Improve business performance while keeping costs and environmental impact under control. This is the challenge faced by companies in all sectors, caught between the need to preserve margins in a season of growing competition and attention to issues of sustainability, a particularly sensitive issue for customers, who are retail or other companies.
Example in the bank
It is in this scenario that the Intesa Sanpaolo initiative, which focuses on the cloud computing of Azure to improve the performance of its real estate assets and facility management activities and reduce the environmental impact.
The financial group has partnered with Microsoft and Iconic to use the data to proactively identify errors, increase comfort and decrease energy consumption in their buildings, thereby significantly reducing the company’s ecological footprint.
Predictive approach
“We wanted to move from a reactive management of building assets to a predictive and proactive approach based on the data collected from various systems”, he says Giorgio Colosi, real estate and facility senior director di Intesa Sanpaolo.
In addition to implementing solutions based on the internet of things (which allow objects to communicate with each other thanks to sensors, without human intervention) and artificial intelligence, the institute has created the structure called DCRI (Real Estate Data Control Room) called to support continuous innovation in building management processes and increase internal skills.
Iconics intervened to identify and solve the problems related to the energy consumption of buildings. The data visualization solution creates a “digital twin” in which monitoring rules and real-time data are associated with specific real estate assets. In addition, the company’s diagnostic and fault detection technology allows you to customize the standard library of rules to predict equipment failures and advise staff with preventive actions.
The data platform is based on Azure IoT Hub to manage the collection of all data and on Azure Data Factory for monitoring and analysis of the same in real time.
Alert in case of malfunction
In the event of an equipment malfunction, the system generates an automatic ticket indicating the location and other information that allows a quick resolution. Once the problem is resolved, the ticket is automatically closed.
“In the morning it was difficult to heat the building and this involved a huge waste of resources”, says Francesco Peruzzu, real estate and facility senior professional at Intesa Sanpaolo. “The IoT devices measured the air flow and entered the related data into the platform, which then analyzed them, thus identifying the anomalies, allowing us to understand what was happening”.
Then he adds that, thanks to the energy dashboard, in a short time the structure was able to visualize an analysis of the different components of the building, thus locating the anomaly. By comparing the usage data and historical data contained in the dashboard, it was possible to identify the faulty component.
Less costs
Precisely the possibility of detecting anomalies more easily, and therefore of intervening promptly, allows to reduce energy costs. Colosi explains that the analysis on three buildings revealed that the use of Azure and the consultancy of Iconics have made it possible to reduce annual energy consumption by 15%, equal to 2.5 GWh per year. now the goal becomes we will implement these solutions on other buildings to further reduce the energy bill, and at the same time minimize environmental impact.
The bank remains the owner of the data collected by the platform, with all that derives in terms of the value of the privacy asset.
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