Recently, we hosted a webinar with industry experts from Yorkland Controls, DB Engineering and Multiplex. Below is part two of two excerpts from our expert Q&A where we will be discussing various themes.
Read, listen or watch the Q&A discussion below:
Q: Why is having insights into your entire building so valuable?
A: Gerry Cellucci, Principal and Vice President of Systems Solutions - Yorkland Controls:
The digital replica of the building assets, that’s the digital twin and on a building by building basis - it’s unique. You may have two identical buildings side by side with the same heat load calculations, have the same HVAC equipment, sized properly, the same lighting, etc. but the occupancy patterns are different and the actual equipment manufacturer, each building has a chiller, sized appropriately but they may be from different manufacturers so they’re different.
The space utilization is different, the profile of the occupants are different so the information or the data, I’m going to call it insights, these tangible insights are unique to that building. These insights, examples of that could be including not only what a building is doing but more importantly what's not happening in the building and with other information that’s starting to grow in this insight bucket if you will - there’s potential for new digital services and revenue streams for the owner or for the landlord.
We can get feedback from these insights, feed them into an operational information engine if you will that could be shared among the operators and literally these operators are growing older and new ones are coming in, they happen to be younger and these new building operators should be spending less time on trying to orient themselves on how a building used to perform but be able to go to their digital twin access portal and give them the better understanding of what’s going on in the building and what happens and what to do when certain issues pop up.
The long term, and I think Terry mentioned the BIM model, we can grab this information and the owner, the operators, the landlord could look at the equipment operation and they could make a determination on the asset value of these and the performance of these buildings and they could be fed back to the designers. These, again I’m making a point on building-specific insights - they start off with a figuratively a small database of assets - how the building is performing but as the building performs over time the asset value actually increases with the information and the insights that are gained so they could be monetized either on the revenue side or the expense side.
Q: Why is having the right digital strategy so important?
A: Terry Olynyk, President and Managing Director, MULTIPLEX CANADA:
I would say that understanding IoT’s abilities, I think Art mentioned Microsoft - they’re out there right now really trying to develop an IoT-specific support network and when ordering any sort of equipment for your project, I’d ask the question if it’s IoT-ready and then working with someone like ThoughtWire - if I ordered half of my mechanical equipment IoT-ready - how much of a third party system do I really need?
I think where a lot of people struggle is they’re buying all these control systems, fire alarm systems, access control systems, systems upon systems upon systems and then they’re left with ‘well how do I connect all of this and what makes the most sense and where am I really spending money and getting data? So, it’s really trying to un-layer a lot of these systems and move forward with not only a digital strategy but an IoT-ready platform that can reduce some of the layers we’re talking about.
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