[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Consulting Specifying Engineer podcast. I'm your host Amara Rosgas and today we're talking about smart buildings with Rob Knight. This podcast is officially two years old now and I'm excited to be here. Thanks for joining me today Rob.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And Rob has some really deep knowledge on this topic, so let me give you a little insight into his background.
Robert Knight is a senior smart buildings consultant with arup. He is based in Chicago and he brings client side and industry knowledge of smart building systems to developing digital plans and strategies.
Rob has more than two decades of experience with intelligent building systems, building controls software and platform development, and building systems integration. He's worked on commercial mission critical health care and mixed use developments in the US and globally.
Rob, this opens us up to a huge conversation here.
Let me start at the beginning.
When you're talking to a building owner about smart building systems, where do you usually start that conversation?
[00:01:22] Speaker B: I would usually begin any conversation about the application of technology with understanding of what the client is trying to accomplish.
I would never begin by selling features, by selling gadgets or particular sensors. Instead, I'm interested in understanding how that building and how the building owner uses their real estate to either make money or if they consider it a cost center, how I can help them minimize the perceived cost of this asset and we can then find clever ways to apply technology to meet those goals.
I think the if you flip that on its head and you started by talking about particular bits of software or particular bits of instrumentation or entire subsystems that an owner might need without it being grounded in a valuable business outcome that's going to either save them money or make them money, it tends to fizzle, it fails, the funding doesn't come through, or even worse, the funding does come through and the outcome is disappointing to that client. So yeah, I certainly would always begin by understanding what do they use their real estate for and then how can we apply technology to further the, the sort of the betterment of meeting those goals?
[00:02:51] Speaker A: So money here plays a huge role. Then how do you explain the long term value of things like maybe advanced lighting controls or predictive H Vac systems that upfront costs might raise eyebrows? What does that conversation look like?
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Well, that's where beginning from understanding their pain, understanding their the potential benefits of if we like optimize the way they're building or their portfolio works for them, we can bring interesting new forms of soft ROI into the conversation.
Anybody can price the real energy payback of more efficient equipment. If you replace your chiller or you replace your old light bulbs, it's easy to quantify the energy payback in a number of years to fund the cost of that replacement. But a lot of times with the smart building solutions that stitch together entire subsystems or might include a more proficient network to carry all that traffic from these subsystems, it's very useful to be able to bring in the soft benefits. And the soft benefits will vary by building type and by clients.
Things like what's the value to you in the cyber security of your buildings and what would be the reputational harm if your building were compromised? Or it could be how much is the the value of your O and M staff becoming more efficient going to mean to you over time? So beyond just the simple energy payback, if you've got a staff in the building and they can work proactively to maintain things rather than always chasing fires to do break fix type maintenance activities to some properties, that's a really beneficial way to look at the world.
And it could even be things like if you're a commercial building landlord, you are very interested in attracting great new tenants, retaining those great new tenants when their leases are due, and being able to perhaps show those tenants that their workforce is able to perform more productively in maybe it's a healthy building or a, like a well certified building, things like that.
If we can start to talk about those soft benefits that are more difficult to put a firm dollar value on, but we can start to say imagine if, you know, imagine if that really expensive fleet of lawyers that sits at the desks in your building, we're just 1% more productive, what's the value in real dollars from that hypothetical benefit that we could give you? If we can just assure that the ventilation error in the building is better and they're a little bit more difficult to defend in like a formal audit process. But if we're very conservative in our estimates and if we are clear that we're being hypothetical about potential benefits of these well planned use cases that we think will address actual pain or actual potential benefit to these building owners, landlords, we have some pretty good luck in advancing the sort of right fit smart buildings program for that building owner. And at this moment I'm going to take take this chance to say that there is no one single vision of what a smart building should be or what it is.
A smart building is in the eye of the beholder. And we try to design the solutions very specifically to each building, to each owner, to each use that they put that building to Again, to try to really address the opportunities to make that real estate more productive for, for the owner.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: Right. And you talked about money. That always talks.
What are some other go to examples or smart building wins that tend to click with owners right away.
[00:06:58] Speaker B: Sure. I mean money obviously drives everything. And I would say the reason that a perfect poster child of like the kitchen sink approach to a smart building doesn't exist is because no one's willing to pay the money for all this.
