At the heart of learnd is our Guaranteed Building Outcomes Model. We provide our customers with a guarantee of their building’s performance through pre-agreed outcomes.
If they are not met, then we pay you. This model can be used for many different building parameters, and moves the risk of operating your building from you, to us.
What are building outcomes?
Building outcomes is a term that we have coined at learnd. It covers the targets and expectations that a customer has from their building’s performance. Here are some examples of potential building outcomes:
– a 20% reduction in energy spend over a 2 year period.
– a guaranteed temperature between 19ºC and 21ºC.
– elevators will work at all times.
Perhaps a retail store knows their customers stay the longest when the temperature is between 19 and 21 degrees and the humidity levels are low. We would guarantee that their store would have these optimal conditions.
If something happened that meant this wasn’t the case, we would cover the difference in retail sales for the store between a baseline and the reduced level seen due to sub-optimal conditions.
Rather than talking about our approach simply as a guaranteed outcome, we like to focus on the performance of your building.
Today, it’s very likely a typical building owner is trying to juggle multiple services from multiple suppliers in the hope their building performs as they want – whether that’s providing a great space to teach people, sell goods or manufacture equipment.
Fundamentally, the building performance is down to them – and the risk of things working is theirs alone. We change that – we offer Building Performance as a Service which shifts the risk from the building owner/operator to learnd.
The following scenario will show you exactly how Guaranteed Building Outcomes work.
Hospital 1 – Managing its own building performance
Let’s say you’re in charge of a hospital building. The main aim of the building is to heal people. However, keeping the building running relies on several critical building systems running in harmony. There are also HTM (Health Technical Memoranda) standards to meet, and patients to keep comfortable. On top of all of this, you need to reduce your energy spend. To do this, you need:
- Building managers
- Facilities managers
- Energy contracts
- Facility management contractors
- Mechanics
- Engineers
- HVAC providers
- BMS providers
This delicate ecosystem requires a huge amount of management. Before you know it, you are in the business of operating buildings, not just healing people. This takes time, money and focus away from the primary aim of the building – helping patients and families.
What’s the problem with doing it like this?
Our example hospital is a super-critical environment. That means it needs to run consistently and efficiently in order to fulfil its aim of healing patients. Elevators need to be in working order, the environment needs to be controlled and wards need to be ventilated.
To achieve this, hospitals employ lots of specialist suppliers – such as Heating, Ventilation & Cooling (HVAC) engineers, Building Management System (BMS) providers, and mechanical and electrical contractors. Some of this spending will be on Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM) contracts and some will be on unplanned repair work.
The problem is – all of these specialist critical systems could be working perfectly, but the building is not performing as required. To get things right, all the systems need to run in harmony, focused on making the building perform. As a building manager, you might increase your PPM contracted days when you notice that more repair work is required. This will negate the repair issues temporarily until you eventually replace the ageing plant. However, this is a reactive strategy that will result in areas of the hospital being out of action for longer.
Hospital 2 – Managed under learnd’s Guaranteed Building Outcome Model
Learnd’s Guaranteed Building Outcome Model is a proactive building management strategy. We work with you and your existing partners (such as a Facilities Management (FM) company), to understand the goals of the building. This will then be broken down into a series of Guaranteed Building Outcomes.
These could include:
- The space temperature on the ward.
- The elevator up to the operating theatre.
- The temperature, humidity, positive pressure and CO2 levels in the theatre.
- The ventilation in the recovery suite.
- The elevator down to the ward.
These building outcomes can be guaranteed individually or as part of a long-term contract that we call Building Performance as a Service.
In this scenario, we take on the risk of your building delivering the outcome you need. If we don’t deliver on those Outcomes, we pay you.
We combine our unique Open Data Platform – which can take and understand data from any building system – with over 170 nationwide staff to support your lifts, BMS and HVAC systems. We also take on the responsibility of working with other contractors, like your facilities management (FM) provider, to align everyone to your Outcomes.
In addition, the team from our Remote Operations Centre (ROC) continuously monitor your building performance, so issues can be corrected before they cause negative impact. Together, this means your building performs as you want it, more of the time – quite literally Building Performance as Service
The Guaranteed Building Outcome Model leaves you to do what you’re good at (in this case, treating patients), and it leaves us to do what we’re good at – managing buildings.
