From zero to hero in 12 months
The potential value of IoT for social and sustainable housing initiatives is clear, but the journey from zero to a fully implemented solution is rife with pitfalls and traps which, if not carefully navigated could limit the return on investment, not only in the short term, but for years to come.
Last week Daizy headed to the Smart Buildings show in London to share our experience of how we collaborated with BCHA to develop an accelerator program focused on getting their IOT program off the ground and delivering and ROI in under 12 months.
Nick Gyles, Daizy’s Chief Product Officer was joined by Graeme Southwood, BHCA’s Interim Director of Change, Transformation and Growth, to explore how an IoT strategy built around BCHA’s broader organisational goals was pivotal, and how this strategy delivered success from procuring solutions, through installation and onto using data analysis to drive business transformation.
Why aren’t Social Housing organisations rolling out IoT?
For many organisations who have dipped their toe in IoT waters, the challenges have often outweighed the perceived benefits.
- Counting the cost: ROIs are sensitive and easily disrupted by additional time on integration and installation; not device or connectivity cost
- Debilitating complexity: The chaos of the current IoT landscape requires expertise to navigate; no evidently frictionless options are available through existing business systems
- Eternal lock-in: Vertical solutions as an option come with longer term issues – data access, pre-defined ecosystems, inflexibility
Without effectively addressing these challenges, BCHA’s strategy to use technology to improve the living environment for customers, while reducing maintenance and repair costs were unlikely to be met through the implementation of IoT.
Accelerating ROI through an alternative approach
With many IoT solutions in the social housing space providing verticalized solutions, the cost and complexity of sensor driven projects can quickly ramp-up, reducing the ROI and introducing long term dependencies that could be difficult to unpick when IoT advancements and new solutions become available.
By selecting Daizy as a strategic partner, BCHA can now address and mitigate common IoT challenges by ensuring they can chose the optimal IoT technology and connectivity to meet their location, budget and use-case specific requirements.
Daizy’s platform provides:
An open platform for Enterprise IoT: we work with any device and connectivity
The ability to manage the lifecycle of devices, projects and data in a single platform, regardless of use case
A suite of easy-to-use tools to design, install, configure and operate IoT projects
All IoT data in one place, under the customer’s control with flexible publishing rules
The opportunity to experiment quickly and scale effortlessly within a single framework for IoT
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What have we learned?
Having completed the initial roll-out, we’ve had a great opportunity to learn about some of the common pitfalls, and also how quickly technology and connectivity is progressing:
A problem early on, patchy Network Connectivity has since improved significantly, aided by the roll-out of NB-IoT
For larger blocks or housing clusters, deploy a LoRaWAN gateway enable a quicker roll-out and a more stable solution
Deflecting spend with third parties is easier than realising internal savings benefit, while also reducing the burden of internal change management
To realise further savings, housing Management platform vendors still need to ramp-up the integration of IoT triggers and use cases into business processes
Get the complete picture
To find out more about the use cases, implementation approach and return on investment, download the full presentation. Or if you’d like to talk to us directly about how we can help you accelerate your IoT project, you can reach us here.
