Honeywell hosts an exclusive dialogue on ‘digital transformation of buildings’

Honeywell engaged Realty+ and other leaders from the buildings and real estate industries for an exclusive dialogue on ‘Digital Transformation of Buildings’ at the ITC Maratha, Mumbai. The round table dialogue provided a platform to discuss and define the future of building technology in India while addressing the issues and challenges faced by building owners and operators. According to India Brand Equity Foundation, real estate sector in India is expected to reach a market size of US$1 trillion by 2030 from US$ 120 billion in 2017 and contribute to 13 per cent of the country’s GDP by 2025. Accelerated urbanization, rapid migration and the rise of population in the major cities have led to the boost in demand for commercial realty. The arrival of the Internet of Things and smart technologies in a growing digital world is leading the commercial real estate industry toward automated centralized control, with the long-term goal of achieving fully self-operating autonomous buildings. Eminent industry leaders from top real estate/corporate real estate, companies, and consultants like Subhash Patil, Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Harish Vellat, Leader, Small Medium and Corporate business, Microsoft India, came together to discuss the need for digital transformation in Operational Technology to achieve greater productivity, reduce costs, and enhance the environment of building occupants. Tamara Adams, Global Vice President, Sales, Marketing and Services, Honeywell Connected Buildings, moderated the dialogue. “The commercial real estate industry has remained unchanged for years. It has been slow to innovate, relying on traditional methods of building operations. Building owners and operators must understand the potential of technology and the need to adopt smarter solutions to bring in top-to-bottom visibility into operations to modify their business models and processes to make the most of their technology investments,” shared Adams. Currently, many building portfolio owners have multiple disconnected systems in each building. Often these systems do not communicate with and are not compatible with each other, leading to manual maintenance, data trapped in proprietary systems, disconnected teams and systems, over- or underutilized space, and poor occupant experience. “Transformation is not ripping and replacing legacy systems and processes with new technologies and disrupting value chains. We’ve created a platform that can co-exist with a building’s existing enterprise framework and system while improving the overall operations of a building or building fleet,” Adams added. According to Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and Vestian report, the Indian real estate sector recorded investments worth USD 25.7 billion during the period 2015-2018 while the first half of 2019, witnessed an investment of approx. USD 2.7 billion. The commercial segment accounted for bulk of the real estate investment in the country since 2016 i.e. 50 per cent of the total investment value during 2015-2019. Foreign funds with USD 16.7 billion investments accounted for 59 per cent of the total real estate investment during the period 2015-2019. Mumbai accounted for nearly 36 per cent of the total investment i.e. USD 10 billion during this period. CBRE reports that the office market space in India crossed the 600 million sq. ft. milestone in H1 2019, with Bengaluru, Mumbai and the National Capital Region being the top three markets*. Office leasing crossed 30 million sq. ft. during the first half of 2019 with Bengaluru, Hyderabad, NCR and Mumbai accounting for about 80 percent of the leasing in the country. Speaking on the sidelines of the round table dialogue, Siddhartha Chatterjee, Sales Leader, Honeywell Connected Buildings, India shares, “The commercial real estate sector in Mumbai is poised for growth backed by institutional investors and the increased demand for office space. There is an increase in rental values in areas like BKC, Navi Mumbai, Eastern Suburbs and Western Suburbs.” “It will be crucial for building owners and operators to build data-driven enterprises to reap cost savings that affect the corporate bottom line. Achieving operational efficiency will be the key differentiator,” Chatterjee added. The dialogue concluded by establishing the importance of implementing a holistic solution as companies look to digitize and better connect their operations while reducing costs. When fully deployed, Honeywell Forge for Buildings aims to help reduce the operating expense of a building portfolio by up to 25 percent by providing visibility, monitoring and control of all building systems and processes across an entire portfolio of buildings. The Cloud-based software aims to transform the way a variety of companies in India collect, analyze and act on data by optimizing their enterprise on a single screen using advanced data analytics. Honeywell Forge for Buildings converts massive quantities of data from equipment, processes and people into intuitive, actionable insights that enable monitoring of enterprise operations from a single screen. Through predictive analytics it helps to identify maintenance issues in advance, enabling workers to be more productive, proficient and safe; reduce costs; and increase productivity.