Episode 15, “Angus Remote Management Systems”
Kirsten Nielsen
Hi, I'm Kirsten Nielsen. Welcome to Expanding the Possible, HH Angus' podcast series where we explore the ideas, technologies, and strategies that are shaping the built environment.
Today we're going to learn about remote building management, specifically HH Angus' ARMS platform or Angus Remote Management Systems. As buildings become more complex and expectations around performance, reliability, and sustainability continue to rise, the way we monitor and manage building systems is changing. ARMS was developed to help building owners and operators move from reactive problem solving to proactive, data-driven decision making. In today's episode, we're going to find out what ARMS is, how it works, and where it delivers the most value across different sectors.
Joining me now are three members of the ARMS team. They are Akira Jones, director of the Digital Services Division at HH Angus and one of the founders of the ARMS service offering. Augusto Valdivia is an AWS DevOps specialist who has been and continues to be a key member of the ARMS technical development team. And Michael Murphy, who leads business development for ARMS.
Akira, what is ARMS and what was the problem that HH Angus was setting out to solve by launching this service?
Akira Jones
ARMS, which is Angus Remote Management Systems, is the platform that we created ultimately to deliver very specific use case driven smart buildings solutions for our clients. And I know that's a bit of a mouthful, but in simple terms, it was really to help our clients solve challenges and make better decisions using the data that they already have in their building. And we really wanted to address the market of existing buildings that are out there. It's really easy in relative terms to create a smart building, which can mean a lot of things, but for simplicity's sake, to create smart buildings for a greenfield site. You're starting from scratch, you can make all the right decisions. But 99% of the buildings that are out there are existing and have different legacy and aged infrastructure, whether that's BMS or lighting control or otherwise, And we wanted to provide something for those folks that could help bring those buildings into the future.
Kirsten Nielsen
So, you were mentioning BAS systems. I'm referring to the kind of the traditional building automation systems. What were the gaps in what that technology provided that ARMS is attempting to address?
Akira Jones
Well, I think that legacy building automation systems particularly have a lot of data in them that is siloed within the system. So modern building automation systems, IP-based building automation systems from the big vendors or otherwise have a lot more integrations and integration capabilities. But older systems have data that are trapped within different silos, and we wanted to free that data and bring those different data sets together and help our clients, again, make better decisions from those data sets. For example, you could have a lighting control system that has occupancy or presence data that is just sitting in there not being used, and can drive immense value for a variety of different kinds of organizations.
Kirsten Nielsen
Why is the whole sector of remote monitoring and management becoming critical now for the owners of these assets than it was, say, five years ago?
Akira Jones
There are a number of different reasons, I think largely driven by the fact that as we move into the future and we want our buildings to be more efficient, We have to find more innovative ways to get that efficiency. So if I look at building efficiency at a high level, if you have a building that's not operating the way it was when it was designed, the first step would be to look at retro commissioning it, making sure that it is operating for the use of that building today. Maybe that building was built 50 years ago and how it's used today is very different. So that'll get you 80% of the way. It's the technology in terms of novel techniques in terms of bringing different data sets together, like for instance, doing occupancy or people driven ventilation control or HVAC control, that will get you that other 10% of the way. And then the rest of it, you have to use much more sophisticated technologies like machine learning and digital twinning to really squeeze out that last bit of operational efficiency from a building.
Kirsten Nielsen
Augusto, can you take us through kind of at the high level, how ARMS works from, say, right from data collection to insight. How does it work in practice?
Augusto Valdivia
In simple words, you can imagine that in a system that collects data in a building, it can be electricity, it can be heat, it can be data collection for occupancy. So what we do specifically, we go to the facility, we install an IoT device, we connect to the network. We start connecting the data that we are gathering for this connectivity to our AWS environment. And when we get this data in our environment, we create fascinating dashboard that people can use to understand what is happening in the building. I consider this system as the nervous system of the body. So you can see what is happening in the building. You can predict maybe futures, failures, and you can act immediately instead of waiting for months to get a report. So ARMS kind of attaches these two into one channel to collect all this data.
Kirsten Nielsen
So it's not replacing building systems, it's connecting building systems.
Augusto Valdivia
It's an extension of what is already in place. And what it does, again, it facilitates the communication of the data that we are collecting into a visual representation of what is actually happening in the building. Because in the past it was very difficult to collect all this data in one place. Now, as Akira mentioned, we can connect all different silos of data into one single package to present to our customers. So we are not taking anything away from the building. We are extending their brain of the building to make it more intelligent, more sufficient, and obviously for people to take decisions on that now, better than later.
Kirsten Nielsen
What types of systems are typically monitored? Is there kind of a top five set of systems that clients want to have analyzed?
