The past months, we’ve been talking with a lot of organizations who want to get started with measuring real-time space use, but are struggling with the financial side of things. How do I get funding for my project? How do I make sure to get a return on investment? What can I do on a small scale? Thankfully, there are solutions for this – and one of them is looking at opening hours.
Bart Valks
Towards a living campus or 24/7 campus
A very interesting case to look at is the opening hours for buildings. Campuses usually contain many buildings that each have their own opening hours. And these opening hours often extend to beyond the regular 9-5 rhythm. It is not uncommon for universities to have many buildings open from 7AM – 10PM on weekdays, and also have weekend opening hours! Furthermore, during exam periods there can also be extended opening hours to facilitate studying on campus.
On campus, there is often a tendency towards retaining the existing opening hours, or even extending them based on a “living campus” or “24/7 campus” trend. Just as with regular space use discussions, you might be facing difficulty as an Estates Manager in arguing against extended opening hours. Campus users argue that there is a necessity: PhD researchers often work on weekends in the faculty, and students need a quiet space to study. As you already know, we are not questioning these demands; instead, we are questioning how much space is available, and what is actually used?
Concentrating capacity to limit opening hours
As you likely already know, opening hours are an important cost driver in Estates management. The decision to open a building on a weekend day means that energy is needed for heating, ventilation, air conditioning and lighting; that there has to be staff present at the service desk, that security needs to open and close the building, and that the building has to be cleaned. Consequently, opening a large faculty building every Saturday or Sunday might cost your institution in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of euros every year.
This is exactly where we suggest to look for opportunity. What if you could move from 3 buildings that are open each Saturday to just 1 building, resulting in significant annual cost savings? Even if you would move from opening one energy-inefficient building to an energy efficient building, that would save you significant resources. The only thing that you need to do, is show the data to your stakeholders to them that this decision is possible.
From real-time data to insight to action
By using our PLEQ Flow sensor at each building entrance, you get a 98% accurate picture of how many people are in your building each day. If you do this for half a year, you will know with certainty how many people use your buildings on average during the weekends. And with this insight, you can confidently conclude that you can accommodate the campus users in a reduced number of buildings open in weekends. From a living or 24/7 campus, this is also more desirable: isn’t it better to have one open building that is used intensively and where people see and meet each other, than to spread out users across many buildings with low utilization and empty corridors with unlit offices?
Numerous institutions have started their real-time data collection with us with this business case. Some of them have even used the cost savings from this case to finance their next project. And because these cost savings are annual, this gives them the opportunity to scale quickly!
Are you curious what this business case looks like, or would you like us to help you figure out what it would look like for you? Contact us now at info@pleqcampus.nl!
