surface new insights that previously were difficult to garner. For example, using inexpensive camera technology, we can digitize movements in your stores/warehouses/offices, this gives new level of insight about your customers and/or staff, answering questions that will help to personalise experiences and drive revenues, for example: which products are my customers most engaged with? How effective is our signage? How long do customers spend in store? Does that increase conversion? 

(3) Leveraging the new technology and available data, automate the management of your property portfolio, with the new ability to plan, execute and monitor activities. This Computer Aided Facilities Management (or CAFM) capability is delivered through a platform with UI optimised for all relevant stakeholders.

Insights regarding your energy usage are derived from a multitude of differing solutions, from individual IOT devices measuring air quality to integration with plant or other devices. These are all channelled through a central building management system (BMS) with a Smart server that translates it to actionable language. It takes varying data sources and turns them into one unified data feed, that can be understood and actioned on. 

Insights regarding customer behaviour and how a building is used, are gathered from GDPR compliant fisheye cameras, which provides full coverage in heatmapping, footfall and dwell across your sites. 

We’ve covered much of this off in previous questions, but insights and the value it can bring is what we’re most excited about, so let’s summarize:

Insights are two-sided, from one infrastructure:

(1) Real time energy usage, provide insight into where, how and when energy is being consumed, giving you ownership, control and the ability to drive change. This insight is both granular at appliance and/or site level, by hour of the day, or high-level across your portfolio. 

(2) Customer behaviour and how your buildings are used.  Industry is great at understanding customers before and after they enter stores, but knowing what they do on-premise is more challenging. With the SMART infrastructure funded by energy savings, you can better understand footfall, movement, dwell and engagement. With this data you can now answer questions to inform decision making across various departments, such as sales, marketing and/or property. Some of those questions could be: which products are my customers most engaged with? What impact did by recent marketing campaign have on product engagement? How effective is our signage? Where is best to launch a new product? How long do customers spend in store? Does that increase conversion?

With a conversation.  We want to get to know each other to understand your business.  We have a strong culture of purpose and only want to do great work.  

After that, we enter into an initial discovery phase (check out the top bar for 'Step One') where we understand your environment, infrastructure and goals, then analyse and model data to inform technology selection and build out business cases. 

Absolutely, the energy crisis has made businesses realise how little control and insight they really have on their consumption and therefore spend. 

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

- Talk with your facilities managers, find out how what support they need. Run a survey to determine the current state.  This will allow a benchmark to assess change post investment. 

- Centralise your energy consumption data through a unified data collector. 

- Upgrade all your meters to smart meters that give you half hours reads of your consumption.   

We’ve noticed that when companies are selling smart building solutions, there is often a focus on how the various technologies work and how they can be integrated into business processes. This focus needs to shift to the actual outcomes of adopting smart technology, especially the actual value that it will provide.

There are four key questions that companies should ask themselves before they even think about making their buildings smart:

- Will it save us money and what is the ROI/payback? 

- Will it support us in generating new revenue or keep existing revenues and how? 

- Will it protect or enhance our brand in the market? 

- Does it help with complying with current or future regulations and how? 

Smart building technology is getting increasingly advanced, sophisticated and complicated, but making the case for smart buildings is relatively simple. Start with a narrow use case, engage all stakeholders, and ensure that the outcome aligns with the company’s wider strategy and purpose. 

If you focus on the actual outcomes of smart building solutions, adopting the technology is the easy part, it all boils down to understanding the overall impact of smart on every aspect of a business.

Absolutely, our vision to create purpose, we want our clients to not only benefit from the work we do but the knowledge we have and the way we work. Individuals as much as our clients benefit from our engagements, they grow themselves, their careers and find a new purpose. How we offering this knowledge transfer is not only refined to our engagements, but we partner with Smart Building Bootcamp, a modular training course with certification that looks to elevate your teams and increase their value on your journey. 

This creates a positive culture, one of buy-in, collaboration and satisfaction. We’re driven to make change, to create a new league of ESG leaders, it’s our belief this is long overdue, now is the time to come together for the good of the planet, people and profit.