Augusto Valdivia
Well, that's a Interesting question. And we need to go back a little bit of time because the idea when we started was to collect information about air quality, air flow, and all these different metrics that we can get. But at this point, we have evolved. It's based on occupancy now. So we are tracking now occupancy in the building for very efficient of the space for the building. I.
Kirsten Nielsen
I think what's interesting about that is it's applicable to so many different industry sectors, that kind of measurement. Mike, let's talk about some of the key customer sections, for example, healthcare. How does ARMS support the healthcare environment specifically?
Michael Murphy
That's a good question, Kirsten. I would say just as a general kind of feedback, all the different market verticals, there's different drivers of the kinds of quality that they want. It's not one shoe fits all, I would say, for a healthcare system would want compared to say corporate office. But I would say generally speaking, what they would need is qualitative and quantitative outcomes. So I would say a quantitative one would be some sort of cost savings measure or some sort of efficiency savings measure. So at a hospital, what we notice is it's siloed and maybe inefficient data. So someone would come into a hospital and they would use all their people counting. They would do some key cards or they would do something like the health information system. What they would see in those situations is like we have X amount of people or were 90% utilized. But then the people that are actually responsible for the space planning would say, hey, what are you talking about? This place is empty. So the value we can give them is real time occupancy, how spaces are actually used. And in those situations, they start to realize like, oh, hey, we now truly understand what rooms are used, what rooms are not used. In those situations, it's, running budgets a bit better, but then also just like the efficiency of the hospital, better scheduling, better planning, using their assets a little bit better. And then I would say kind of more qualitative stuff is like all sectors we find is that there's a lot of anecdotal problems. So somebody says there's a problem and that's just treated as that's the universal truth, whereas the data can actually show them what's really happening. And then you can have those conversations with the data. You can just say, hey, look, we're at critical mass here. We know now your people are only in 10% of the time. Our colleagues over here are in 80% of the time. Look, we got to kind of restructure the space. So yeah, I think if you could show some cost saving measures and efficiency saving measures and then some of the kind of like workplace difficult conversations, if the data can help solve those things, I think that's a big win for the clients.
Kirsten Nielsen
I think it points to kind of the interesting opportunity to avoid having to add bricks and mortar to space that is not fully utilized. So it has tremendous ripple effects to budgets and to tax dollars and that kind of thing.
Augusto Valdivia
And in addition to what Mike just said, I would like to add something because I think the example is very good. And one important key factor that we can mention here is that when we are using this type of technology with IoT devices collecting data. It's not about more data. It's actually better data that you are receiving because with our ARMS platform, we can share information that this room today was used by six people but never tomorrow, to that specifics. If you use the example of scheduling or badging system, it's never awkward. So if you are relying on these logs, you're just basing your information and decision and assumptions and real. real data.
Michael Murphy
So from the sales perspective, there's kind of like the opportunity and the challenge for us would be like it's a very saturated space. So sometimes when you're first engaging with a customer, like all this stuff seems like a nice to have. Our kind of goal is change it from a nice to have to a must have. And then they start to see how the data is helping them solve problems. And once you get that, that's how you scale. Generally, we have is a unique selling point that we haven't actually touched on is we're not technology driven. We're solutions driven. So as Akira said earlier, like we can actually look at your existing infrastructure and potentially get data out of siloed platforms that you may not know what you have. And then we can procure the right technologies for the use case.
Kirsten Nielsen
Akira, give me a real world example, because I know that your group recently had an award for some work that you did in a healthcare setting that really was helping the client to improve their optimization of the space.
Akira Jones
Yeah, so that was a project that we've done with one of our clients, Sunnybrook Health Sciences. And as Mike had mentioned, we had started with Sunnybrook several years ago with some small pilot projects, but the culmination of this was implementing a very accurate people counting and occupancy system for the Barzakay Brain Health Sciences clinics. And this is really interesting. Ambulatory clinics and hospitals, I think, often face challenges in terms of scheduling. And the hospitals have a hard time understanding where are the challenges coming from. Is it staffing? Is it the amount of available physical space to run the clinics? These are questions that are challenging for organizations such as Sunnybrook to figure out. So we provided another piece of the puzzle by providing them a real understanding of the utilization rates of their ambulatory clinics. And again, it's just one piece of the puzzle. There are other ways to determine utilization and other bottlenecks in organizations in terms of how they deliver care. In clinics, it's not just the number of available spaces or clinic slots, but how many clinics they can run based off the number of staff they have. So now they have a full picture and the clinic manager there is able to use our platform to really understand okay, what are the utilization crunches coming from? Is it from physical space or is it from the availability of people to run the clinics? And she's able to assign the different rooms to different clinics and really optimize how they deliver care through this particular hospital-run clinic.
Kirsten Nielsen
It's great development for them. Augusto, I'm going to turn to you for a moment and say, what does this customer portal actually look like and how do people interact with it?
Augusto Valdivia
It's a very simple user and login for security, very specific for that. We try to keep it as secure as we can. We apply SSO for logins. Then when a user is in the interface, what they see is a dashboard with information about the months, the dates, the weeks, about utilizations through the day, to the details of what is the exit door that has been more occupied versus the one that less occupied and what are the rooms that are being occupied during Wednesday where is the body of people moving around through the building so they can have a better understanding. I think that Mike mentioned when they are calculating about how can we schedule people, for example, for cleaning purpose based on the data and the movement of the people inside the building and that support that. So I really like the interface. It's well done, nicely, very dynamic, customizable depending of the use case or the specific customers that we have.
Kirsten Nielsen
The things that we've been talking about, like healthcare and office buildings, educational campuses, Are you able to scale this up quickly? Because I think as use cases start to prove the concept to clients, there will be greater and greater demand for the operators of buildings to understand what's happening and where they can optimize, where they can save money.
Augusto Valdivia
Yeah, for sure. Scalability is one of the priorities that we have from the beginning when we start planning for the type of architecture that we're going to be building. since we are a shop that use infrastructure as a code. So it's super scalable and we can reuse the code over and over and easy for us to extend it. So we don't see any problems for us to scale at the moment. From the very beginning, we plan for this situation. So I don't know if that answer your question, but we are prepared for scalability for sure.
Kirsten Nielsen
Well, that's good because when you're looking at a healthcare client, For example, the larger hospitals have multiple buildings on the same property. Universities have multiple buildings on the same property. So if you're starting in one area, one floor, one section of a floor, and then the client likes what you're doing, they're happy with what they're seeing, they're benefiting from the value of it, and they want to start ramping up to other buildings, then the ability to bring those extra other facilities into the program is key.
Augusto Valdivia
Yeah, exactly. From the software side, it's very easy to onboard new devices. And we have a strong partnership with device providers that we can buy devices fast enough for us to scale the project. So yeah, everything, you know, comes back to the reputation that HH Angus has in all the years that I've been working in all this good partners that we have to help us to grow the projects easily.
Kirsten Nielsen
That actually brings me to another question, and I wanted to put this one to you, Akira. How does HH Angus'S engineering expertise influence, let's say, the accuracy, the reliability, the integration, the workability of this solution for clients?
Akira Jones
I think in a number of ways. At the core of it, we're buildings engineers. So we really understand how buildings work. We've played a role in designing and constructing these buildings for over 100 years. So there's a lot of institutional knowledge in terms of how these systems interact with each other, the type of data that we should be seeing, understanding the data coming from legacy building systems like building automation and lighting control systems. So I think that gives us a really unique advantage in the space relative to other kinds of technology vendors because we do understand how these buildings work. I think we also have a very robust approach to deploying these solutions and we can troubleshoot many different types of challenges In terms of, for instance, getting data from a building automation system, anybody who's worked with BAS systems of various vintages, the type of data that you're getting varies from building to building, and we're able to problem solve and solve the challenges around understanding the data that we're getting, and even from a point of view of commissioning. Our hardware, we make sure that everything is commissioned so that it's operating the way it should be. The sensors like occupancy sensors are operating within their listed ranges of commission to provide the most accurate data. So I think we just provide a different perspective from other vendors from the fact that we're engineers.
Kirsten Nielsen
How does an organization know that ARMS would be the right solution for them? Mike, I'm going to direct that one to you.
Michael Murphy
I genuinely believe it's because we're not a technology. I think that's really appealing to a client because we're focusing literally on a use case, which means the problem and the goal. And what we can do is as engineers understand the building and get data from maybe existing systems they don't know is possible. And then we just find the technology that's going to solve the problem. And I think that's a big actually differentiator from a lot of other companies. I think we're a lot better at kind of that end-to-end solution.
Kirsten Nielsen
I think it's interesting also to make the point that we are vendor neutral. We will always be recommending the best possible equipment for the solution that works for the client. But at the end of the day, we're not selling for any particular company.
Akira Jones
And I should mention too that we have a lab in our own office that we test all of the hardware that we deploy on site. So one of the things that we've learned very early on is to test different kinds of IoT devices and systems in real-world conditions because how things operate in a perfect kind of situation is often very different than a real-world situation. So we deploy within our lab and within our offices all of the hardware that we recommend to our clients and integrate into our systems. so that we know exactly how it's going to perform when it gets on site.
