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Honeywell has added a new platform to its suite of building management technologies that enables multiple buildings to be managed from a single screen as an integrated system, and says the ability to compare performance is generating significant savings.
David Trice, vice president and general manager, Honeywell Connected Enterprise, Buildings, in a press briefing at Honeywell’s recent Asia Pacific user group meeting in Sydney, said Honeywell Forge had been developed in response to demand from customers, some of which need to manage hundreds or even thousands of buildings.
“Think 1000 buildings, managed from your favourite coffee shop,” Trice said. “You’re able to control a building on the other side of the world from a single location with a single click into a single platform.
He said Honeywell when developing Forge, had focussed on a few key areas of building management: predictive maintenance, digital access, space utilisation, and portfolio management, and one of the system’s main benefits was that it enabled a manager to see how different buildings were performing against the same metric, and to then take measures to improve poor performers.
“We’ve taken all that data and aggregated it up into a single dashboard where a CEO or somebody at that level can see how his portfolio is performing.
“We’ve got a way to normalise performance into a score, so you can see on a relative scale how your buildings compare to each other, and then decide, based on that score, where you need to make investment decisions.
“You can drill down into the poor performers and see where you can make investments that will ultimately drive the performance of that building and the portfolio as a whole.”
Trice said a number of early Forge users were seeing reductions in operating expenses of up to 25 percent. “We’re getting tremendous impact for predictive maintenance, from energy optimisation, and delivering bottom line impact to our customers.”
A new approach to building management
He claimed Honeywell Forge was leading users to a new approach to building management.
“A number of our customers are starting to understand that there’s low hanging fruit, that if they can apply a consistent process across in a large number of buildings, it can have a dramatic impact. And being able to see the performance across the portfolio the starting point for understanding where to drive improvements.”
Trice said the challenge in developing Forge had been getting it to cater for building management products other than Honeywell’s.
“We have to have a single way to connect to all of them, not only to get the data out of the building to drive the insights, but also to push the decisions back into the building to drive the control.
“That’s what Honeywell Forge is all about, taking all of that infrastructure, providing access to it through a common interface that we refer to as connectivity as a service: a single interface that gives us a common way to see data, interact with data and drive decisions back.”
