Nov 21, 2017Finnish IT solutions company Tieto Corp. has been selling an intelligent building solution that it has deployed at its own facility, using indoor positioning technology from Quuppa. Since installing the solution at its own Helsinki headquarters, the company has seen workers' sick-days decrease, while productivity and sales have risen.
The building-intelligence system allows companies to know where its employees or visitors are located, how the facility is being used, and how to better manage a building or campus and the operations within it accordingly. Approximately 10 companies are either using or piloting the solution, including construction company Skanska, the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare and transportation agency Metropolia.
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Tieto provides IT and engineering services to businesses worldwide, the majority of which are in Nordic countries. The company employs 13,000 workers and has a 50-year history of serving such industries as oil and gas, forestry, health care and the public sector. During the past 18 months, Tieto has been developing, testing and deploying a new service based around the Internet of Things (IoT) and automated data collection, says Tomi Teikko, the company's director of intelligent building. The first Tieto Intelligent Building system released, known as MyOffice, has been deployed by a handful of businesses this year.
MyOffice consists of Tieto's cloud-based software, apps for mobile devices, Quuppa locators, tags to transmit to the locators, and infrared sensors to detect the presence of individuals at desks or other specific locations. The goal is to enable a company to understand how its space is being used, both in real time and historically. In that way, employees could view where their colleagues are located, which meeting rooms are occupied or which desk areas are free for maintenance. Managers can learn more about how space is being utilized, as well as when it could be made more efficient—such as providing more or fewer conference rooms, for instance.
The company started the MyOffice installations at home. It acquired a 21,000-square-meter (226,000-square-foot) Helsinki facility last year that had been previously owned and occupied by Nokia, and installed the MyOffice system to help track the movements of people around the building. The overall goal, Teikko says, "was to help people work in more flexible and modern ways to support ad hoc work."
At its facility, the company set up 500 Quuppa locators around the building that enable it to identify an individual's location within a few feet. Employees and visitors each wear an LD6T Quuppa Tag on a lanyard, while some Quuppa asset tags have been attached to items such as employees' bicycles. To date, about 80 percent of personnel wear the badges (the use of which is voluntary), amounting to around 1,600 workers.
LD6L Quuppa Locators, installed on ceilings, provide coverage around the office areas (from a ceiling of about 9 or 10 feet in height). Rectangular LD7L locators, designed for outdoor use or installation in spaces with higher than 12-meter ceilings, can be side-mounted on walls in areas such as Teito's large atrium.
Quuppa provided assistance with installing and commissioning the system at Tieto's own facility, according to Fabio Belloni, Quuppa's co-founder and general manager, while Tieto now conducts installations at its customer sites itself. "We helped them turn it on and trained their organization," Belloni states. "And after that, they are managing it independently." Tieto also deployed infrared sensors at each desk area to detect when a person is seated at a desk.
As an individual enters the building, his or her unique tag ID number is captured by the Quuppa locators, with built-in Bluetooth transceivers and integrated antennas. The locators forward the data to a server, where Quuppa Positioning Engine (QPE) software identifies the location by measuring the angles of the beacons' transmissions, as received by the locators. That information can then be forwarded to the MyOffice software so that it can be matched with the individual and data related to that location.
For instance, if an individual were to enter a conference room, the software would update that room's status as occupied and display it that way for app users, or for those who signed into the software from another location. But if another worker were searching for an individual, he or she could view in the software that the individual was in a conference room, and thus participating in a meeting.
Additionally, the technology could be used by security, maintenance and housekeeping personnel. Those tasked with cleaning the office, for instance, could access the app to view which areas were unoccupied, as well as for how long, and thus might be available for cleaning. The addition of IR sensors at desks could make that information even more granular, by identifying if anyone were sitting at a specific desk. The MyOffice app could also be used to create orders such as a request for cleaning service in a specific area, or maintenance on a printer or lamp, based on the location of the individual placing the order.
What's more, Teikko says, technology can incorporate other sensor data, such as temperature. For example, if temperature sensors were integrated with the solution, employees could view the average temperature on a map of the office, and identify the best place for them to work based on their own temperature preferences.
The greatest benefit for employees, Teikko says, "is the reduction of unnecessary administrative tasks," such as booking conference rooms, as well as the added comfort and convenience of finding the best place to work, and the locating of coworkers. Since the company moved to its new location and deployed the MyOffice solution, he adds, employee sick days have been reduced by 10 percent. The company is producing more new business innovations, Teikko reports, noting, "We have had the best final sales and profit in four or five years" this year.
Tieto is now exploring the possibility of piloting the building-intelligence solution with customers at health-care facilities and schools. Quuppa beacons are being deployed with a variety of partners around the world. Quuppa Intelligent Locating Systems are used at more than 600 installations throughout 39 countries, Belloni says. The technology is designed to be scalable in a complex environment, such as a busy office.
