IoT & Office Building Savings: How Smart Tech Improves Cost-Efficiency
Tuesday, 31st May 2022
The way we manage office spaces is changing. Smart buildings—connected spaces using IoT sensors to gather data on a range of different facilities—are a game-changer. We can now effortlessly monitor and control occupancy, air quality, light quality, temperature, and more.
When fed into a central hub or dashboard, this data can be used by facilities managers and workplace managers to create a healthier working environment, reduce a building’s carbon footprint, and make large offices more cost-efficient and productive to run.
In this article we’re going to take a look at some of the main ways smart technology is being used to reduce an office’s operational overheads.
Build a smarter environment to reduce energy costs
Energy consumption is a massive cost you face if you’re running a large office building. But you’ll be pleased to hear that controlling your environment using smart sensors will make your energy use considerably more efficient—reducing your carbon footprint, and cutting costs too.
In an office, you need to control heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) usage, lighting needs, and water usage. And typically, buildings don’t do this very efficiently. They might rely on ad-hoc, manual ways to improve ventilation, for example. This includes opening windows—allowing heat to escape in the process. And tracking energy use is done manually.
By monitoring these things using a smart building system (like Infogrid’s) you can gain insight into your energy consumption and build strategies to help reduce it. Installing a system of smart heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) sensors across your office allows you to feed real-time data to a central dashboard, allowing facilities managers to view and optimise conditions from one place.
Let’s look at the impact of this. By automating just three things—your HVAC systems, building’s lighting, and window shading—you can make energy savings of 30% to 50%. And by automating only HVAC and lighting, you can save 23% of the energy you use.
In energy terms, our Healthy Buildings System has helped one retail company save 800 tonnes of CO2 every year. And when it comes to cutting overheads and becoming cost-efficient, we’ve also helped a supermarket save $1.6 million on energy costs every year, too.
Improve air quality to support employee health
IoT solutions can significantly reduce the cost of running a large office building, and cut its carbon footprint in the process. But interestingly, smart building tech is also keeping employees healthier and more productive. In turn, this means fewer sickness absences and reduces staff turnover. This is particularly impactful in the area of indoor air quality (IAQ).
According to our own research, 64% of employees believe a lack of fresh air coming into their workplace could impact their mental wellbeing. This is linked to concerns around viral risk, especially as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. And many employees are also more aware now of how colds and flu travel through the air when people are in close proximity.
In fact, poor indoor air quality costs businesses billions of dollars each year in sick leave and poor productivity, according to the EPA. So it follows that improving air quality can reduce the costs of staff absences and improve the performance of your business overall.
But it’s not always easy to measure and improve indoor air quality. Doing so requires tracking many different metrics—which can be confusing and time-consuming to collect, interpret, and act on. This is where automated technology will help—and Infogrid can get you set up so you can optimise your IAQ effortlessly, and create healthy environments in all your buildings.
Optimise cleaning schedules to boost staff efficiency
A thoroughly clean working environment means healthier and happier employees. Staff are now more aware of how easily illnesses, pathogens, and even immune system triggers—such as dust particles, mould and mildew spores—can spread in public areas that aren’t cleaned regularly.
In fact, 73% of employees interviewed by Infogrid said regular cleaning was the biggest factor in determining how safe they feel in the office following the Coronavirus pandemic.
But how do you raise standards of workplace hygiene without raising your costs? A round-the-clock cleaning schedule demands a lot of manpower, and ramps up use of energy and cleaning products. A smart system for large-scale cleaning (which includes automated sensors and monitoring) can improve cleaning efficiency—which translates into money saved.
How? It’s about improving productivity and focusing cleaning efforts where they’re needed.
For example, a company housed in a 6 floored building at 70% occupancy could typically save $44,000 per year on cleaning costs by improving the productivity of their cleaning team by 45%.
Infogrid’s smart cleaning system helped a London shopping mall save approximately £15,000 per year for every ten bathrooms they have.
The solution collected feedback from 3 different kinds of sensors: door and urinal sensors to report traffic usage, wipe-clean feedback panels to track user satisfaction and missing supplies, and clickable touch-buttons to audit cleaning schedules by registering when cleaning took place.
Together, this data allowed the shopping centre to clean their building in a targeted manner, which dramatically improved staff efficiency and cut costs.
Deploy predictive maintenance to reduce manual inspection costs
IoT sensors make maintenance more efficient by using machine learning algorithms to predict when a piece of machinery will need attention, rather than waiting for it to break down. This also removes the need for a pre-set maintenance schedule—which might cause something to be checked and/or replaced before it actually needs to be.
This helps to maintain optimum productivity and avoids costly downtime while essential equipment is getting repaired.
One example is pipe monitoring. But why might this be important in an office setting?
Water pipes need to be actively monitored to reduce the chance of leaks and contamination, keep water services at the right temperature to prevent bacterial growth, and to ensure water isn’t left to stagnate. Doing this manually is extremely time-consuming—and it creates waste.
But by using an automated pipe monitoring system with smart sensors, you can prevent costly damage and health risks by detecting sources of flowing, pooling, and dripping. These solutions constantly monitor your site for leaks, meaning you can proactively prevent hazards from slips and spills and get ahead of your future maintenance schedule.
Working with the facilities management firm JLL Integral, Infogrid’s IoT pipe leak monitoring system saved one financial services firm 81% of time spent on manual compliance. We also saved one London theatre hundreds of labour hours on leak detection inspections per year.
How Infogrid can help you
Infogrid’s Smart Building System connects all the areas you need to facilitate office building savings. Our single platform can be used to control an office’s environment to reduce energy costs and optimise cleaning and maintenance to cut unnecessary manual labour.
