Buyer beware – the marketplace for building automation, smart building, and building technology is evolving quickly and is full of new technologies, complicated integration and snazzy buzzwords.

It is so important to understand the benefits to be achieved from making a building ‘smart’, and to define what this actually means to you, the building occupier, the property manager and maintenance team.

In short, data acquisition is a useless exercise unless you know how to read, manipulate and formulate efficiency or improvement actions from the data presented; whilst also understanding the key benefits of smart building upgrades that you’re trying to harness.

When optimally deployed, smart buildings technologies have the potential to deliver productivity and wellbeing improvements at the lowest cost and with the lowest possible environmental impact over the building lifecycle. This requires adding intelligence through a building’s useful life. There are potentially numerous systems and subsystems which can be integrated, and these have typically operated independently in the past, so in a smart environment these systems can share information to optimise total building performance. 

However, this must also be backed up by human intelligence to really understand the interactions and available opportunities for efficiency.  

Collaboration with building occupants, control specialists, building M&E maintainers combined with an understanding of human behavioural operation patterns, is paramount and all parties should be clear of their obligation to maintain or improve operational standards.

This is the psychology that we at ETS are applying with forward-thinking national and international brands to install hardware and software that satisfy the clients need for visibility, control and reporting of a building and wider portfolio’s operation.

We are employing an empowering approach to building technology which enables individual building systems to be connected and integrated. Most buildings already have some level of intelligence built in, whether HVAC, lighting, or fire safety. We are technology agnostic, and work with various manufacturers’ equipment dependent upon the client’s requirements, budget and what they want to achieve from the data outputs. Consequently, at ETS we are pushing to achieve more from building data and ultimately make better decisions.

A well-designed smart solution at any stage of a building’s life can make a property more attractive to buyers, a better letting option for tenants and occupiers, through greatly reduced cost and carbon emission, being more efficient to operate and maintain, and alignment with broader CSR agendas.