Case Studies

FE ATURES may – june 2016 gb&d 79 bottom line losses. They needed to cut costs in order to survive, so they looked at their second largest expense, which is what real estate and occupancy tends to be for most organizations." Vivadelli led the team that developed the workspace management tool that helped bring IBM back from the brink of insolvency. He started AgilQuest based around the concept, now commonly referred to as office hoteling, which routinely cuts corporate real estate portfolios by 30-40%, saving his clients millions in wasted ex- penses—while making an equal dent in re- source consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. "How can an asset that is being used 50% of the time be called sustainable?" Vivadelli implores. "If it's only used 50% of the time, it's using 50% too much materi- al, creating 50% more construction waste, releasing 50% more wastewater runoff, con- suming 50% more energy, and producing 50% more CO2 than it should." The over whelming success of the AgilQuest model has not made Vivadel- li complacent. He's now expanding the concept to link a multitude of potential workspaces in every major city of the world through a new cloud-based platform known simply as AgilQuest.com, which will be released this summer. Rather than functioning as a discrete system within each corporate or government real estate portfolio, the new platform will go beyond those walls to allow workers to find suit- able space when and where they need it, whether that's up the street from their house at a café, or in the well-appointed video conference room of a global corpo- ration. In essence, AgilQuest.com is a way for businesses to monetize the excess space that they have by renting it out to anyone who needs it whenever it is unoccupied. Vivadelli sees this new initiative not as just another iteration of his core business model, but an approach that will revolu- tionize the way people work. "It's like Airb- nb for office space, but it's more than that," says Vivadelli. "Who would have thought that a company could have legitimized hitchhiking? It's called Uber. Who would think that they would share their home with somebody else and charge them a fee to stay there? Three years ago you would say you're absolutely mad. But now it's not unreasonable to think that a compa- ny with excess office space would share it with workers from outside the company for a fee." Clearly, Vivadelli and his team are not afraid to think big. The Busin ess Case fo r Smart Buildings an d Happy Workers One key to both the business case for down- sizing corporate real estate portfolios, and for the impact that it has on sustainability metrics, is the degree to which it is inte- grated with other efficiency-oriented ini- tiatives—namely, those summed up in the phrase "smart buildings." Vivadelli calls the approach "smart occupancy." AgilQuest's technologies are increas- ingly able to interface with building auto- mation systems, which are strengthened by the data the company's software can provide, and vice-versa. "More and more buildings are being built with layers of networks—heating and cooling, lighting, emergency systems—and they are becoming very smart, they're becoming very aware," says Torrance Houlihan, AgilQuest's VP of product. "We're starting to leverage that, to communicate with the building, talk to the turnstile, talk to the lights, talk to the heating and cooling systems, and get information from them." The General Services Administra- tion, another federal agency that utilizes AgilQuest software, recently integrated the building automation system of its Washing- ton D.C. headquarters with the OnBoard and Commander BI platforms as part of a major renovation and technology upgrade. With the new system, each time an employ- ee swipes their badge at the entry turnstile, OnBoard registers their presence in the building and sets a sequence of behind the scenes events in motion. The building automation system reads the schedule for that employee and primes itself to bring the various spaces that he or she will use that day up to a comfortable temperature, just in time for them to arrive. If they go into a conference room where they have a meeting scheduled, a sensor in the room turns on the lights, which in turn informs the OnBoard system that the per- son has indeed used the space that they re- served. If the meeting were to be cancelled at the last minute, the building automation system would inform OnBoard that no one was present, and the space would automat- ically become available again on the reser- vation system. Assuming the meeting does happen, five minutes before it is scheduled to end, the lights briefly dim to signal every- one in the room that another group may be waiting to use the space, so they are sure to finish on time. If no one else is scheduled for the space, the lights and HVAC turn off once the room's sensors detect that ev- eryone has left, and all of the data about how the space was actually used, versus how its use was anticipated, is logged by both the building automation system and AgilQuest's Commander BI. Investing in such a high level of work- place utilization precision pays for itself very quickly: the GSA cut its operational costs by more than 50%—a total of $32 million annually in combined savings on leased space and associated service costs. The integration with smart building tech- nologies has yielded an additional 10% an- nual savings on energy costs. In the process, the GSA has saved 16 million kilowatts of energy annually, and avoided the omissions of 16,000 metric tons of CO2. Houlihan points out that a mobile work- force is also "fundamentally more resilient than when you assign people to one place." Employees can work from home, and with AgilQuest's upcoming public access reser- vation system, people will have access to a large network of other places to work. "It enhances resiliency and business continu- ity in the events of unforeseen closures resulting from fire, terrorism, natural di- sasters, or other acts of God," says Houlihan. "People can quickly find another place to go to work and continue to deliver value to their customers." Finally, there is another less direct, hard- er to quantify benefit that Houlihan refers to as "personal ROI." As someone who fre- quently works from his home office, which is an hour and a half drive from AgilQuest headquarters, he speaks from personal ex- perience when noting, "It's a huge benefit to not have to spend three hours a day in a car. If an organization can offer a better ex- perience to a person by letting them choose where and when they are going to work, by letting them see who is coming in, making sure that they have the right technology for them and making sure that the right space is available to them, it's really a much more compelling story." That's definitely a story that attracts to- day's most talented workers, which is per- haps the most important business strategy of all. An office building is no longer just a box for employers to stick their workers into. Today's top minds see work as what you do, not as a place you go every day. gb&d FE ATURES AGILQUES T GSA Transformation: By the N um berS 50%: percentage by which GSA cut its operational costs $32m: in combined savings on leased space and associated service costs as a result of cutting operational costs 10%: percentage of additional energy costs that the integration with smart building technologies yielded "How can an asset that is being used 50% of the time be called sustainable? If it's only used 50% of the time, it's using 50% too much material, creating 50% more construction waste, releasing 50% more wastewater runoff, consuming 50% more energy, and producing 50% more CO 2 than it should." john vivadelli ceo & foun der, agilquest PHOTOS: COURTESY OF AGILQUEST The GSA recently integrated the building automation system of its Washington D.C. headquarters with the OnBoard and Commander BI platforms as part of a major renovation and technology upgrade. may – june 2016 78 gbdmagazine.com

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