IoT concepts and pilots
Emaar and ServeU
Proving what connected facilities could do, before anyone committed to building it.
Executive summary
Emaar and its facilities management arm ServeU wanted to know what connected sensors could do for their buildings before committing to a rollout. Slipstream planned the IoT concepts, designed the pilots and ran them in selected facilities, delivering a proof of concept judged on what facilities teams actually care about: response times and resident satisfaction.
The challenge
- Facilities teams largely learned about issues when a resident reported them, but nobody had established whether sensors would change that in practice.
- A portfolio-wide rollout is an expensive commitment to make on a vendor's promise rather than evidence.
- Occupancy, footfall and facility status were not measured consistently, so there was no baseline to judge a pilot against.
- Whatever was proposed had to convince the internal teams who would live with it, not just a procurement process.
The strategy
Concept before hardware
Started from what the facilities teams needed to know (occupancy, footfall and facility status) and worked back to the sensing that would tell them, rather than starting from a product catalogue and finding a use for it.
Pilots in real facilities
Ran the concepts as pilots in selected live facilities rather than a controlled demonstration, so the findings reflected how buildings and the people working in them actually behave.
A proof of concept, not a demo
Framed the output as evidence for a decision: what changed, for whom, and what a wider rollout would involve, so the client had grounds to commit or not.
The results
| Outcome | Starting point | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Response times | Driven by resident reports and scheduled rounds | Improved within the pilot |
| Customer satisfaction | Shaped by how quickly issues were resolved | Improved within the pilot |
| Occupancy, footfall and facility status | Not consistently measured | Measured directly in the pilot facilities |
| Basis for a rollout decision | Vendor claims | Evidence from the client's own buildings |
A pilot's job is to answer a question, not to run a building. This one showed that sensing occupancy, footfall and facility status improved both response times and resident satisfaction in the facilities it covered, which gave Emaar and ServeU grounds to decide how far to take it.
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