Smart Tech Gets P&G Their Money Back

CHICAGO—Property managers wondering whether they can afford the expense of smart building technology may want to take a look at the latest results of a major pilot program launched by Proctor & Gamble and Jones Lang LaSalle. Larry Bridge, P&G's global facilities and real estate governance manager, told an audience at yesterday's 2013 BUILDINGChicago and Greening the Heartland Conference that installing JLL's cloud-based building management platform at a hefty slice of their corporate portfolio paid for itself through energy savings in only three months.

“That really did a lot to get [corporate] finance on board,” he said. The system, called IntelliCommand, provides 24-hour, seven days per week real-time facility monitoring and control at multiple locations. This allows JLL personnel working in a centralized command center to identify energy savings, ensure automatic work orders get issued and monitor all building systems down to a granular level.

P&G deliberately chose a variety of building types to ensure they understood the smart technology's full potential. Twelve buildings with a total of about 3.2-million-square-feet, or about 20% of the company's portfolio, were wired into IntelliCommand. They included the company's global headquarters campus in Cincinnati; its global healthcare headquarters facilities, including numerous laboratories; a key technical center; and a major mixed-used complex.

And when P&G and JLL recently got together to look at the first 11 months of data, they received a surprise. One of the best rates of return, said Bridge, was at a research and development facility built in the 1960s. The new system allowed the company to save about 13% on energy use, an unexpected result from a facility built in an era when energy conservation was largely unknown. The company also saw a 16% reduction in energy costs in just nine months at another technical center.

Furthermore, P&G found they could even squeeze savings from a building where the company had already focused on promoting energy efficiency. For example, they got an additional 8% from their healthcare facility, Bridge said, even though, of all of their facilities, that was the one where they promoted energy savings. “The pay back on all of this? We're talking months.”

Within those first 11 months, P&G had achieved overall pilot portfolio savings of 10%, or 4,400,000 kilowatt hours—and company officials believe they can find additional savings.

“IntelliCommand is helping us achieve our departmental goal of reducing our energy usage by 20 percent by 2020,” Bridge said.

The AEC conference runs through September 11 at the Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza.