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The theme for our initiatives in 2018…leverage
technology to generate data that can be interpreted
to drive improved business processes, to enhance the

client experience or strengthen cost efficiencies.

the end-to-end work flow in this way be interpreted to drive improved lar must be competitive, the answer
through one system provides access business processes, to enhance the is not immediately apparent. At a
to important data. Beyond managing client experience or strengthen cost minimum, we are moving down the
individual service requests, this data efficiencies. path of enabling the infrastructure to
becomes meaningful information allow the collection of data. We have
that track trends and address any There are two key areas of focus. already started to get requests from
root causes. First, we are implementing a com- some of our larger clients, who are
mon electronic procurement platform interested in accessing this data to
A second initiative involved leverag- across all our properties. By doing start to build their own applications
ing data to improve business pro- so, there will be natural efficiencies to promote their employee satisfac-
cesses to sustain cost efficiencies. in automating the manual process tion. If we can understand which
It was essentially our first major of handling thousands of invoices at core set of applications will eventu-
national Smart Building initiative. each property; but more importantly, ally be a common client expectation,
Given that the cost of energy is one we will have easy access to all of we can leverage our scale to pro-
of the highest spend categories, our our spend data across the entire vide those to all of our clients, with
teams are always looking for ways to portfolio. By understanding the scale greater consistency and effective-
improve. Historically, teams reviewed of our various spend categories, we ness, rather than each one of them
energy bills to understand equip- can build regional or national con- building their own.
ment issues or other inefficiencies. tracts, allowing us to build bigger and
Although opportunities can be identi- broader strategic vendor relation- What technology trends do you
fied, this approach was very reactive, ships. see having the most impact on the
and the inefficiency and extra cost industry over the next three years
has already been incurred. We will also continue to build and and why?
enable our Smart Building platform.
To be more proactive, we imple- As we evolve our algorithms and It’s all about data; collecting it, ana-
mented a program where we now col- business processes to optimize our lyzing it, interpreting the results, and
lect real-time data from over 200,000 proactive energy management capa- taking action to drive a business
building equipment sensors. This bilities, we need to continue to under- goal. This is nothing new, but with
data then feeds a program of algo- stand the most meaningful areas for the explosive growth of the IoT, the
rithms that generates faults or alerts selective investment in this arena. opportunities are growing exponen-
to let us know when there is an equip- With the explosive growth of the tially. This is already happening, and
ment malfunction or other energy Internet of Things, the opportunity to we are already underway on related
issue. Our team can now proactively collect data that was previously not initiatives. The big change to come,
investigate and address these faults, conceivable seems endless. however, will be in the increasing
rather than letting the inefficiency automation of the ‘analyzing and
fester, and eventually show up as a There seems to be a plethora of interpreting’ phases of this pro-
higher cost on the next energy bill. applications or ‘use cases’ on how cess with Artificial Intelligence and
to interpret this data to drive evolv- Machine Learning. As we continue
What are your highest priority tech- ing client expectations. Which ones to get more data from more sources,
nology initiatives in 2018 and what do we pursue? How do we ensure our business processes and opera-
are the drivers behind those initia- appropriate safeguards related to tor skill sets will need to continue to
tives? cyber-security? The ROI for Energy evolve, given there will be a lot less
Management was relatively easy to effort in optimizing data algorithms,
The theme for our initiatives in 2018 quantify; however, it is not always and more on executing on the action-
is the same as 2017; leverage tech- obvious for many applications. In an able insights.
nology to generate data that can environment where every capital dol-

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