Italy’s leading financial newspaper enjoys benefits of integrating building and business systems
Integrated business management — the Honeywell Enterprise Buildings Integrator enables information from building-management and access-control systems to be linked with personnel and financial records in this new headquarters of Italy’s leading financial newspaper.
Honeywell’s Enterprise Buildings Integrators (EBI) working with LonWorks technology links building-management systems with financial and personnel records and supply chain of Italy’s leading financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore in its new headquarters in Milan. Ease and flexibility of configuration, control and monitoring were other requirements. The newspaper employs a large number of professional people with high expectations, who demand a high level of individual control over their personal space. Journalists work irregular hours, and a radio station operates 24 h a day, so flexible and discrete control was needed. The showcase headquarters was designed by Renzo Piano. It is an industrial complex mixing new build with remnants of the original 1960s structure. The U-shaped building has 48 000 m2 of office space, radio station, television station, 250-seat auditorium, congress centre, lecture rooms, bookshop, restaurant and underground car park. All the employees work from the one site. One wing, about a third of the floor area, is let to a leading international business consultancy. Honeywell Milan provided the turnkey solution of the complete building-management and access-control systems. The Enterprise Buildings Integrator (EBI), working with LonWorks technology, integrates the different systems into one network and enables seamless monitoring and control of them from a PC. This approach supports an holistic approach to building management and provides a good insight into the real-time and historical performance of the facility. Web office consoles for each of the three wings enable employees to control their microclimate from their PCs using an Internet browser. 1200 control spaces are configured to provide flexible control within an open-plan environment. Standard conditions can be pre-set for different room functions (meeting, presentation or vacant). Such fine tuning requires 85 000 data points to be monitored around the clock. Security and fire detection is managed via the EBI platform, with access control for 2500 card holders. This is backed by CCTV cameras with digital video recording and management. 3000 fire-detection devices linked to five fire panels are integrated into the EBI through an OPC client/server interface. Honeywell trained the company’s own operators and oversees all system maintenance. The system makes sense of a lot of data. Having one source for real-time and historical data makes for quick and accurate decision making. It supports consistent and standard operating procedures for every aspect of security and building management and provides one system for enforcing them. Integrating building-management systems with business-information systems supports further performance gains. Monitoring time and attendance reduces payroll administration and paperwork — a huge benefit in a complex organisation employing a lot of people, employees and contractors, working different shifts. Honeywell account manager Sergio Gazzola says, ‘This is a relatively low-cost capital investment with a huge return on total-life operating costs. It also looks good, with wall switches replaced by software. With the infrastructure in place from the outset, there will be no need for expensive rewiring should business needs necessitate reorganisation in the longer term.’
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