Augusto Valdivia
Just about like the little bit technicality part, right? So there's a few sides that I can share with you. So if you are still collecting data that is not real-time data, you need ARMS. You need ARMS to help you to cut the bridge shorter to get that data quicker. If you're still using batch data, for example, for occupancy to count how many people are in your building, That takes time. That's not real time. So again, you need ARMS for that. So when you need to wait for a report in 24 hours or a week to let you know that you have a problem in your building, again, you need ARMS. You need ARMS because it's easy for us to work with and for you as a customer will be easy as well. It's easy for us to be scalable. It's easy for us for installation. And I think that will be also easier for you to take decisions real time when you need it. I think this is one of the biggest solutions that we can provide to our customer. We can get your data fast, efficient, and you can take efficient decisions based on that data that we are collecting for you. So you need ARMS if you have all those checks on that list.
Michael Murphy
And just to give kind of a real life case of that - we have a project in Europe. It's a small pilot and it's just getting off the ground now. But when we engaged with that institution, they actually had an existing occupancy pilot with a competitor. But the feedback from the client was they said, look, they're exclusive with a sensor. So we're tied to 1 sensor with this pilot. And as a result of this, they said they can't integrate with other building systems. And then they asked us, they said, hey, could you actually ingest data from their sensors so we could actually see if they're accurate and measure them against yours? We said, sure, as long as it's an open API. So already we're talking about future use cases with this client because they said they haven't met anybody that's as flexible or as solution focused. So I think that's just, it's really important. It's kind of back to Agosto's point with data for data's sake. If you're just getting data and you don't understand how it's helping you, people just don't use it. But if you're configuring data, that's helping somebody solve the problem. It's just really impactful.
Kirsten Nielsen
One thing I have sort of been thinking about as you've all been talking is the security aspect of what monitoring does and occupancy does. Is there a security application that clients are interested in? When people are trying to understand how many people are in their building and whether there's people are getting in who are not supposed to be getting in because you can badge into a building and have someone come behind you who doesn't have a badge and maybe doesn't belong.
Akira Jones
From the point of view of tailgating, our platform definitely helps understand occupancy better than the badge data, largely because tailgating usually causes the under-reporting of the number of people in the building. I will say that one of the benefits of our platform is that we don't collect any kind of PII. But it's generally seen as a positive for our platform, largely because some of our major clients are healthcare organizations where collecting PII is a major consideration. That's not something that we do or store. So it makes it very simple working with these kinds of organizations to be able to provide these kinds of insights without the PII, largely because many folks have a lot of concerns about collecting that type of data.
Kirsten Nielsen
And so PII for those who don't know?
Akira Jones
Is that personal identifying information.
Kirsten Nielsen
Okay, good. So it's actually a selling point.
Akira Jones
It's a selling point. That's right.
Kirsten Nielsen
That's great. In your mind, what is 1 key takeaway that you want people to know about ARMS?
Akira Jones
Ultimately, we are use case driven. So we start first with the challenges that an organization is having and then we build a solution around that. And I think that's a key point because our goal is to drive value for our clients. We want to make sure that the money they spend has some kind of return on investment. Because ultimately, that's the biggest challenge, I think, with implementing smart buildings use cases. People spend money on technology for technology's sake and it doesn't drive any kind of value. And that really sets an organization back, right? they see I spent this money, I didn't get anything out of it. Why am I going to invest more in terms of smart building? So I think the fact that we're use case driven and vendor agnostic allows us to be extremely flexible in terms of the type of solutions that we bring to our clients.
Kirsten Nielsen
And Augusto, for you?
Augusto Valdivia
I'm a tech guy. I'm going to go in the tech direction. The technology that we are using is one of the leaders in the cloud environment. It's super secure, super scalable. It has all the tools that require for us to build this type of software for our customers and very customizable. From the beginning, we are in this industry where nobody's doing this. Come to us, we're the future.
Kirsten Nielsen
That's great. Thank you very much, all three of you. That brings us to the end of our conversation about ARMS, the Angus Remote Management Systems.
If our listeners are interested in learning more about how ARMS supports healthcare facilities, office buildings, campuses, and other types of complex building environments, as you've heard them described here, you can visit angusremote.com and there's a contact link there where you can start a conversation with the team.
Before we go, I want to thank our guests today, Akira Jones, Augusto Valdivia, and Mike Murphy, for sharing your insights and your advice. Thank you, gentlemen.
And thank you to our listeners. If you'd like to subscribe to Expanding the Possible, you will be sure to catch our future episodes as we continue to explore systems and strategies behind high-performing buildings.
Thank you very much. I'm Kirsten Nielsen, wishing you a great rest of your day.
Hi, I'm Kirsten Nielsen. Welcome to Expanding the Possible, HH Angus' podcast series where we explore the ideas, technologies, and strategies that are shaping the built environment.
Today we're going to learn about remote building management, specifically HH Angus' ARMS platform or Angus Remote Management Systems. As buildings become more complex and expectations around performance, reliability, and sustainability continue to rise, the way we monitor and manage building systems is changing. ARMS was developed to help building owners and operators move from reactive problem solving to proactive, data-driven decision making. In today's episode, we're going to find out what ARMS is, how it works, and where it delivers the most value across different sectors.
