by Brianna Crandall — July 22, 2020 — Fortune 100 technology company Honeywell and enterprise application software provider SAP recently announced that they have teamed up to create a joint cloud-based solution based on Honeywell Forge, the company’s enterprise performance management offering, and the SAP Cloud Platform that will streamline and combine operational and business data to support better decision-making and drive greater efficiencies.
The companies’ first area of focus will be the real estate industry, where building owners often need to pull data from disparate sources that are not normalized. This can make it extremely difficult to determine the true efficiency and utilization of their portfolios, point out the partners.
Drawing on the power of the Honeywell Forge autonomous buildings solution and the SAP Cloud for Real Estate solution, the new offering will enable facilities managers (FMs) and building owners to reposition their portfolios through cost savings and newly identified efficiencies, while also helping to improve tenant experience. Honeywell Forge powers a new artificial intelligence (AI)-driven autonomous control capability that makes automatic adjustments to maintenance, comfort and sustainability.
As buildings come back online in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis, owners are expected to focus on key performance indicators (KPIs) tied to enhanced occupant safety and reduced carbon footprint along with energy savings. By providing real-time access to these KPIs, the joint offering will help building owners optimize their operations to meet aggressive energy savings targets and substantially reduce maintenance hours.
For example, in the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) operation alone, which is known to account for 35 percent of total energy consumption (see DOE assessment) in commercial buildings, an AI-automated system such as Honeywell Forge can save up to 23 percent in energy costs, based on findings from several Honeywell pilots.
Darius Adamczyk, chairman and CEO, Honeywell, remarked:
Building owners today often struggle to get the real-time data they need to determine the true efficiency and utilization of their portfolios. Honeywell and SAP together will provide insights from the boiler room to the boardroom that make it easier for our customers to get a true picture of how to optimize building performance, lower carbon emissions to meet sustainability goals, reduce energy costs and help enhance occupant experience. Having this information readily accessible will allow our customers to generate tremendous business value while becoming more sustainable, and it will greatly enhance the appeal of their buildings to renters and tenants.
Christian Klein, CEO, SAP, stated:
Our partnership will significantly change the game in digital and intelligent real estate management. Customers will greatly benefit from the single holistic view provided by our offering dashboard. With the addition of Qualtrics, companies can also collect employee sentiment data to provide a complete 360-degree experience measurement while optimizing occupant productivity, building performance and their entire real estate portfolio. With embedded artificial intelligence and data analysis, our solution will enable managers to determine their optimal office use and adjust their portfolios to reflect varying economic, environmental and regulatory conditions.
Honeywell and SAP say the solution will provide customers with easy access to a wider range of pertinent real estate data, including energy performance, security, maintenance, rent, taxes, location, regulations, lease terms and other costs.
The solution will include:
- Predefined extensible dashboards combining information technology (IT) and operational technology KPIs, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI)
- Monitoring and reduction of annual energy spend, resulting in reduced carbon footprint and greater energy efficiency, even as maintenance hours decrease
- A harmonized data architecture that connects building data from Honeywell with real estate and financial data from SAP
- Combined human comfort KPIs with measured experience KPIs
Learn more about the Honeywell/SAP solution on the SAP website.
