The intelligent building technology business is going back to school. Up until now the business has been product driven by a need to ‘shift boxes’ to system integrators. The vain hope that it joins up later is always someone else’s headache – usually the building owner or facilities manager who often has to pay for bolt-on integration to bring together the BMS, security etc.

End users have traditionally adopted a pick and mix approach driven by cost differentials with hundreds of suppliers and resellers chasing scraps of margin from commodity sales. Their sales spiel says that the kit does X, Y and Z, but little or no thought has been given to the A, B and C – the building blocks of what the end user is trying to achieve.

What intelligent building technology requires is a more joined up and integrated solution-driven approach, and one where more value is placed upon the benefits it brings to the finished building than the functionality of the individual components.

Our industry is moving towards converged building technology – the open systems approach where control is placed in the hands of the user to maximise the occupier’s comfort and internal environment while reducing impact on the external environment - the carbon dioxide emissions that make commercial buildings the UK’s biggest polluters.

To achieve this, the entire industry has to change its mind set. The architects, consultants, developers and specifiers need to understand the balance between economic and environment issues and understand that they are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the opposite is true. Good building management from day one will save businesses millions of pounds while, at the same time, protecting the planet.

At our end of the business, we need to do two things. Firstly continue to educate upwards so that customers and end users understand the bigger picture and that reducing costs on a build is not just about specifying the cheapest deal. At Tour Andover Controls, we are now working more and more with architects and specifiers at the ground level to make sure that all the systems join up and talk to each other throughout the life of the building.

The second part of the education is an internal lesson – targeting the multiple layers of suppliers to get them working together to provide the right solutions and to ensure that open systems do what they say on the tin.

We have developed a philosophy of working closely with our key partners and our approach has been like that of the systems we promote - open and honest. We are encouraging them to think outside and beyond the box that they would traditionally try to promote in isolation, and to do this effectively we must change our management strategy to promote this dual route approach.

This approach is reinvigorating and de-commoditising the market. We are working on rationalising and consolidating our partners to form high-level strategic collaborations based upon their capability, accreditation and their future business strategies. The rationale is that by adopting a common approach and working together to promote open systems, all parties will benefit.

So how does it work to best effect? Our partners are systems integrators or ‘system solution houses’, experts who engineer solutions in their own right but who have also been trained in all aspects of our product portfolio. This allows them to confidently specify Tour Andover Controls technology alongside those of our competitors when quoting for work based upon their capability to design the best solution rather than simply cut the price. Our ideal partners are therefore people with a clear business strategy that is moving them up the food chain – away from moving boxes and towards promoting the best solutions for the client.

This means that partners can tender for the work on big contracts in their own right because they know TAC, our systems, our way of working and our services. Furthermore they understand that the partnership will result in long-term business collaboration that allows their business to prosper.

An example of this would be the approach we adopted at Colchester Barracks, where we are providing an open system approach to security, integration and BMS. Here we are the lead contractor for the integrated building management system working directly into Sir Robert McAlpine who, via this new transparent approach, has access to any number of accredited partners who can supply equipment and labour to the standards specified by the business development team. This means they are able to source the best product for the job, which does not necessarily have to be ours, and that the end user is not tied to any one supplier for installation or service. Provided the right skills levels are in place and the price is competitive, we can specify the list from which the main contractor chooses which ultimately keeps control within the partnership team.

We believe that we have created specific opportunities for our preferred suppliers to work in a transparent, best practice environment and that this is an intelligent response to the intelligent building anomaly of pushing boxes. Furthermore our customers and suppliers recognise the advantages of working together and that working together is a lesson and a benchmark for the entire industry.

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