Joining me now are three members of the ARMS team. They are Akira Jones, director of the Digital Services Division at HH Angus and one of the founders of the ARMS service offering. Augusto Valdivia is an AWS DevOps specialist who has been and continues to be a key member of the ARMS technical development team. And Michael Murphy, who leads business development for ARMS.
Akira, what is ARMS and what was the problem that HH Angus was setting out to solve by launching this service?
Akira Jones
ARMS, which is Angus Remote Management Systems, is the platform that we created ultimately to deliver very specific use case driven smart buildings solutions for our clients. And I know that's a bit of a mouthful, but in simple terms, it was really to help our clients solve challenges and make better decisions using the data that they already have in their building. And we really wanted to address the market of existing buildings that are out there. It's really easy in relative terms to create a smart building, which can mean a lot of things, but for simplicity's sake, to create smart buildings for a greenfield site. You're starting from scratch, you can make all the right decisions. But 99% of the buildings that are out there are existing and have different legacy and aged infrastructure, whether that's BMS or lighting control or otherwise, And we wanted to provide something for those folks that could help bring those buildings into the future.
Kirsten Nielsen
So, you were mentioning BAS systems. I'm referring to the kind of the traditional building automation systems. What were the gaps in what that technology provided that ARMS is attempting to address?
Akira Jones
Well, I think that legacy building automation systems particularly have a lot of data in them that is siloed within the system. So modern building automation systems, IP-based building automation systems from the big vendors or otherwise have a lot more integrations and integration capabilities. But older systems have data that are trapped within different silos, and we wanted to free that data and bring those different data sets together and help our clients, again, make better decisions from those data sets. For example, you could have a lighting control system that has occupancy or presence data that is just sitting in there not being used, and can drive immense value for a variety of different kinds of organizations.
Kirsten Nielsen
Why is the whole sector of remote monitoring and management becoming critical now for the owners of these assets than it was, say, five years ago?
Akira Jones
There are a number of different reasons, I think largely driven by the fact that as we move into the future and we want our buildings to be more efficient, We have to find more innovative ways to get that efficiency. So if I look at building efficiency at a high level, if you have a building that's not operating the way it was when it was designed, the first step would be to look at retro commissioning it, making sure that it is operating for the use of that building today. Maybe that building was built 50 years ago and how it's used today is very different. So that'll get you 80% of the way. It's the technology in terms of novel techniques in terms of bringing different data sets together, like for instance, doing occupancy or people driven ventilation control or HVAC control, that will get you that other 10% of the way. And then the rest of it, you have to use much more sophisticated technologies like machine learning and digital twinning to really squeeze out that last bit of operational efficiency from a building.
Kirsten Nielsen
Augusto, can you take us through kind of at the high level, how ARMS works from, say, right from data collection to insight. How does it work in practice?
Augusto Valdivia
In simple words, you can imagine that in a system that collects data in a building, it can be electricity, it can be heat, it can be data collection for occupancy. So what we do specifically, we go to the facility, we install an IoT device, we connect to the network. We start connecting the data that we are gathering for this connectivity to our AWS environment. And when we get this data in our environment, we create fascinating dashboard that people can use to understand what is happening in the building. I consider this system as the nervous system of the body. So you can see what is happening in the building. You can predict maybe futures, failures, and you can act immediately instead of waiting for months to get a report. So ARMS kind of attaches these two into one channel to collect all this data.
Kirsten Nielsen
So it's not replacing building systems, it's connecting building systems.
Augusto Valdivia
It's an extension of what is already in place. And what it does, again, it facilitates the communication of the data that we are collecting into a visual representation of what is actually happening in the building. Because in the past it was very difficult to collect all this data in one place. Now, as Akira mentioned, we can connect all different silos of data into one single package to present to our customers. So we are not taking anything away from the building. We are extending their brain of the building to make it more intelligent, more sufficient, and obviously for people to take decisions on that now, better than later.
Kirsten Nielsen
What types of systems are typically monitored? Is there kind of a top five set of systems that clients want to have analyzed?
Augusto Valdivia
Well, that's a Interesting question. And we need to go back a little bit of time because the idea when we started was to collect information about air quality, air flow, and all these different metrics that we can get. But at this point, we have evolved. It's based on occupancy now. So we are tracking now occupancy in the building for very efficient of the space for the building. I.
Kirsten Nielsen
I think what's interesting about that is it's applicable to so many different industry sectors, that kind of measurement. Mike, let's talk about some of the key customer sections, for example, healthcare. How does ARMS support the healthcare environment specifically?
