Honeywell (Nasdaq: HON) has announced the launch of a cloud-based solution that streamlines and combines operational and business data for building owners and managers to support better decision-making, drive greater efficiencies and reach sustainability goals. The new solution, Honeywell Forge Real Estate Operations, extends the capabilities of Honeywell Forge enterprise performance management software and was jointly developed with SAP on the SAP Business Technology Platform.

Honeywell Forge Real Estate Operations is an out-of-the-box cloud-based analytics application. The SaaS solution aggregates the financial, employee and real estate data of SAP with Honeywell’s buildings data, IoT sensor data and building management system insights. Real estate portfolio owners, managers and operators can use actionable insights from the software to help optimize their real estate performance across multiple dimensions of building performance. The data is delivered to users in a simple, easy-to-digest scorecard.

Energy efficient solutions in the building space have helped reduce per capita electricity consumption in Saudi Arabia and UAE. Advanced technologies are still required to reduce overall consumption and carbon emissions to meet the governments’ green initiatives and sustainability goals. For example, in Saudi Arabia electricity consumption within commercial buildings accounts for 16% of total electricity consumption. In the UAE and Egypt, electricity consumption within commercial buildings stands at 36% and 12.3%, respectively. 

The UAE in the last two decades has led the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region in promoting energy efficiency and sustainability, especially in the building sector, with the Emirates Green Building Council (Emirates GBC) promoting green buildings. The country also has the majority of sustainable building projects in the GCC region, with 70 percent of LEED-rated buildings.

“Until today, real estate portfolio managers have only had access to a fragmented set of disconnected data about their buildings, which has resulted in significant inefficiencies,” said George Bou Mitri, president and general manager, Honeywell Building Technologies, Middle East, Turkey and Africa.“Honeywell’s partnership with SAP has led to a solution that unifies IT data, OT data and occupant information, providing customers in the region with new visibility into the performance of their real estate portfolios.”

“We have provided feedback on the Honeywell Forge Real Estate Operations product throughout its development and believe it has significant potential to help Real Estate organizations improve portfolio performance across multiple dimensions,” said Matthias Grimm, vice president, head of Global Real Estate and Facilities at SAP. “In addition, we are piloting Honeywell Forge as part of the planning process for our own internal real estate transformation.”

Honeywell Forge Real Estate Operations can help improve:

• Operational readiness. The solution quickly provides users with information about the availability of critical assets, the number of open services cases and corresponding capital and operational costs.
• Occupant safety. Users can gain visibility into the compliance of safety practices, including indoor air quality and capacity limits.
• Sustainability. The solution provides real-time visibility into energy consumption metrics to help companies track their sustainability goals.
• Financial intelligence. Combined OT and IT data provides users with a comprehensive picture of the overall financial health of their entire building portfolio to understand underperforming locations and detect financial trends. The solution also closely monitors the financial impact of operational investments.
• Occupant experience. The solution enables building managers to maintain a comfortable environment for occupants.
• Occupant utilization. Honeywell Forge Real Estate Operations helps visualize building utilization, including its impact on the operational and financial performance of buildings.

“There is a growing trend in the regional commercial real estate space for a more seamless, frictionless experience for occupants, owners and managers,” Mitri said. “The combination of optimizing real estate performance plus a mobile-driven occupant experience provides our customers with a powerful set of solutions to digitally transform and adopt to these new dynamics.With our expanding set of solutions, Honeywell is helping customers manage the changing requirements of today’s office managers and workers, including safety, security and compliance requirements.”

Honeywell Forge Real Estate Operations complements Honeywell’s large and growing set of software offerings for building owners and managers. Late last year, Honeywell acquired Adelaide, Australia-based Sine, a mobile-enabled software solution that provides a simple, intuitive way to confidently onboard and track the flow of people throughout a building. With this new capability, Honeywell offers a more seamless experience for occupants and further enhances the experience of the connected building for visitors, guests and staff. The new functionality adds to Honeywell’s portfolio of native edge-to-cloud, data-driven architecture with user-friendly mobile interfaces designed to further digitally transform operations.