IP Convergence

Response to Demand

Demand Response is all the rage but quite frankly if buildings can respond to an ADR then they could run more efficiently every day. If buildings were smarter about how they are being utilized, we could start to decommission power plants not build new ones. Systems are available today that will do constant commissioning, control optimization and we are now entering a new era of presence based automation. Think about thousands of low power wireless sensors sprinkled throughout a facility. Their purpose is to add a layer of intelligence about how spaces are being used. Systems for controlling elevators, life safety, BAS, Lighting and others would all have access to this layer to make better decisions about how to control their media. At BuilConn this year several vendors mentioned saving 20% - 30% of the energy consumed by buildings just by optimizing their current infrastructure. I hate to see the government get involved but if they put energy restrictions on buildings based on type and size, owners would have to optimize their holdings. Call it a CAFÉ standard for buildings! We don’t need Demand Response we just need to have Buildings Respond to Demand.

May 31st, 2008 Posted by John | Energy Ideas | no comments

Chain of Events

Someone recently asked me how an electrical contractor came to start a new company and to develop a software solution from the ground up. It made me think, how did we come that conclusion?

A little background is necessary to set the stage. In 1990 we were a turnkey parts and smarts distributor for a major controls manufacturer. By 2000 we were out of the turnkey business and just installing controls for all of the majors. By 2003 we were out of the install business and I needed something to do. So I went on a job interview for a local controls company that wanted to start another branch office.That interview took me to a national sales conference to preview the perspective control manufactures products. At the conference the CEO talked about the service industry and the commoditization of the controls market. His comments made me think there has to be a better way. I have a way of reading too much into the message, but it seemed clear to me this CEO just told all of the distributors to get out of the controls business!

I returned from the sales conference and told my employer about the experience, yes I told them about the job interview as well. They were intrigued and allowed me to do some research. I attended several of the industry trade shows that year.Through this process it became evident to me that the same people who owned the current marketplace were the ones working on solutions for the new open marketplace. I’m no genius but it was a little strange to me that anyone that was an established player in the current market would want to help the eventual commoditization of their products.

I continued to attend conferences watching and waiting for the solution to the promise that everyone kept talking about to materialize, it didn’t. In a chance encounter with our marketing and communications firm, I happen to mention what I was researching. They suggested I meet with one of their technology partners to discuss what I was looking for. The best part for me was that they had absolutely no knowledge of the building systems market. When I explained the market and my vision, they approached the solution from a purely IT perspective. Thus was born the idea of an enterprise class building services portal.

And so the rest is the future!

May 13th, 2008 Posted by John | Convergence | no comments

Chimney Generator

Someone needs to build this!

I had this idea after seeing a solar adaptation that was 7 km across at the base. I couldn’t help but think, what a huge waste of space, why not build a building around it. With as many buildings that I have been in struggling to control the chimney effect, why not induce it by channeling the waste heat.

Please feel free to discuss the technical merits as I’m not a mechanical engineer.

Seems like it should work.

May 5th, 2008 Posted by John | Energy Ideas | no comments

Disintegration

With all of the talk about integration, I think what we need to disintegrate! By tightly coupling systems we create fragile networks vulnerable to failure. Years ago when BAS systems first came to be, they ran on central computer systems that controlled all aspects of operations and control. Then came distributed control systems, by far a much better solution. So it goes in today’s market, only instead of distributed control systems, we are applying the same standards to the systems in the building. Let the systems designed to control discrete functions do their job. Let them do it better by providing data services collected from all data stores throughout the facility.

Everyone talks about basement to boardroom data propagation, what about boardroom to building. Number one, data is not information; information comes from the compilation of data into meaningful reports. Reports designed by stakeholders in the boardroom not the basement. Corporations use complex processes designed to drive efficiency and profitability. We need to apply the same concepts to buildings. Buildings should be responsive to changes in the business processes.

April 29th, 2008 Posted by John | Convergence | no comments

The New Daedalus

One of my favorite blogs is the New Daedalus. Toby Considine has a visionary perspective of buildings and the services that are possible. Last year I hired Toby to provide some consulting work for us. I was looking for confirmation of the direction we were heading with the CePORT BSP product. I think Toby and I are kindred spirits. My software developers and I got into a somewhat heated discussion about market focus. They wanted to focus improving some more traditional applications that are low hanging fruit and I wanted to stay focused on creating something new and innovative. Toby sat quietly listening to our conversations and finally pronounced, don’t take away the passion for the product. He went on to say, what will make us successful is our passion about doing something completely different. After gaining a better understanding of what our system can do, Toby coined the tag line, “the Convergence of People, Space, Time and Energy”.

