Is your building feeling a little flabby around the middle? Does it wheeze when exerted or suffer from breakouts? Does it need a personal trainer to tell it to stop eating too much and that it’s not looking after itself? Then you need Demand Logic.
Or at least that is what Sonny Masero, founder of the winner of EG’s inaugural TechTalk Academy, held in November last year, says.
He adds that rather than just monitoring the health of a building, Demand Logic goes deeper.
“We can not only tell you whether there is a health problem, and whether it is functioning in the way that it should, but we also have an online doctor or fitness trainer that can help you find the source of that problem – the specific piece of equipment or sensor that is causing the problem – and help you find a remedy,” he says.
Demand Logic started life as a simple app, focusing on energy savings and the specific pieces of equipment in the building that were causing energy wastage.
Since then, Masero has created a system to easily get data out of buildings and use it for other purposes.
Demand Logic’s “Fitbit” looks at comfort and productivity issues in buildings, maintenance problems and managing insurance risk, as well as good old energy saving.
“Getting the basics right around building systems is really critical,” says Masero.
“We think there is a significant proportion of savings that can be delivered in using data just in the operations of buildings and making that operation much simpler.” He says Demand Logic does just that.
The product is sold as a software service. It is a single device that is installed in the building in less than three hours (Masero says his record is 20 minutes) and securely connects the building network – the ventilation, heating, air conditioning, energy and utility meters and more – to the internet.
Once connected, Demand Logic creates a virtual model of the building and starts “talking” to all the equipment in the building and gathers data.
Masero says there are no other companies that can acquire data in the way that Demand Logic does and that even IBM and Google Deepmind, which have started to do building analysis, have not been able to crack the problem of getting data out of a building quickly.
A big part of the tool is based around collaboration. Anyone using the software can log on and see their portfolio of properties, and there is even a chatroom for people to share common problems and solutions that their building’s personal trainer has discovered.
This collaboration enables Demand Logic to develop league tables that give it a picture of what real-time, operational effectiveness looks like.
Key metrics are based around productivity, the impact the operation of the building is having on staff productivity; maintenance, how effectively maintenance is being delivered in improvement of the condition of the equipment; and energy wastage.
The correlation between office performance – temperature, humidity and air quality – and how people perform is well known and cited at length in a world increasingly focused on wellbeing. But it has a real financial impact too.
According to Demand Logic’s calculations, if productivity is hit by even half a percent, the salary cost can be as much as seven figures in a City or Canary Wharf skyscraper – more expensive than even the world’s greatest personal trainer.
“We want to help people understand how this kind of data intelligence and software service can be put at the heart of property management,” says Masero.
“We are in 10m sq ft of buildings but at the moment we are still seen more as an engineering tool, whereas we think there is real value in what we do in terms of the core delivery of property and real estate management services.”
Click here to read how Demand Logic wowed the TechTalk Academy.
If you would like to apply for TechTalk Academy 2018, e-mail techtalk@egi.co.uk
To send feedback, e-mail Samantha.McClary@egi.co.uk or tweet @Samanthamcclary or @estatesgazette
