Making our workplaces smarter

As visitors enter the Accenture office building at Castellana 85 in the heart of Madrid’s financial district, they often notice the open layout. Work areas, canteens, hallways, and stairwells are interconnected with artful lines, curves, living green walls, and other architectural elements, instilling a sense of comfort, inclusion, and collaboration.

The building also has “smart” capabilities. It is aware of how many people are inside, informing adjustments in heating and cooling to optimize temperature and energy consumption. Digital signage shows real-time and predicted future occupancy in canteens, enabling people to choose the best time for a break based on their crowd preferences. Using data from indoor air quality sensors, building managers can make adjustments to maintain a healthy environment. Restroom door sensors count door swings, informing frequency of cleaning. These features are just the beginning of what the building can do.

Our smart buildings initiative

Castellana 85 is one of 20 pilot projects in Spain, Portugal, the UK, and the U.S. where Accenture is deploying, testing, and demonstrating and suite of smart building technologies in collaboration with several vendors. A smart building uses connected sensors, hardware, and software to gather and analyze data on various building attributes and parameters, directing data-driven actions to optimize the building’s environment and operations.

While the smart technologies vary somewhat across our pilots, sites share several characteristics. Sensors monitor air quality, occupancy, waste and recycling, and other aspects of building operations. A centralized software platform collects, integrates, and analyzes building data and sends alerts to our workplace teams, who contact building managers to adjust operational parameters. In the future, platforms will use machine learning to automate many adjustments.

Extensive benefits

Our initiative is motivated by the many benefits of smart buildings:

• Better real estate management: Occupancy data improves understanding of how building spaces are used. This informs decisions on efficient use of space as well as better designed spaces that lead to more inspiration and collaboration.
  
  
• Financial value: By operating buildings more efficiently, we spend less on energy, water, cleaning services, and other expenses.
  
  
• Employee wellness and retention: Smart buildings provide our people with more comfortable workspaces that support their physical and mental well-being, productivity, and creativity.
  
  
• Sustainability: Building operations worldwide account for 30% of global final energy consumption and 26% of global energy-related emissions. Scaling smart building technologies across our real estate portfolio can support our sustainability goal to achieve net-zero emissions by 2025.
  
  
• Go-to-market opportunities: By collaborating with our vendor partners to demonstrate the value of smart building technologies in our own buildings, we can develop innovative market solutions, showcase them to prospective clients, and ultimately help them make their workplaces smarter.

A pathway to business transformation

Last year, the pilots generated immediate cost savings. Now, we are extending their reach. A global rollout of smart building technologies is under development, with additional deployments planned at sites in Singapore, France, China, Australia, and India. We have also implemented predictive models that correlate different data streams to forecast CO2 levels, temperatures, and occupancy, helping to further optimize operations.

By making our buildings smarter across our real estate portfolio, we’re cultivating more engaging, inspiring, and collaborative workplaces that can adapt to the changing needs of our people and our business. This sets the stage for greater innovation, new business models and—more broadly—business transformation.