Michael Murphy
That's a good question, Kirsten. I would say just as a general kind of feedback, all the different market verticals, there's different drivers of the kinds of quality that they want. It's not one shoe fits all, I would say, for a healthcare system would want compared to say corporate office. But I would say generally speaking, what they would need is qualitative and quantitative outcomes. So I would say a quantitative one would be some sort of cost savings measure or some sort of efficiency savings measure. So at a hospital, what we notice is it's siloed and maybe inefficient data. So someone would come into a hospital and they would use all their people counting. They would do some key cards or they would do something like the health information system. What they would see in those situations is like we have X amount of people or were 90% utilized. But then the people that are actually responsible for the space planning would say, hey, what are you talking about? This place is empty. So the value we can give them is real time occupancy, how spaces are actually used. And in those situations, they start to realize like, oh, hey, we now truly understand what rooms are used, what rooms are not used. In those situations, it's, running budgets a bit better, but then also just like the efficiency of the hospital, better scheduling, better planning, using their assets a little bit better. And then I would say kind of more qualitative stuff is like all sectors we find is that there's a lot of anecdotal problems. So somebody says there's a problem and that's just treated as that's the universal truth, whereas the data can actually show them what's really happening. And then you can have those conversations with the data. You can just say, hey, look, we're at critical mass here. We know now your people are only in 10% of the time. Our colleagues over here are in 80% of the time. Look, we got to kind of restructure the space. So yeah, I think if you could show some cost saving measures and efficiency saving measures and then some of the kind of like workplace difficult conversations, if the data can help solve those things, I think that's a big win for the clients.
Kirsten Nielsen
I think it points to kind of the interesting opportunity to avoid having to add bricks and mortar to space that is not fully utilized. So it has tremendous ripple effects to budgets and to tax dollars and that kind of thing.
Augusto Valdivia
And in addition to what Mike just said, I would like to add something because I think the example is very good. And one important key factor that we can mention here is that when we are using this type of technology with IoT devices collecting data. It's not about more data. It's actually better data that you are receiving because with our ARMS platform, we can share information that this room today was used by six people but never tomorrow, to that specifics. If you use the example of scheduling or badging system, it's never awkward. So if you are relying on these logs, you're just basing your information and decision and assumptions and real. real data.
Michael Murphy
So from the sales perspective, there's kind of like the opportunity and the challenge for us would be like it's a very saturated space. So sometimes when you're first engaging with a customer, like all this stuff seems like a nice to have. Our kind of goal is change it from a nice to have to a must have. And then they start to see how the data is helping them solve problems. And once you get that, that's how you scale. Generally, we have is a unique selling point that we haven't actually touched on is we're not technology driven. We're solutions driven. So as Akira said earlier, like we can actually look at your existing infrastructure and potentially get data out of siloed platforms that you may not know what you have. And then we can procure the right technologies for the use case.
Kirsten Nielsen
Akira, give me a real world example, because I know that your group recently had an award for some work that you did in a healthcare setting that really was helping the client to improve their optimization of the space.
Akira Jones
Yeah, so that was a project that we've done with one of our clients, Sunnybrook Health Sciences. And as Mike had mentioned, we had started with Sunnybrook several years ago with some small pilot projects, but the culmination of this was implementing a very accurate people counting and occupancy system for the Barzakay Brain Health Sciences clinics. And this is really interesting. Ambulatory clinics and hospitals, I think, often face challenges in terms of scheduling. And the hospitals have a hard time understanding where are the challenges coming from. Is it staffing? Is it the amount of available physical space to run the clinics? These are questions that are challenging for organizations such as Sunnybrook to figure out. So we provided another piece of the puzzle by providing them a real understanding of the utilization rates of their ambulatory clinics. And again, it's just one piece of the puzzle. There are other ways to determine utilization and other bottlenecks in organizations in terms of how they deliver care. In clinics, it's not just the number of available spaces or clinic slots, but how many clinics they can run based off the number of staff they have. So now they have a full picture and the clinic manager there is able to use our platform to really understand okay, what are the utilization crunches coming from? Is it from physical space or is it from the availability of people to run the clinics? And she's able to assign the different rooms to different clinics and really optimize how they deliver care through this particular hospital-run clinic.
Kirsten Nielsen
It's great development for them. Augusto, I'm going to turn to you for a moment and say, what does this customer portal actually look like and how do people interact with it?
Augusto Valdivia
It's a very simple user and login for security, very specific for that. We try to keep it as secure as we can. We apply SSO for logins. Then when a user is in the interface, what they see is a dashboard with information about the months, the dates, the weeks, about utilizations through the day, to the details of what is the exit door that has been more occupied versus the one that less occupied and what are the rooms that are being occupied during Wednesday where is the body of people moving around through the building so they can have a better understanding. I think that Mike mentioned when they are calculating about how can we schedule people, for example, for cleaning purpose based on the data and the movement of the people inside the building and that support that. So I really like the interface. It's well done, nicely, very dynamic, customizable depending of the use case or the specific customers that we have.
