From the Backbone to the Nerve Centre

Why the future of smart buildings starts with elevators.

The arguments for making buildings and cities smart are well known. Smart buildings are greener, more energy efficient and more cost effective. These buildings give their managers and owners a wealth of information about how they are being used, empowering them to make informed decisions. And they make tenants more productive by gathering data relating to their behaviour and “responding” intelligently to their needs. In the post-COVID-19 era, there is an urgent need for buildings to become smart, since question marks over working and lifestyle trends remain. But how do we go about making buildings smarter?

Making a building function truly as a single entity requires the installation of many diverse Internet of Things (IoT) devices throughout the building — in corridors and rooms, at entrances and exits and in critical equipment and systems. These might include sensors capable of monitoring air quality, daylight, temperature, motion, footfall, cameras that could recognise the right faces, voice assistants that could recognise the right voices and lighting or window blinds that will respond to the time of day or the weather. In existing buildings, these will all have to be retrofitted, though the buildings of the future may be built smart from the ground up.

There are challenges here. For one, “agnostic” technology — not just IoT devices but analytics tools that can make data intelligible, and therefore usable — is needed so that all buildings in an owner’s portfolio can be made smart. Oligopolistic organisations, such as those that exist in the building maintenance space, can be reluctant to share data or discuss best practices with their competitors. Within buildings, silos and hierarchies, separating building maintenance services and building managers and limiting communication and collaboration will have to be brought down so that a given building can be viewed from above, as a “whole.” Positive change, then, both technological and cultural, is required for smart buildings to fulfil their potential.

But that does not mean we cannot make a start — or have not already started — down the path to a truly smart built environment. A handful of ambitious PropTech brands are leading the way and rapidly transforming the sector. Real change is already taking place, and much of this is concentrated in elevators.

You might well ask, “Why elevators?” The answer is simply that they are the logical place to begin in making a building smarter because lifts are both critical and strategic to how a building runs. If a lift breaks down, it will cause bottlenecks and the over-use of any remaining lifts, and it can send tenants going up and down several or even dozens of flights of stairs at a huge cost to tenant satisfaction and overall productivity. More than any other part of a building by a long shot, faulty elevators affect tenants the most, and the cost per hour of lift downtime is astronomical. Lifts are also notoriously vulnerable to breakdowns, and, let’s face it, nobody wants to find themselves stuck in a lift.

If a smart elevator stops between floors or is operational with the doors open, it will trigger an immediate red alert, and that enables a fast response from engineers. In an ordinary lift, the occupants rely on a mandatory phone system if there’s a breakdown or if occupants are stuck between floors. Sadly, in our experience, these phone systems can fail, or it can take a long time for an engineer to arrive.

Using data gathered by IoT, building owners can understand how lifts are used and whether they are in need of repair. They can then dispatch maintenance teams before a breakdown has a chance to occur, and move from an expensive replacement model to a far-less-expensive (and greener) maintenance model. Owners can almost guarantee that vertical transportation within their buildings will be continuous and fluent, and that has implications for profitability, forecasting and planning.

As the spine of the building, elevators can also give owners a good idea, if not a perfect representation, of how the wider building is being used. Using the data gathered through IoT and made usable through analytics, those owners or managers can get a sense of overall traffic patterns and occupancy — something almost none of them have. Only co-working spaces reliably track occupancy, since it is an integral part of their model and profitability.

Without an idea of occupancy, building managers and owners cannot understand churn; this is need-to-know information at this uncertain time, especially as businesses consider how they are going to return to the workplace post-pandemic, and with a move toward greater flexibility and sustainability in the workplaces, the more intelligent our buildings, the better they are likely to respond to our needs.

At WeMaintain, we have a pricing model for elevators where instead of charging a flat fee for lift maintenance, we charge based on usage, a little like insurance for a car based on the number of miles a driver is expected to cover in a year. This adaptive model potentially offers savings to building owners if the elevators are not in constant use, or there is a downturn in traffic, such as we have seen during the pandemic. To offer this, we have data representing normal usage of elevators (outside of the COVID-19 era) taking into account the size of the building, the number of lifts, the occupancy and the likely number of trips per day. In this scenario, we charge accordingly, so a large portion of the contract fee is variable.