What Toby writes about in his blog is possible today! People need to shed their past experiences with closed system architectures and focus on a new paradigm of what’s possible. Our portal, even though it’s patent pending doesn’t invent any new technology. What is does, is apply existing technology in a new way as to enable innovative applications. Loose coupling of systems across a diverse landscape is the future, reusable data services provided to systems regardless of platform is will be key.

Don’t discount Toby’s posts, I think the things he writes about will be commonplace in the near future.

April 29th, 2008 Posted by John | Convergence, Miscellaneous Musings | no comments

BIM and the Electrical Contractor

Building Information Modeling has the potential to revolutionize the estimating process and for that matter, the electrical construction business. Theoretically, if the electrical engineer enters all of the information required by BIM, the electrical material list will be complete. Everything from conduit and conductors to switchboards will be covered. Owners or GC’s may decide to pre-purchase and furnish all of the electrical materials for a project. Several GC’s have done this with the larger electrical equipment but now could buy out an entire project. Great for them, but not a very appealing proposition for the electrical contractor. Material markup and buying power offer the electrical contractor a buffer to lost hours because of job conditions.

That leaves the electrical contractors to figure out how efficiently they think they can install the material. In the short term electrical contractors that adopt BIM will have an edge over the stragglers but in the long term, BIM will commoditize the electrical construction industry. BIM has the potential for setting up industry standard pricing for the installation of electrical systems. How will contractors differentiate themselves in this new era? EMR rating, installation quality, reputation, and relationships will become more important than they already are.

You’ve heard it before, “nothing is free”, and this will be true of BIM as well. Will the extra 20-30K spent in overhead to implement a BIM project really save even more on the installation side? The shift to BIM will put more emphasis on the talent pool inside the office to efficiently and accurately manage projects. If low price in and change order out is your business model, you better find another way. Change orders will be scarce and closely controlled.

April 29th, 2008 Posted by John | Building Information Modeling | no comments

People, Space, Time and Energy

Have you ever wondered what effect occupancy has on your facility? Do you know if your business processes lead or follow your facility’s systems? Building systems waste lots of energy because they don’t respond to people and to business processes. Buildings should be responsive to their occupants and the environment. Building Automation Systems (BAS) and other infrastructure systems do a good job of automating the systems in the building but fall short when it comes to the business processes.

How can you make the experience of visiting and working in a building better? How do we realign People, Space, Time, and Energy in a building? Building systems are silos for good reasons: each does a great job at a specific task, and each needs to work well even when another fails. So how can facilities managers expand the capabilities of existing systems without creating fragile connections?

We have been asking these questions at Continental Electric for over three years now. CEPORT BSP is a patent-pending, platform- and technology- agnostic building services portal designed to manage the convergence of People, Space, Time and Energy.

The key is to align a building systems with its occupants and business processes, resulting in a more productive work environment and energy-efficient operation. Providing loosely coupled services to systems throughout the facility in order to extend their functionality without creating a complex and fragile system is essential. Enabling integration between enterprise software and building systems is only part of the solution. Data presentation, reporting, security, and adherence to current IT standards are the other keys. Adapting to the occupants’ IT security infrastructure is the only way to ensure acceptance. Support single / reduced sign-on so that users are not burdened by multiple logins to access the system. Corporate IT departments will have specific requirements, so being flexible and prepared to deploy on any platform will avoid common barriers to entry. If you’re going to access and store corporate enterprise data, your system must be as secure as the systems it accesses. Allowing custom business rules to be defined and executed based on calendar, events or time can facilitate interaction between disparate systems.

With energy cost skyrocketing, Demand Response will become commonplace. What is the appropriate response given the current building status? That decision needs to be based on data collected from all systems in the building. Provide a service wrapper for the systems in the building, they can monitor each other and take action on their own. An enterprise-class reporting and BI engine will provide a way to validate energy and operational data by creating professionally crafted reports. Reports should be available via printer or email and published to CMS’s and subscription lists. Using common internet search tools and terms to find predefined reports is a natural and unobtrusive way for C-level executives to find critical performance data.

At Continental, we are testing and deploying our solution on top of our own headquarters’ building systems in Skokie, Illinois, but larger and smaller buildings or companies will all see the value in true building integration. The need for a one-size-fits-all product is inherent to the market’s mode of development. We believe a truly integrative BSP will scale to any building size, with any client configuration, because every building must interact with People, Space, Time, and Energy.

Some examples of modules currently in development include:

AWS (alternative work spaces) or Hotelling
An AWS module that is fully integrated with card access, BAS, lighting, VOIP, and HR can provide a rich yet simple reservation experience. A kiosk interface should be designed for ease of use, to get you the information you need in less than 15 seconds. Using context-sensitive location routing, your AWS module should track utilization for reporting. It should facilitate LEED certification, for example, by being capable of directing employees to specific areas after hours or on weekends to minimize energy usage.

Carpooling
Where else do People, Space, Time, and Energy interact? In travel. A building can actually facilitate carpooling via a BSP module that utilizes a simple enrolment process, integrated with the HR and card access systems. Users’ origin locations and arrival /departure times can be automatically populated and compared. Simple and flexible options should be available for selecting personal preferences.

Conference Room Reservations
Another BSP module that should help the building work more closely with business processes is one that adds extended functionality to the reservation systems already in use. Whether you use Outlook or Notes or a web-based system, your IT department shouldn’t need to use APIs to add catering, A/V requests, furniture changes, climate profiles, and other meeting characteristics, depending on processes you already use. Better yet, it would enable processes and utilization reporting you have always wanted to put into place but have never had the capability to implement.

Building Event Communication
Companywide gatherings, security emergencies, and weather closures are the kind of events that stretch the limits of business processes and human patience. A BSP module that enables communication and tracking of these events and their accompanying system needs is vital to predicting and resolving public concerns in these areas. Ideally, a single-entry interface should automatically propagate data to the appropriate personnel and systems in the building. It would even socialize your corporate ecological efforts by publishing LEED data to kiosks or your CMS, earning you LEED education points.

Builders and tenants everywhere are aware of the balance needed between the “smart buildings” of the future and the reliable systems of the past and present. A building services portal that can achieve that balance, servicing people and responding to business processes to create greater efficiency of space, time, and energy, should be every integrator’s goal.

Special thanks to Toby Considine for our tag line,
“Convergence of People, Space, Time and Energy”.

February 29th, 2008 Posted by John | Convergence | no comments

Integrate Why

Integrating building systems is all the rage, but have you ever asked why? I maintain that system silos and distributed control will always be the best application. Just because you can integrate lighting, HVAC, Security and others doesn’t mean you should. Let’s look at a typical example.

Owner occupied office building

The building designers took ultimate care to make sure the systems installed in the building were open protocol. They were also careful to design each control system to be a robust standalone system. The lighting in the open office areas are smart ballast technology with integrated daylight harvesting, occupancy sensors and override switches. The HVAC for this open office area is low pressure under floor distribution with return air temperature sensors on the AHU’s and CO2 sensors in the space. Under this design there is no need for control integration, these systems provide energy efficient automatic control.

In the few enclosed office spaces, there are FP VAV boxes and local lighting control via a combination occupancy / switch with dimming capability. You could integrate these spaces because granular control is possible but because these spaces make up such a small portion of the overall building space, it doesn’t economic sense.

Just because cross systems integration is possible, doesn’t always mean it makes economic sense to do so. A properly designed modern building will have distributed controls for all systems that provide reliable energy efficient and comfortable spaces.

The cool factor of automatic control of systems based on access control or license plate recognition just doesn’t cut it. Neither does adding VoIP phone integration, lets see, get up and adjust the lights or sit at my desk and use the phone. What price are we willing to pay for this added convenience? My guess is not much. Added expense and complexity, just so I don’t have to get up!

What we need to focus on is the integration of all building systems, IT and low voltage control. How can we affect the overall performance of a building based on a higher analytical level? Data collection across building systems can be invaluable, what effect does human occupancy have on energy consumption. If a building doesn’t react to changes in occupancy, maybe it’s not as energy efficient as it should be. Moving building information quickly and efficiently to the necessary parties is more valuable than the cool factor. Communication of emergencies, both internal and external can be absolutely crucial to the safety of the buildings occupants.

More thoughts later.

January 20th, 2008 Posted by John | Convergence | no comments

Do I Hear an Echo

It been two years now since I started researching IP convergence and its affect on the electrical industry. Unfortunately, the message hasn’t changed. Product manufactures continue to push their widgets; systems integrators are still espousing “seamless integration”. We should all understand by now that there is no such thing as plug and play controls interchangeability and seamless integration. If there was we wouldn’t need a systems integrator would we?

Electrically Speaking

I can’t speak for all electrical contractors but as far as I’m concerned, installing products and cabling for vendors is a risky business. An electrical contractor sells productive labor; anything that interferes with that productivity costs them money. Vendors are not as sensitive to construction schedules and are invariably late with parts and smarts deliveries. While this is not a significant issue for them, lost productivity costs the electrical contractor dearly. On a typical install only job the labor to material ratio is 90% labor to 10% material. Given that, there is no room for error, there is no way to recoup lost hours. One way to mitigate some risk is to have the vendors work as subcontractors to the electrical. Using this model provides three critical improvements to the vendor model.