Kirsten Nielsen
The things that we've been talking about, like healthcare and office buildings, educational campuses, Are you able to scale this up quickly? Because I think as use cases start to prove the concept to clients, there will be greater and greater demand for the operators of buildings to understand what's happening and where they can optimize, where they can save money.
Augusto Valdivia
Yeah, for sure. Scalability is one of the priorities that we have from the beginning when we start planning for the type of architecture that we're going to be building. since we are a shop that use infrastructure as a code. So it's super scalable and we can reuse the code over and over and easy for us to extend it. So we don't see any problems for us to scale at the moment. From the very beginning, we plan for this situation. So I don't know if that answer your question, but we are prepared for scalability for sure.
Kirsten Nielsen
Well, that's good because when you're looking at a healthcare client, For example, the larger hospitals have multiple buildings on the same property. Universities have multiple buildings on the same property. So if you're starting in one area, one floor, one section of a floor, and then the client likes what you're doing, they're happy with what they're seeing, they're benefiting from the value of it, and they want to start ramping up to other buildings, then the ability to bring those extra other facilities into the program is key.
Augusto Valdivia
Yeah, exactly. From the software side, it's very easy to onboard new devices. And we have a strong partnership with device providers that we can buy devices fast enough for us to scale the project. So yeah, everything, you know, comes back to the reputation that HH Angus has in all the years that I've been working in all this good partners that we have to help us to grow the projects easily.
Kirsten Nielsen
That actually brings me to another question, and I wanted to put this one to you, Akira. How does HH Angus'S engineering expertise influence, let's say, the accuracy, the reliability, the integration, the workability of this solution for clients?
Akira Jones
I think in a number of ways. At the core of it, we're buildings engineers. So we really understand how buildings work. We've played a role in designing and constructing these buildings for over 100 years. So there's a lot of institutional knowledge in terms of how these systems interact with each other, the type of data that we should be seeing, understanding the data coming from legacy building systems like building automation and lighting control systems. So I think that gives us a really unique advantage in the space relative to other kinds of technology vendors because we do understand how these buildings work. I think we also have a very robust approach to deploying these solutions and we can troubleshoot many different types of challenges In terms of, for instance, getting data from a building automation system, anybody who's worked with BAS systems of various vintages, the type of data that you're getting varies from building to building, and we're able to problem solve and solve the challenges around understanding the data that we're getting, and even from a point of view of commissioning. Our hardware, we make sure that everything is commissioned so that it's operating the way it should be. The sensors like occupancy sensors are operating within their listed ranges of commission to provide the most accurate data. So I think we just provide a different perspective from other vendors from the fact that we're engineers.
Kirsten Nielsen
How does an organization know that ARMS would be the right solution for them? Mike, I'm going to direct that one to you.
Michael Murphy
I genuinely believe it's because we're not a technology. I think that's really appealing to a client because we're focusing literally on a use case, which means the problem and the goal. And what we can do is as engineers understand the building and get data from maybe existing systems they don't know is possible. And then we just find the technology that's going to solve the problem. And I think that's a big actually differentiator from a lot of other companies. I think we're a lot better at kind of that end-to-end solution.
Kirsten Nielsen
I think it's interesting also to make the point that we are vendor neutral. We will always be recommending the best possible equipment for the solution that works for the client. But at the end of the day, we're not selling for any particular company.
Akira Jones
And I should mention too that we have a lab in our own office that we test all of the hardware that we deploy on site. So one of the things that we've learned very early on is to test different kinds of IoT devices and systems in real-world conditions because how things operate in a perfect kind of situation is often very different than a real-world situation. So we deploy within our lab and within our offices all of the hardware that we recommend to our clients and integrate into our systems. so that we know exactly how it's going to perform when it gets on site.
Augusto Valdivia
Just about like the little bit technicality part, right? So there's a few sides that I can share with you. So if you are still collecting data that is not real-time data, you need ARMS. You need ARMS to help you to cut the bridge shorter to get that data quicker. If you're still using batch data, for example, for occupancy to count how many people are in your building, That takes time. That's not real time. So again, you need ARMS for that. So when you need to wait for a report in 24 hours or a week to let you know that you have a problem in your building, again, you need ARMS. You need ARMS because it's easy for us to work with and for you as a customer will be easy as well. It's easy for us to be scalable. It's easy for us for installation. And I think that will be also easier for you to take decisions real time when you need it. I think this is one of the biggest solutions that we can provide to our customer. We can get your data fast, efficient, and you can take efficient decisions based on that data that we are collecting for you. So you need ARMS if you have all those checks on that list.
