Customer Success Story

The Department for Business,Innovation & Skills
Swindon, United Kingdom
One of the Department’s Buildings
1 Victoria Street, London

Government Buildings, London

Introduction
The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial
Strategy (BEIS), formerly The Department for Business,
Innovation, and Skills (BIS) is the department for business,science, and innovation within the UK Government.
In November 2015, BIS began a journey with ICONICS
that was going to allow them to build a scalable, Azure
cloud based solution that would revolutionise the way
Central Government would manage their property
estate. The department invests in skills and education topromote trade, boost innovation and help people to startand grow a business. To this end there are 49 partnerorganisations that sit under BIS, each with their own
estates and facilities related datasets and challenges. The
Property Asset Management Team was created in April“BIS’ ultimate aim of creating a compreh­ensive
data solution to manage all aspects of property asset management has been achieved
through working in partnership with ICONICS.
Whatever the request ‘no’ or ‘we can’t do that’
does not appear to be words in their vocabulary; the project team regularly go above andbeyond to consistently exceed expectations intight time frames. At all times ICONICS havebeen professional, solution orientated andforward thinking. The successfulness of thepartnership had already led to further development of the original system solution.
ICONICS and the data capture and management solution is central to the future plansof BIS.”
Roger Taylor
Property Director
BIS

2014 to manage a portfolio of estate across the partnerorganisations and BIS. A significant part of this was toensure evidence based decision making and to optimisethe performance of buildings across the office estate. Witharound 2,500 staff working for the core BIS Department
alone, and in excess of 14,500 people working across thepartner organisations, there are offices across London,
Sheffield, Cardiff, Manchester, Nottingham and a variety
of other UK cities.

Government Infrastructure & Manufacturing

The Department for Business, Innovation & Skills

Swindon, United Kingdom

Therefore, the estates and facilities management challenges that faced BIS were significant; plus the evergrowing need to rationalise and make financial savings
meant that sound data management was needed to underpin decision-making.

had aspirations to one day integrate more real- time/automated building and energy data into the system. The
question was, what technology or system could unite, visualise and analyse all of this data and offer the flexibilityof a future proof solution.

The Aim
The Department’s holistic aim was to rationalise theirbuilding portfolio and shrink their carbon footprint by reducing the number of buildings they own and introducing
more flexible work hours for their staff. But, in order tohave any chance of shrinking their footprint, BIS realisedthat they needed to be able to analyse the performance ofImplementation
Maxine Oakey, Information Manager for BIS Property
Asset Management Directorate, and her team did alot of market research and whittled down a variety oforganisations to a handful of potential software vendors
and consultants.

Swindon, UnitedKingdom

New System: Management Dashboard Screenshot

New System: Property KPI Metrics

their estate, detect trends and use data to drive proactive
estate management. The challenge was that the data andreporting processes for their entire building portfolio wascompletely fragmented. BIS did make sure to monitor
the performance of their buildings. However, their manual data collection processes were so complex that they
didn’t have the time or resources to digest the data andact accordingly. Imagine compiling hundreds of incongruent spreadsheets for 70 disparate data sources across
180 buildings. It was a data analyst’s nightmare. So, BIS
established a consistent data strategy and went to market
to find a holistic business-wide system; a single “viewof truth” to support the management of their properties.
They knew they wanted to capture all sorts of operational
data; everything from occupancy counts, energy statistics and meter readings to project information, financial
reporting and lease agreements; but the Department also

In the autumn of 2015, ICONICS ran a short Azurehosted proof of concept to demonstrate the capabilities ofGENESIS64™ to Central Government. BIS chose three
data sources and, within a week, saw that the dashboards
that ICONICS had built, combined with the flexibilityof visualising spreadsheets with different formats, wereexactly what they needed. BIS took the 7 BIS partnerorganisations with the largest proportion of BIS officeestate and decided to embark on a journey with ICONICS
that, if successful, could potentially be rolled out acrossthe rest of Central Government.

Government Infrastructure & Manufacturing

ICONICS Customer Success StorySolution
The Azure-hosted solution provides an integrated view ofall BIS building assets. The Property Asset Management
Team (PAM), can now drill down to any building, bygeographical area, and see over 70 different data types

The Department for Business, Innovation & Skills“The Data Capture Management system, or DCM
as we call it, collates all of our data into one placemaking analysis, presentation and managementof our data much easier, saving us time andresources. We can see all of our data at once
instead of depending on multiple spreadsheets,giving the team and our client’s one true picture.
We can create dynamic graphics giving an at-aglance representation of our data and modify thesystem to suit our needs”.
Charlotte Tyson
Data Coordinator
BIS

Swindon, United Kingdom

Results
The results have been staggering. BIS can now see andprioritise the most underutilised and energy inefficientbuildings across the 180 buildings that they’re trying torationalise. BIS estimated that the PAM team used to spend
75 percent of their data collating and validating data.
BIS foresee that this figure will drop to 15 to 20 percent.
That’s 55 to 60 percent of their resources freed up!
The rest of the time will be spent on actually adding
value to the data; analysing trends, making and testing
hypothesises; truly taking data verified steps to improveunderperforming properties.
The ICONICS visualisation and future PowerBI
integration is expected to save BIS at least one full-timeemployee per year. Most importantly, BIS have seen thatICONICS’ technology is powerful enough to interface
with any other systems or data source when they’reready, ultimately giving Central Government a futureproof platform.

in building dashboard summaries within Azure. There’s
no longer a need to trawl through hundreds of different
spreadsheets to see the buildings occupancy counts,
energy consumption statistics, or lease agreements. Thisis data now accessible within a couple of clicks. BIS canmanage all the data entry through a web upload interface,where they can upload their disparate spreadsheets; the Next Steps
solution offers a complete picture across multiple datasets BIS have an ambition to make the ICONICS system anindustry standard across the whole Central Government,
and a single version of the truth.
as well as to add real-time building automation data andIn utilising Microsoft’s Azure Table storage and Event push other data into PowerBI. For now though, ICONICS
Hub, ICONICS configured a truly scalable cloud are already making steps to configure a ‘browser lightsolution, meaning that adding data sources in the future, version’ and a fully mobile responsive HTML5 version,and growing BIS’ audience across the government, isn’t built on ICONICS’ commercial off-the-shelf product
MobileHMI™.
going to be costly.

© 2018 ICONICS, Inc. All rights reserved. Specifications are subject to change without notice. AnalytiX and its respective modules are registered trademarks of ICONICS, Inc.
GENESIS64, GENESIS32, Hyper Historian, BizViz, PortalWorX, MobileHMI and their respective modules, OPC-to-the-Core, and Visualize Your Enterprise are trademarks ofICONICS, Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
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Government Infrastructure & Manufacturing

ICONICS Customer Success Story