The internet-of-things (IoT) design and infrastructure proof-of-concept delivered Crown Group a superior, best-of-breed technology strategy for collecting smart 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, efficiency savings and productivity improvements across their group.

Website: www.crowngroup.com.au Budget: $200K Location: Australia Industry: Private property developer

Key outcomes

• $80k vendor technology savings per annum
• Freed up 4-6 FTE personnel per annum
• 10+ reports automated
• 10+ Dashboards and BI tools created
• Real-time alerts and reports using Azure stream processing

Data Lake

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 smart building 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 smart building 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.

Dynamic BI Reports

The following reports were delivered upon handover:

• Real-time reporting – e.g. programmatic peak demand management and fault detection, alerts and alarms.
• Operational reports from internal sources,
• Employee Log,
• Electricity Consumption,
• Electricity Peak Demand,
• Water Consumption Report,
• Gas Consumption Report.
• Invoice reporting from external sources, Electricity, Gas, Refrigerants, Water, and Waste.
• Sustainability and mandatory reporting,
• NGER Report,
• Scope-1 & 2 Emissions Data Requirements,
• NABERS Report (NABERS),
• GRESB, and
• GRESB Data Requirements.

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.