1. The electrical contractor is afforded some power over the vendors and can force them to perform. This also allows the electrical contractor to carry markup on the vendors and that gives them some wiggle room.

2. The electrical contractor can offer the general contractor one source of responsibility without locking the owner into one specific vendors products. The electrical contractor will get competitive bids for all of the technologies and select vendors based on product capabilities, vendor performance and of course price.

3. The electrical contractor can install all of the low voltage subsystems as a system not as silos. During the estimating phase they can coordinate all of the electrical pathways reducing overlap. The current vendor model has a division 16 contactor doing the high and medium voltage work and several other electrical contractors working for the vendors.

From a Technology Perspective

I’ll restate what I’ve said for two years now. Playing by IT rules isn’t easy but until you do the smart building everyone is talking about is just that. In order for truly open building integration to occur, the industry needs to stop encapsulating pseudo open protocols on the IT infrastructure. The system integrator needs to employ network engineers, software developers and traditional systems technicians. The systems integrator cannot sell or represent any manufacturers’ equipment. They need to be totally technology agnostic and help the owner / consultants find the best products for each application. They would then provide a building integration performance portfolio and a cost estimate for programming and implementation. Only then can owners make an informed decision about the validity of integration.

Building automation systems (BAS) should be renamed systems automation systems (SAS), as they are by design system centric. A building automation system has nothing to with systems and everything to do with building operations. Everything from the parking facility to the boardroom should be analyzed and optimized for operational and energy efficiency. The local systems controlling these areas should be fully functioning standalone systems designed to respond to external directives from the building integration system. We need to stop talking about systems integration and move on to building integration.

Just more ranting!

June 13th, 2007 Posted by John | Convergence | no comments

Are You Going to Get What You Thought

We are entering into a new era with controls being available from so many sources. Who stands to gain the greatest market share under the new open protocol paradigm? Building owners have pushed for this for years, but are they really going to get what they thought? Will it really change the pricing structure? Will they get more value? With the major controls manufacturers looking for more creative ways to capture market share, will they really be open? Will you be able to call the provider of your choice for parts and service? Building owners and managers have always been held hostage because of single source product offerings. You will need to ask some very straightforward questions when deciding on a technology solution. Can I pull out your NAE, MBE or pick any other acronym for today’s network controllers and replace it with someone else’s? Will the JCI or Siemens “open” terminal controls really work with anyone’s network controller? Can I add a terminal controller from another manufacturer to the existing field bus and have it map to the network controller? Will they perform just as the other controller on the network? Will they talk peer to peer? Are there ANY proprietary BACnet objects or SNVT’s? You must have your MEP consultant write the controls spec to include the proper language and then write that language into the contract.

Maybe there is another way?

An electrical contractor who stays technology agnostic and offers products that are available from multiple sources could be in a good position to enter into a new arena. All of the low voltage systems are converging on the building IP backbone. The electrical contractor is currently installing the IP cabling infrastructure. The electrical contractors are being subcontracted to install the wiring for these low voltage systems now; doesn’t it make sense for them to expand their offering to the actual systems being installed? Who better to engineer a structured cabling system that truly encompasses all of the low voltage subsystems? Wouldn’t an owner feel more comfortable having one source of responsibility for the turnkey installation of the best available systems across all of the low voltage subsystems? Manufacturers’ products generally work; the important part has always been who installs them. Some of the major electrical distributors are starting to offer technology solutions such as card access and CCTV. As controls and other low voltage subsystem technology becomes a commodity, more products will become available through the major electrical suppliers. Innovative product manufacturers looking to expand distribution channels will find new ways to increase market share.

Typically the electrical contractor isn’t focused on back end sales but on making a fair profit on each installation. The electrical contractor doesn’t need to call anyone else to fix wiring problems or replace controls, thus eliminating double markups and finger pointing. The electrical contractor that installs the building IP infrastructure can, engineer and install the security system, the card access system, the BAS system, A/V systems and any other wired or wireless technologies. After all, we know that wireless takes wires, right. Today, multiple technology contractors all-employing their own electrical subcontractors are installing each system as a silo. Each electrical sub must install their own hangers and raceways causing inefficiencies and coordination problems. What is needed is one electrical contractor who coordinates the entire low voltage electrical infrastructure. The 2004 CSI master specification uncovers technologies traditional hidden under other divisions in the current model. This poses a problem for the general contractor, as they will be asked to manage more without being paid for it. An electrical contractor capable of packaging the low voltage systems design and installation would benefit the GC’s by giving them one source to manage.
All of this serves the building owners ultimate goal. If the contractor doesn’t take care of their needs, they can find alternate sources for products and service. Isn’t that really what building owners have been asking for?

April 3rd, 2006 Posted by John | Convergence | no comments