All the bells and whistles that would, you know, do everything we could imagine. Right. But when we selectively apply different technology interventions that meet the specific use cases, some of those are really things that you might not have imagined if you just were to step back and say what should a smart building be? But when we, we dive into the, the, the real ways that that property owner hopes to, hopes to enhance their real estate through technology, we arrive at some pretty unusual, unusual things that a real basic go to example of a smart building win could be as simple as if we can measure the number of people that use your space, we can not only give you the data that will inform your future space planning and your future renovation work to shuffle people around your office, but also we might be able to right size the amount of ventilation that that building does on an average day and take advantage of things like the fact that in fact nobody shows up to work on a Friday. So there's no need to ventilate at sort of design conditions when the space is empty. That's a fairly common example of marrying together typically two different systems. Typically you've got this Internet of things style people counting platform and then maybe a traditional building management system that operates the mechanical equipment, the H Vac.
And if you can get those two subsystems to share their data, you can have some pretty nice energy saving wins.
But there's also there can be kind of unusual or interesting outcomes like a mixed use neighborhood developer who really wants to remove the friction of people coming to visit and become very interested in the intersection of digital signage with parking guidance, with kind of blue dot navigation so that from an app that they're or a website that their customers could utilize, it becomes really easy to get to the site and find a parking spot without a whole lot of circling the block, hunting for a place and leaving in frustration. So you know, both of those examples I gave the people counting and optimizing H Vac, but also the digital systems that help to get a customer into a parking spot so that they can spend money in the shop, are both the sort of interventions that we can imagine once we understand what is the, what is the owner really trying to accomplish. If we were to take that, that retail neighborhood, the mixed use neighborhood developer, and try to talk to them about, you know, optimizing something based on, you know, fire alarm, communicating status to the security system, that, that may not resonate as well with them and that may not result in the sort of outcome that, that will move the needle for them, but, but putting more customers in the front door of the shops, that will, and that'll result in attracting and retaining better retail tenants in their, in their storefronts.
So we, we really just try to look for the unique combination of things that, that really move the needle for that particular property owner.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: Rob, you piqued my interest when you talked about marrying systems.
When you're talking about system integration like H Vac or lighting, fire protection, access controls even, how do you explain the benefit of them all talking to each other? I mean, to me it seems obvious, but it might not to others.
[00:11:12] Speaker B: That's a great question and I don't mean to overstate the same points, but it really will depend on the owner and the outcomes they're trying to achieve. Those use cases that we've imagined for them will best move the needle, best optimize their real estate for them. And by going through that exercise where we, we really understand their needs and their wants and it allows us to put together a recipe of the integration that will accomplish those goals. Rather than integration for integration sake or technology for technology's sake.
My co workers and I at ARUP would love to get that client who really wants to do it, all right? Would just want to integrate everything just because they can. We haven't met that client yet. If you're out there listening, please give us a call. But what's more common is finding those small ways that accomplishing some integration will, will allow us to unlock those kind of magical payback opportunities. Or I say payback, but it could also be a profit opportunity. And so while some of these, the systems you, you named, H Vac, lighting, fire protection, sometimes as kind of table stakes, the basic way we would go into a new construction commercial building in 2025, there will always be some minor integration there. And there might be easy opportunities even to converge some of these operating subsystems of a building into a single pane of glass. Those might be easy benefits to reap by explaining to the client how their workforce could sit at a single, you know, single user interface, web based from their mobile phone, from an iPad at their desk on the PC and manage or monitor all these different core bits of their building. But I think some of the neat things about integration are when we're able to also connect to some sort of front of house type systems. And that could be the client's cloud based computerized maintenance management system so that work tickets can be dispatched automatically when equipment run hours have exceeded a threshold. Or it could be, you know, ensuring that many of these subsystems in a building can feed data forward into a really great, you know, energy analytic bit of software or can, can utilize fault detection and diagnostics across a number of these sort of former silos if we can stitch them all together.
But also it's, you know, is there an occupant facing app that might provide benefit to your tenants?
What's the value in your marketing?
