_Facilitating modern building management with CIM
Knight Frank operates multiple complex building portfolios and manages numerous vendors and contractors on behalf of our clients. Our Facilities Management teams often rely upon the expertise of these third parties to ensure buildings are operating at their peak performance, however this can lead to high operational costs.
Our key challenges were managing multiple vendors and contractors, reducing operational costs, gaining transparency into issues, improving tenant comfort, optimising energy use and increasing sustainability performance.
"We needed a technology solution to help our facility management teams manage complex asset portfolios more efficiently and cost effectively", said Nidal Mechhawi, Head of Facilities Management, NSW.
Buildings generate a wealth of data that when unlocked by building analytics, can help to drive better decision making and improve operational performance.
To harness these opportunities within its own portfolio, Knight Frank engaged CIM as our preferred building analytics provider to help manage and uplift the operational performance of our small-to-medium sized property assets in Australia.
CIM transforms building operations by combining building analytics, machine learning and technical engineering support into real-time, data-driven insights, empowering owners and operators to maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of their portfolio to improve asset value, tenant comfort and sustainability.
CIM’s building analytics technology and world-class customer support team is helping some of the largest commercial real estate and facilities management companies to rapidly transform building operations and deliver greater value for tenants and shareholders.
By deploying CIM’s PEAK platform across a commercial portfolio of 12 managed sites, Knight Frank is facilitating greater transparency and control over plant and equipment performance to drive efficiency, sustainability and thermal comfort improvements for multiple building owners.
CIM's award-winning PEAK platform integrates building intelligence, machine learning and technical engineering support to improve efficiency, sustainability and comfort across Knight Frank's property portfolio. PEAK was recognised as “Best in Class” by the CSIRO following a 24-month independent evaluation of building analytics technologies.
PEAK simplifies and accelerates the end-to-end process of fault detection, diagnosis and problem resolution, automatically collects and monitors live building data, and leverages algorithms to pinpoint, highlight and prioritise inefficiencies, facilitates a collaborative workflow with stakeholders to quickly resolve issues, and provides visibility and insight to optimise site and portfolio performance.
Knight Frank’s Facilities Management teams now use the PEAK platform to take a smarter, data-driven approach to building operations, in partnership with CIM’s customer success team of engineering experts, who provide the right advice on building tuning, optimisation, maintenance and CAPEX planning.
"By digitising the facility management side of our building operations, we are able to continually meet and often exceed our objectives of reducing energy consumption and costs, improving thermal comfort, and streamlining day-to-day operations for our facility managers", said Nidal.
Since early 2018, PEAK has proactively identified more than 2,000 faults and tuning opportunities, provided diagnosis and resolution insights, and improved contractor and building management team workflows by helping manage contractors on Knight Frank’s behalf.
The platform generated AUD$204,000 (957 tCO2) of realised energy savings and demand reductions across Knight Frank’s Australian assets in two years, reducing peak demand on one building alone by 23%.
One of these buildings was 309 George Street, Sydney. In partnership with the City of Sydney and Knight Frank, CIM’s building analytics solution was deployed at 309 George Street to digitise operations, improve energy performance and increase the building’s NABERS rating.
PEAK was connected to a network of 502 streaming points, and 374 monitoring rules were applied across the data collected from these points. CIM’s engineers collaborated with Knight Frank’s onsite teams to quickly rectify the faults and tuning opportunities picked up by PEAK’s rules, and to implement other key initiatives and recommendations identified.
Within six months, CIM and Knight Frank successfully optimised building operational performance at 309 George Street, leading to a 17% reduction in electricity consumption, a 42% reduction in gas consumption, a 19% increase in thermal comfort and a NABERS rating increase from 3 to 4 stars.
"Thermal comfort for tenants and visitors is now much more consistent. At one site, CIM helped maintain an average thermal comfort rating of 96%, which means temperatures are maintained between 21-24°C across the entire building 96% of the time. This is the best performing building from a comfort perspective of any CIM site", said Scott Beauman, Senior Engineering Manager at CIM.
Through ongoing collection and analysis of building data across the portfolio, CIM will assist Knight Frank to reduce planned maintenance, move to a predictive maintenance regime, and drive smarter, data-driven CAPEX planning.
"Our partnership with CIM is helping us to cement Knight Frank's industry reputation as a standout facility management company. It also strengthens our competitive edge in the market by enhancing the experience for our tenants, which helps to attract and retain key building portfolio accounts", said Nidal.
For further information, please contact:
Nidal Mechhawi
Director, Head of Facilities Management, NSW
Asset Management Services
+61 435 908 601