A Smart Building Contractor’s, Thought Leadership Approach

Its official! Smart buildings are here to stay. 

Almost every new commercial building is now specified with some sort of smart element (be it for energy saving, improved user experience, welfare… the list is endless) and many existing buildings are now looking at retrofitting smart.  

There is a wealth of smart building consultancy services dealing with all types of situations from blue sky thinking right down to specific use cases and user journeys.  A lot of thought is often given to the design stage of a smart building project, but it’s important to talk and inform the client about the crucial delivery stage.  We call it, the implementation phase of a smart building.  

While it is often very simple to specify a smart use case between a consultant and end client, often the detailed design and implementation are much more complicated and fall under the Contractors Design Portion (CDP) element of the smart building contractor’s (typically the MSI’s) package. This phase is typically not as visible to the client or design team.   

Implementation of a smart building package often requires a lot of coordination with third parties because the smart building package will often integrate with many, if not all elements of the project.  

Also, many smart building systems require a different approach to installation and commissioning, and this presents some extra considerations to the construction phase of the project.  Here are some of our findings learnt from delivery of some of the smartest projects in London. 

Commissioning 

Smart building systems often require detailed commissioning phases which don’t normally fit into a traditional construction programme. For example, a desk occupancy system. These typically cannot be commissioned until the very end of the project (indeed until the furniture is in place) and this poses a problem for the project scope as often this will fall after the practical completion (PC) date. 

Many smart systems are data centric and involve collecting and posting building data from one place to another. This often proves a challenge to not only get this data securely out of a system but also in a way that can be understood by third parties. There are plenty of well published naming conventions available for implementation on a project such a Brick or Haystack. However, as these are mostly frameworks unless their implementation is managed (by the smart building contractor) they will be implemented in different ways by different systems and not be usable to the smart system. Key to this again is early engagement and making sure that the smart building contractor is able to engage with the sub-contractors implementing the systems to help them understand their obligations with this piece of the project.  

Many smart systems not only rely on other systems to supply their data, but they also rely on third parties for their functionality. A typical example of this would be the network contractor providing PoE power to smart devices such as environmental sensors or people counters from the building CNS network. This dependency means that unless the smart building elements are considered early in the programme it will likely be a challenge to commission and sign as they are reliant on other contractors finishing their works. In the example above this is particularly prevalent as the CNS network might need to consider earlier cleaning and handover of critical spaces so the building network can be bought online earlier which will have a considerable impact on a project programme. 

Taking the above thoughts into account its clear that the delivery team need to engage early with the smart building contractor on a project and by doing so most of the challenges can be mitigated. A lot of the potential smart building headaches go away with proper planning and education of the delivery team. Also, whoever delivers the smart building scope of works cannot be dealt with the same as many of the other specialist sub-contractors on a project and unless this is managed as part of the wider project delivery process a seamless handover cannot be achieved.