Continental Electrical Construction Company practices what they preach
With five offices, training facilities and warehouses strategically located in different Chicago suburbs, Continental Electrical Construction Company has used BUILDINGWORX to optimize its own internal building services. This is the story of how Continental came to create and use the software to achieve a variety of operational benefits, to drive energy efficiency for its facilities and to position BUILDINGWORX from CEPORT as a value-added solution for its customers.
CEPORT is an affiliate of Continental Electrical Construction Company, Chicago's leading electrical contractor since 1912. The firm has established itself as a trusted source for a complete array of services, from assessment and design to installation, maintenance and repair. Continental has completed 60 million square feet of construction and tenant developments in the Chicago area alone, including the Sears Tower, U.S. Cellular Field, Millennium Park and McCormick Place.
Along the way, Continental has nurtured a corporate culture promoting superior safety, continuous training and technological innovation. A great example of a Continental Electrical innovation is the CEPORT BUILDINGWORX software platform.
Leveraging Continental’s decades of experience in building automation, we founded CEPORT back in 2008. Our goal was to create an open technology platform for building services, which is now called BUILDINGWORX. We believe that building owners require an open, flexible and web-based tool to analyze and optimize their building performance. From the beginning, we decided to incorporate a holistic set of data, going beyond building automation data to include business process data, data from energy and water meters, occupancy data and external data such as weather data, benchmarking data and energy cost data from utilities and energy markets.
Of course our visionary founders at Continental became our guinea pigs and our first customer. Along the way, we have worked closely alongside Continental to refine, improve and extend the software platform into today’s modular and holistic data integration solution, BUILDINGWORX.
Continental uses BUILDINGWORX to optimize building services across its five buildings located in various Chicago suburbs. The firm has actively used the platform since 2008 to streamline business processes such as space planning and utilization, attendance reporting and tracking, switchboard, visitor reception and energy management. With over 500 employees and several dozen electrical construction projects happening across a large geography, it is imperative for enterprise efficiency to track employee location.
Over time, through the ability of BUILDINGWORX to integrate virtually any building data, Continental has been able to quickly develop business rules that provide it operational flexibility and cost reductions.
Using the BUILDINGWORX in/out registry, the receptionist, employees and managers can manage where employees are located at any point in time. Besides integrating with the card access system, employees can use the company’s intranet to add notes so that the receptionist and fellow employees understand which project a person is working on when they are out of the office. This location awareness allows Continental to more efficiently manage projects and provide superior customer service to the building owner or general contractor.
By integrating data from Continental’s HR system (which is a custom built application), from Microsoft Active Directory (for LDAP and user email information) and from Cisco Call Manager (for telephone user and extension data), BUILDINGWORX pulls together all of the metadata needed to assign employees to spaces and to enable departmental level space utilization reporting. As a result, Continental has been able to identify opportunities to consolidate space and reduce its costs as the economy has changed and as its organization has evolved. In fact Continental will be consolidating all of its offices into a single location in Oak Brook, IL later this year. This consolidation should save close to $1 million dollars in annual operating expenses.
Continental integrates oBIX data from a Johnson Controls FX-40 Tridium system every 5 minutes. This provides the building level environmental data and exposes the ability for users to gain control of their local settings. At corporate headquarters, employees can collaborate to adjust set-points and control their own comfort within pre-defined ranges. By providing this level of control directly to its employees, Continental enhances their productivity and frees up its building maintenance personnel to focus on other high priority tasks.
Continental has continual near-real-time awareness of occupancy and specifically who is entering and exiting its facilities, and how employees are utilizing the facility. This is accomplished through integration to data from Continental’s S2 card access security system. The API integrates the data into the BUILDINGWORX platform once per minute.
Data from Continental’s Axis IP digital video cameras is also available seamlessly within BUILDINGWORX, exposing what otherwise would be inaccessible video images to building occupants in order to increase safety within and across facilities. This digital video can be accessed on demand by any authorized user, such as the receptionist or individual employees, whose access to the video over the company’s intranet can be restricted (through easily created business rules) to specified cameras and specific times of day, for example if an employee is working after normal business hours and needs to view the parking lot camera before leaving the building, enhancing the employee’s safety.
Continental also actively manages its energy costs using BUILDINGWORX energy analytics. Data from the National Weather Service is accessed every hour through a standard web services interface. This supports complex reverse linear regression base-lining of energy use, normalizing the energy data based on weather, hours of operations, occupancy and other inputs. Energy usage data is read every fifteen minutes allowing enough granularity to intelligently correlate usage with occupancy and other factors, providing insights that Continental has used to adopt energy conservation measures and to prioritize energy efficiency technology investments such as a new state-of-the-art lighting system for its main building.
Continental has leveraged BUILDINGWORX to create a highly productive work environment across its geographically dispersed campus. Both real-estate management and human resources management have become more fact based. A single receptionist can administer three buildings, attendance reporting and location awareness have improved effectiveness of employees, wasted spaces have been identified and consolidated, which has generated significant savings, employees have direct control over their comfort and enhanced security, and real-time, granular energy monitoring has led to energy savings and efficiency throughout Continental’s building portfolio.