What's the value in your reputation and your appearance to the world when new people show up to work to get badged on day one? And rather than have to walk down to the security office to have their photo taken and be issued a plastic card, what if as the landlord, you can just tell them to download your app and that app will unlock the front door and get you up the elevator straight to your desk?
For some class A high rise kind of office owners, landlords, that's terribly valuable to attract the sort of tenants they'd like to bring. So I know I just wandered all over the map with that answer, but I think in summary, if the question is how do we explain the benefit of tying things together?
My answer is there's not a single answer I have to that it's that it depends. It depends on what the owner is trying to accomplish with, with technology applied to their building. And each of the bits of subsystem that, that you could put into a modern building can be as elaborate or as basic as, as needed. But the integration piece is where we start to understand whether a particular one of those subsystems need to, needs to be enhanced somewhat.
Is it sufficient that you've got a just a real basic fire alarm system or is there some need to pull data from the fire alarm system either so that we can, you know, send text messages to a wider audience of people? Or perhaps it's because we want to, you know, enable some digital signage in the building to switch to a kind of emergency wayfinding mode or anything in between?
Yeah, I think, I think I'll end my answer there Amara, because I'm likely to ramble another 10 minutes if you were to let me.
[00:16:05] Speaker A: Yeah, and Rob so You kind of touched on this. I'm going to keep you going here. What's your strategy for simplifying the role of, say, a building management system, a building automation system for a client who's never dealt with one before, who.
[00:16:23] Speaker B: I would, I would say that.
So my bread and butter and my experience in this industry comes from the design and specification of building management systems, even from having been a system integrator for a time, being that sort of overlay layer that pulled data out of temperature control systems, lighting control systems, power meters, and presented a single kind of user interface to clients.
From the design side, I think that everything that we endeavor to do as designers is with the goal of simplifying the appearance of that complicated system to the end users. Whether those end users are the guys in the boiler room running the equipment or if it's the, the owners up in the, in the C Suite.
It can be a challenge because those BMS is, they are very complex. There's multiple kinds of networks and there's different programmable controllers. But I would, you know, in a pitch for properly designed buildings, I would think that any firm who's out there designing new construction mep, for example, MEP systems and new construction buildings, I think all of us are aligned in trying to present easy to use solutions. So the end users are kind of insulated from all the gory details that go into it.
Trust us to write a sequence of operation for that air handler that can be presented on a nice clean graphic without needing to understand all the if then else statements that go into the creation of it. It's part of that is perhaps in how the specifications get authored and the requirements you give to the contractors to create those easy to digest dashboards or to boil down certain bits of information into KPIs that even the C Suite can understand. You know, how many kilowatts per person or how many kilowatts per square foot has this building used today, this month, last year. So some of it's in the specifications and some of it is in the, the design of the system itself where we try to, you know, ensure that it's easy to answer basic questions like where did my energy go? You know, how, if I'm using this much energy, how does it get accounted for? How does it break down across my building? And it can be very useful to be able to answer that question, you know, at, at a glance instead of having to pour through a spreadsheet full of particular meter kilowatt data. Instead, if we can outline it saying, well, the third floor is this many kilowatts and the H VAC systems in total have contributed this many kilowatts.
That can result in an easier to use building. And if a building is easier to use, it'll be managed more efficiently and effectively for, for years to come.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: And you started our conversation with us, Rob, but what kind of successes have you had getting owners involved really early in the process? I mean, smart building planning has to start somewhere early in the conversation.
How do you bring them into that?
[00:19:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, sadly, it's probably too rare that we get involved right at the outset. And at the outset is when big buckets of money get allocated in a budget and it's more common. I would say that the smart buildings folks get brought in a bit later when it becomes more difficult to fight for your dollars in the overall program.
But we have had some success. I'm blessed to work at a, a large company that, you know, works on some, some really large, large scale projects and we can bring along the smart buildings thought process early when we're engaged, you know, as the broader, like MEP engineer, for example. But I do love, we, we have some customers that have come, come to us outside of that channel that, that do seek to bring planning to bear early because I guess they in their own research have, have understood the potential value in aligning the wide array of things they're going to be designing into their building, aligning that early on and sort of. Right. Sizing each of those component parts.
I would say those clients who come to us like that, you know, they already understand that absent some strategic planning across the whole project, they're likely to end up with different subsystems or silos, if you will, that may not be the best fit for achieving a sort of overall goal that meets their business needs.
So that my message to a building owner, if I had the opportunity to make a pitch early in the process, would be if you don't have this conversation with me or somebody like me early, you're likely to end up with some of the subsystems that are undersized or incapable of giving you the performance you're going to need to feed your goals. And you may well get certain subsystems or bits of technology that are overkill for your true needs, which will feel like, you know, technology for technology's sake.
And you know, using somebody like me can, can really help you optimize that application of technology. It's what is, what is just enough for you without being too much. And that's going to be the Right.
Sort of cost benefit point to land at. So I guess our success has been when we have the opportunity to make that pitch to a, to an owner who gets it and who's, you know, moved by the possibility of better performing real estate.
What I can't solve is how to get audience with those kind of owners who haven't heard of us or haven't heard of the topic or don't know where to, where to go for that early advice and hear about it a little bit too late. And then we're all too accustomed to the journey that, you know, the way the journey looks if we, if we get brought in late after all the, all the design elements, but ours have been fairly well detailed and they're racing to issue for construction, you know, within a month. And that's, if that's when we get brought in. It's not optimal, but we can still give it our best effort to make what interventions are possible on sort of a short time frame. But there was a chart I saw one time. I'm not sure which organization put it out, but it's, maybe it's just a, sort of a common folklore in construction, but it has to do with the, the ability to alter big program pieces in a construction project. And it sort of diminishes over time as the design gets more and more evolved. It's just two, two lines that are, you know, intersect in the middle that are inverse of each other. And it's true that the further along you are in the design process, the more difficult and costly it can become to make larger changes to the, to the program. And sometimes achieving the ideal smart buildings outcome for a client can require some larger, more significant, like interventions that if hadn't been planned for, hadn't been budgeted for, hadn't been allocated space in closets or in ceilings, it can become impossible to include those ideal solutions. So we would love, every single time, we would love to be involved earlier than we usually are. And big thanks to those enlightened clients who actually do understand this and have come to us early enough that we can do impactful things for them. Talk to your friends and your peers in the industry and share, share the client side wisdom of that with them because I think it's not as common as we'd like to see.
[00:24:54] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that all makes perfect sense. I'm going to flip it on you, Rob.
Let's look at engineers who struggle to explain these systems to owners.
What advice do you have for engineers? I mean, technology is changing quickly. There's a Lot of things, A lot of moving targets. What's your advice?
[00:25:16] Speaker B: I think if you're struggling to explain something, you're probably, you're probably trying to explain the wrong thing. And if I'm trying to explain to a client how the different networks convert protocols and, you know, share their data at the, at the wire level to achieve an outcome, I'm probably not going to succeed with that. I'd have to be talking to another tech nerd like myself for that to mean anything. But I, I find that when I'm talking about outcomes and experiences, it's much easier. And it turns out most clients don't really care how you're going to achieve that outcome. So if I'm trying to, I guess I'm.
My advice to those engineers who are struggling is quit trying to explain the features, quit trying to explain the software platform and how it's going to get architected and instead talk about what is that going to mean?
What is sort of the difference from status quo that you're proposing going to mean in outcomes for that owner? Is it going to be that your, your workforce can receive emails and know right where to go to fix problems instead of have to return to the, to the basement and, you know, check the logbook?
If you can explain outcomes in a very basic way like that, that's impactful, that sort of appreciates the learned experience of that person you're talking to. Rather than talking about bits and bytes and kilobits and kilobytes, you'll have much more, much better luck. And you can take care of architecting it any way you want. And if you end up with the IT guy on the phone and he's interested in that level of detail, you can knock yourself out and explain all the techno garble to the IT guy. But you have to, I guess, know your audience and, and present, present an outcomes based approach to what you're trying to achieve here and you know, share with them the ways that's going to be different than what they're accustomed to and, and you ought to have better luck.
[00:27:17] Speaker A: Techno garble, that's a new one for me.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't mean to diminish my, my engineer peers. Like we all have to speak techno garble to the right, to the right audience, but it's often not the person making the purchase decision. They're usually pretty far removed from caring about how the sausage gets made. They just want to know that their building will work like they want it to work.
