Crown Group – Portfolio IoT system
CSIRO & AIRAH – 1m ARENA funded energy control and integration program in NSW schools
CSIRO & AIRAH – 1m ARENA funded energy control and integration program in NSW schools
The internet-of-things (IoT) design and infrastructure proof-of-concept delivered Crown Group a superior, best-of-breed technology strategy for collecting building data, analysis, reporting and building management across their portfolio.
By integrating data from building management control systems, water, gas and other telemetry systems onsite into the Microsoft Azure cloud in real-time; enabled analytics and reports to be created centrally and unlocked building data available to the entire organisation.
Crown’s internet of things (IoT) solution improved operational management and control for their portfolio driving automation of processes which drove efficiency savings and productivity improvements across their group.
Website: www.crowngroup.com.au
Budget: $200K
Location: Australia
Industry: Private property investment group
$80k vendor technology savings per annum
Freed up 4-6 FTE personnel per annum
10+ reports automated
10+ Dashboards and BI tools created
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:
1 National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007
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:
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:
At the centre of the IoT architecture was the ‘data lake’ – essentially, a giant storage of original unaltered source files and data. All data flowed to the data lake – and from here, daily ‘snapshots’ of the data were taken into the ‘data warehouse’ via extract, load and transformation procedures. The ELT extracts data from source files, transforms it so comparisons could be made between disparate data sets, and places it into the data warehouse.
This ‘structured’ data can be used by anyone in the organization to run a report using the chosen drag-and-drop analysis tool, Microsoft Power BI. Once the data is structured, anyone in the organisation could develop models and derive insights from data in minutes, without time-consuming aggregation tasks or elaborate models. The following reports were delivered upon handover:
An asset register was developed as a central, user-editable database to accurately reflect on-site operational plant and equipment as a single source of truth (SSOT). The information entered into the asset register provided contextual, reference data for the IoT system to fulfil quality reporting requirements for an asset, measurement unit, building, site or across the portfolio.
The solution eliminated unnecessary vendor solutions, reduced data duplication and waste, optimised team resources and unlocked advanced capabilities and innovation programs across the entire portfolio of buildings.
The solution eliminated unnecessary vendor solutions, reduced data duplication and waste, optimised resources and activated advanced capabilities and innovation programs across the entire portfolio of buildings. Key project benefits:
Does your organisation have:
A class-leading strategy that reduces costs and delivers benefits from smart building technologies?
A solid plan to meet net-zero commitments and the transformation of the energy sector?
If the answer is no, then we can help…
Contact a BE consultant to have a chat about smart building technologies and how they can benefit your organisation or check out our new modelling tool and/or case studies for practical examples of our work.