Models such as this offer operational benefits, in terms of low downtime, greater reactivity and responsiveness to any problems and better service. These models also come with the added benefit of helping managers or owners get to know their building better, laying bare exactly how the occupants use it, and it’s through interrogation of this information that it’s possible to spot wide-reaching efficiencies.

The data PropTech companies collect from elevators is mostly about the doors opening and closing, the acceleration speeds and the function of different parts of the elevator. But we can also use people sensors, so we know precisely how many people are coming in and out of the lifts and on which floors.

If smart cities start with smart buildings, and smart buildings start with smart elevators, then the importance of the elevator is clear to see.

Usually, to conduct a traffic study within a building, you have to hire consultants. The consultants might come for a few days and manually count the number of people coming in and out of the lifts at differing times, and the floors that are most used. It’ll cost a few thousand pounds to commission, and it’ll only be a snapshot in time.

Furthermore, if you put actions in place to optimise lift usage as a result of that traffic study and if you want to measure the results of those changes, then you’re going to have to hire those consultants again and do another study to measure the data. This can be costly and not wholly accurate, because, again, it will be taking a snapshot of time. By contrast, smart devices offer building managers and owners similar information in real time, 24 hours per day, seven days a week. This means, if you want to implement small changes, you can measure the results instantly and at no added cost.

A real-time benefit of this kind of information, for example, is a workplace with flexible working where every employee has a desk or works from home some of the time. Because of the data from the elevators, the managers will know that over the Christmas period, perhaps based on the last two years’ worth of data, the business only needs one floor open rather than the usual two. As a result of this, they might decide to heat just one floor and ask all employees to work there, thereby cutting down on heating costs and saving energy.

The beauty of elevators is they can be programmed to meet the needs of building occupants. You can programme parking floors and set a schedule. For instance, you can programme an elevator to automatically return to the ground level after completing a trip from 6 to 10 a.m., and you can make sure it is on the fifth floor from 5 to 8 p.m. The lift engineers at WeMaintain have access to usage data, can see what schedule is best to fit the actual usage and can programme the parking floors and ideal locations for lifts accordingly.

There are ever greater synergies to be leveraged once we also install IoT into heating, ventilation, air conditioning systems, automated doors and escalators. But even without IoT in place across the building, you can use occupancy and usage data from the elevators to adjust those systems accordingly. If there’s no one in the building, then these systems won’t kick in, and this will save money and energy. In commercial buildings, air conditioners are set up to a schedule, but these could and should be adjusted dynamically based on occupancy.

In the future, we think we can go one step further and use elevator systems to get feedback from the occupants of lifts about the service and general working of the building while they travel up and down. This information doesn’t have to be about lifts. It could take the form of a smart screen with a survey that asks questions and obtains data about other systems in the building and how they are being used. In this way, the IoT elevator becomes a service that not only takes the occupants where they need to go, but also helps building owners and managers understand what is and isn’t working with the building, turning it from the backbone to the nerve centre.

One of the key reasons for making elevators smarter, in addition to the obvious benefits mentioned above, is because we’re heading for a dearth of lift engineers. Historically, it has not been seen as an attractive profession for younger engineers, and many existing lift engineers are set to retire in the next 10 to 20 years. This might be because traditional elevator operators have been overburdening lift engineers, asking them to manage too many elevators or buildings and not compensating them appropriately. One of the things we hope to do at WeMaintain is to make this job more attractive and accessible to new talent by bringing in young engineers we can train from the ground up and whose skills can be used to combine a range of IoT systems throughout their careers.

If smart cities start with smart buildings, and smart buildings start with smart elevators, then the importance of the elevator is clear to see. Smart elevators do not just show building owners the potential of a fully IoT-equipped building but offer a glimpse of how our world might look were it to become fully smart and the intelligent decisions that access to this wealth of data would offer us.

The future of smart building is really about putting together the data generated by the traditionally very siloed categories of equipment that offer information no one is tapping into. We can already manage the energy consumption of lifts (although this is usually negligible compared to the carbon footprint of heating and ventilation systems), but with fully-IoT integrated buildings across all systems, we’ll be much nearer to delivering carbon-neutral operations in our built environments.

Knowledge really is power, because with it we can choose efficiency and better operations both for people and the planet. Lifts have already started the journey toward greater sustainability and efficiency, and the other parts of our buildings are set to follow suit. The only way is up.