[00:27:43] Speaker A: Well, this all makes perfect Sense. Rob, this actually syncs up very nicely with what you told me about your background, which goes way deeper than building controls.
You have an education in theater and the technical controls behind these theatrical performances. So how has that experience ported over to your work in the AE industry? I think you just explained a little piece of that.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a fun question.
When I tell my co workers, who, many of, many of whom are, you know, properly degreed mechanical or electrical engineers, that I have a degree in technical theater, I often get a lot of raised eyebrows. How could I possibly be able to keep up in an industry without, without that engineering degree? And to save a little face, I like to tell the story about the, the independent study work I did as a, as a senior working on that technical theater degree. Actually sort of combining a lot of computer science work I had taken at the time, I decided to do like a deep analysis of the prospect of using this obscure. It's not really obscure in the music industry, but it's a, it's a protocol used to coordinate musical instruments called midi, Musical Instrument Digital Interface. And as my independent study, I thought I'd really peel that apart all the way down to the, you know, a deep understanding of the protocol itself in order to propose using it as a means of like, coordinating show control, which would mean cuing audio and lighting cues from one single spot. And I believed that MIDI offered the potential to do that. But to be able to sort of prove it, I had to propose which bit of the, of the, of that obscure protocol could be modified to, to make it a universal show control sort of protocol. And again, I, I'm at risk of going into techno garble right now. I'll pull back and I'll say that that challenge that I took on and decided to, to solve is become quite similar to some of the deep dive technical problems we have to solve to make the modbus power meter share data to the energy management platform. It kind of requires understanding how those protocols message across the wire so that we can figure out how to pull that data into, you know, the fancy modern cloud platform. A lot of times we go into existing buildings that have legacy stuff and that sometimes that legacy stuff, the way those things communicate doesn't differ too much from the. I don't want to date myself, but if I've been working for 25 years, I'll let you all do the math.
The MIDI protocol of my college days, there's a lot of buildings that still have installed equipment of that era. And so I think that sort of Understanding has been invaluable in, in helping to solve challenges and systems integration for commercial buildings, for hospitals, for data centers, for, you know, mixed use neighborhoods and so forth.
So I think, gosh, Amar, I hope I've answered your question about, about how that, that odd left field background in technical theater has, has benefited me or maybe benefited my, my clients. But I think it comes down to the, the appreciation of if I want to make different systems that have different core purposes work in unison, how can I use a particular network to make that happen most efficiently? And, and that's kind of the storyline of what that interest I had in college, how it's turned into a career in, in commercial buildings and making these systems in commercial buildings work in an optimized way.
[00:31:41] Speaker A: Yeah, you're the wizard of Oz. You make everything happen seamlessly from behind the curtain.
[00:31:46] Speaker B: I try.
It's hopefully always seamless.
Perhaps some speed bumps in the road, but seamless is the goal.
[00:31:58] Speaker A: Well, Rob, thank you so much. I do appreciate these insights.
[00:32:04] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. It's been fun to ramble on and I hope that your listeners heard something here of value to them on their own smart buildings journey. I, I would, I'd leave you all with, with the thought that the status quo, the sort of, if you do nothing modern building you're going to get is, is not going to be as impactful as it could be. With just a little bit of extra strategic guidance and sort of proper planning on how to pull these bits together and make them work better for you and doing whatever it is that you want your buildings to do for you, you'll get a great building with different bits and pieces that are all working well. But talk to a smart buildings person, talk to an integration expert about ways to make them even better. One of my favorite Can I end Amara with two sort of old saws? The first is that in the case of smart buildings, I strongly believe that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That's what integration unlocks for you. And the other is an observation I heard at a conference about a year ago that as a building owner, I'd rather take vitamins than take aspirin. And in that metaphor, a smart building properly planned up front, you're doing something proactively to make things work better instead of waiting for the pain and then treating the pain instead.
You know, get strong early and you won't need the aspirin later.
[00:33:37] Speaker A: That makes entirely too much sense. Awesome.
Well, this is where we need to wrap things up. Integrated building systems and smart buildings are important topics for this audience. So for more information, visit Consulting specifying
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