Smart building automation: platforms vs apps

The Current Climate of Workplace Technology

Right now, you’ve likely got at least 30 apps on your phone, most likely a mix of transport apps, banking/savings apps, browsers, and a few social/entertainment apps (depending on how much you like to procrastinate).

I think we’ve all gotten used to clunky workflows that involve opening and closing lots of apps to get something done, and we just accept this poor experience. When posting content to our Instagram and LinkedIn, to get the best photo, there might be three different apps to select, enhance, and edit the content before uploading, and then tracking the engagement via a fourth app.

This sounds like a convoluted process because it is. In today’s workplace environment, it is a similar state of affairs. Employee experience in the workplace today consists of interactions with a plethora of apps and IoT systems, it impacts negatively on the user experience because they aren’t communicating, integrating, or adapting to the needs of the user.

The Issue with Smart Building Apps

Each app in this convoluted process is like a chain link. If one breaks or is too slow to respond, it affects the whole process. Each app in the chain also takes up memory space; both in your phone and your mind. Swapping between these apps gives you opportunities to get sidetracked or distracted.

These points are bad enough if it’s personal tasks, but if you have to go through this process at any point in your workday, clunky workflows become a huge issue, the wasted time and lack of quality user experience can be detrimental to the employee experience.

For example, if I was a valued client who’s been invited to your workplace, I would receive a calendar invite with location and time. Then, I need to figure out the commute, building access, lift access, and floor access. When I arrive at the building, someone from your organization needs to greet me in person or I need to check-in with reception. We could simplify this process and remove several undesirable interactions.

Through PlaceOS smart building integrations, when you extend an invite to a client, we trigger additional actions to ease the process. The visitor receives an email with a QR Code for access, wayfinding information, and guest wifi details. When they arrive in the building, user location service integrations send a notification to the hosts to let them know their guest has arrived. This is just one example of many in your workplace that PlaceOS can unlock.

It’s Simple, Smart Building Platforms

Like life, it comes down to communication. A platform like PlaceOS joins all these points of data and does the querying for you. This creates a streamlined user experience and saves time. Instead of controlling the technology in a built environment separately, PlaceOS can provide a harmonious single source of truth for many digital experiences including room and resource booking, energy management, AV control systems, visitor management, space management, environmental control, IoT devices, IoT sensors, secure access, parking management, asset tracking, and people finding.

The beauty of a modular platform like PlaceOS is that it can integrate with everything and automate anything. This means that besides providing a great user interface for a variety of technology, it can also set up automated smart triggers to control the technology within your building.

A smart building platform can also capture and compile all of your smart building analytics to provide clear and concise, data-driven insights. The result is the ability to measure your building performance, your workplace performance, and make changes in real-time to adapt the user experience to suit the needs of your employees. It’s what good smart building technology should be.

Aside from the time savings from automation, integrating all the technology within a physical space to create a unified workplace user experience for that space provides huge interstitial time savings because you and your teams are no longer shifting between apps to complete your tasks.

This has a snowball effect over time, don’t ignore the benefits. If you want to learn more about our smart building solutions, take a look.