Michael Murphy
And just to give kind of a real life case of that - we have a project in Europe. It's a small pilot and it's just getting off the ground now. But when we engaged with that institution, they actually had an existing occupancy pilot with a competitor. But the feedback from the client was they said, look, they're exclusive with a sensor. So we're tied to 1 sensor with this pilot. And as a result of this, they said they can't integrate with other building systems. And then they asked us, they said, hey, could you actually ingest data from their sensors so we could actually see if they're accurate and measure them against yours? We said, sure, as long as it's an open API. So already we're talking about future use cases with this client because they said they haven't met anybody that's as flexible or as solution focused. So I think that's just, it's really important. It's kind of back to Agosto's point with data for data's sake. If you're just getting data and you don't understand how it's helping you, people just don't use it. But if you're configuring data, that's helping somebody solve the problem. It's just really impactful.
Kirsten Nielsen
One thing I have sort of been thinking about as you've all been talking is the security aspect of what monitoring does and occupancy does. Is there a security application that clients are interested in? When people are trying to understand how many people are in their building and whether there's people are getting in who are not supposed to be getting in because you can badge into a building and have someone come behind you who doesn't have a badge and maybe doesn't belong.
Akira Jones
From the point of view of tailgating, our platform definitely helps understand occupancy better than the badge data, largely because tailgating usually causes the under-reporting of the number of people in the building. I will say that one of the benefits of our platform is that we don't collect any kind of PII. But it's generally seen as a positive for our platform, largely because some of our major clients are healthcare organizations where collecting PII is a major consideration. That's not something that we do or store. So it makes it very simple working with these kinds of organizations to be able to provide these kinds of insights without the PII, largely because many folks have a lot of concerns about collecting that type of data.
Kirsten Nielsen
And so PII for those who don't know?
Akira Jones
Is that personal identifying information.
Kirsten Nielsen
Okay, good. So it's actually a selling point.
Akira Jones
It's a selling point. That's right.
Kirsten Nielsen
That's great. In your mind, what is 1 key takeaway that you want people to know about ARMS?
Akira Jones
Ultimately, we are use case driven. So we start first with the challenges that an organization is having and then we build a solution around that. And I think that's a key point because our goal is to drive value for our clients. We want to make sure that the money they spend has some kind of return on investment. Because ultimately, that's the biggest challenge, I think, with implementing smart buildings use cases. People spend money on technology for technology's sake and it doesn't drive any kind of value. And that really sets an organization back, right? they see I spent this money, I didn't get anything out of it. Why am I going to invest more in terms of smart building? So I think the fact that we're use case driven and vendor agnostic allows us to be extremely flexible in terms of the type of solutions that we bring to our clients.
Kirsten Nielsen
And Augusto, for you?
Augusto Valdivia
I'm a tech guy. I'm going to go in the tech direction. The technology that we are using is one of the leaders in the cloud environment. It's super secure, super scalable. It has all the tools that require for us to build this type of software for our customers and very customizable. From the beginning, we are in this industry where nobody's doing this. Come to us, we're the future.
Kirsten Nielsen
That's great. Thank you very much, all three of you. That brings us to the end of our conversation about ARMS, the Angus Remote Management Systems.
If our listeners are interested in learning more about how ARMS supports healthcare facilities, office buildings, campuses, and other types of complex building environments, as you've heard them described here, you can visit angusremote.com and there's a contact link there where you can start a conversation with the team.
Before we go, I want to thank our guests today, Akira Jones, Augusto Valdivia, and Mike Murphy, for sharing your insights and your advice. Thank you, gentlemen.
And thank you to our listeners. If you'd like to subscribe to Expanding the Possible, you will be sure to catch our future episodes as we continue to explore systems and strategies behind high-performing buildings.
Thank you very much. I'm Kirsten Nielsen, wishing you a great rest of your day.
As buildings become more complex and expectations around performance, reliability, and sustainability continue to rise, the way we monitor and manage building systems is changing. HH Angus’ ARMS platform was developed to help building owners and operators move from reactive problem solving to proactive, data-driven decision making. In this episode, we're explore what ARMS is, how it works, and where it delivers the most value across different sectors.
Featured in this episode are Akira Jones, Director of the Digital Services Division at HH Angus and one of the founders of the ARMS service offering. Augusto Valdivia, an AWS DevOps specialist who is a key member of the ARMS technical development team. And Michael Murphy, who leads business development for ARMS.
Featured in this episode are Akira Jones, Director of the Digital Services Division at HH Angus and one of the founders of the ARMS service offering. Augusto Valdivia, an AWS DevOps specialist who is a key member of the ARMS technical development team. And Michael Murphy, who leads business development for ARMS.