Challenges – the many

Crown Group’s investment focus shifted from build-to-sell to build-to-manage with Eastlakes Live, a mixed-use shopping centre and luxury apartment development. The shift in ownership meant that the company was required to report under the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting (NGER) Act¹ where the Directors of a company were personally liable for any issues of non-compliance. To comply with NGERS, Crown Group was required to calculate energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions with some important exceptions, such as excluding tenant consumption. Thus, achieving accurate energy and emissions calculations required accurate metering data to be processed from energy-consuming assets as well as generation, solar and embedded network building devices. Qualifying for NGERS reporting means that requirements extended to all assets across their portfolio including serviced apartments, a conference centre and the new shopping centre.

Crown Group engaged Buildings Evolved to consult on NGERS requirement calculations via a series of stakeholder engagement sessions. From these sessions, we identified that there was a heavy reliance on manual curation and analysis of pdf and CSV files for compliance reporting resulting in increased effort, costs and risks which were amplified by:

• Poor data availability – data existing in multiple locations, and between departments causing tedious and time-consuming manual searches, aggregation and analysis tasks that limit efficiency.
• Poor data quality – data is old or multiple versions exist with variations
• Organisational inertia – report requests between departments took time to fulfil which disrupted workflow and resolution of issues

Compliance & Reporting – applied

The solution involved determining strategic vision – understanding the business case, identifying key criteria for success, and defining a performance culture through engagement, research, and planning. From this process, a bespoke compliance and reporting solution was identified as optimal. Crown Group desired the ability to integrate a compliance and reporting solution with energy management and business intelligence capability in departments outside of sustainability.

The next stage involved defining user stories through consultation with key stakeholders, ensuring that project outputs and outcomes aligned with user needs and were meaningful, effective, and measurable. From this process, it was evident that Crown Group sought a class-leading strategy that would enable them to move from reactive to proactive governance by:

• Providing quality data, real-time alerts and alarms to issues onsite.
• Leveraging best-of-breed machine automation and fault detection diagnostics and machine learning algorithms for equipment and energy management.
• Determining key performance indicators, reporting and analysis tools for improved management and control.

A vendor research piece was commissioned to seek off-the-shelf solutions. From this analysis, it was held that software-as-a-service offered limited capability to meet operational and business intelligence requirements outside of compliance and reporting. Namely, the ability to manage energy and resources in a proactive way by responding to events in real-time and enacting proactive governance and control for the operational management of plant and equipment onsite. Additional technical requirements of the system were added after this step which was:

• The solution be hosted on Australian cloud servers using Microsoft Azure architecture, and
• Integrate with existing solutions used by Crown, such as Microsoft Active Directory.