PTC : Drives Digital Transformation & Innovation Within Our Own Walls

Buildings are becoming increasingly intelligent and efficient through IoT-enablement and other innovative technologies; the smart building market is expected to reach $62m and the smart office market will be nearly $50bn by 2024.

While PTC's reputation across the IoT market is largely as a technology provider, the company is taking on the practitioner persona through incorporating this technology within its own walls.

Included in PTC's seven occupied floors in the cutting-edge 121 Seaport building are 750 connected workstations provided by Steelcase. The workstations are equipped with an interactive user interface and scheduling features. Primarily on the outskirts of the floors are 180 huddle and conferences rooms with Steelcase RoomWizard scheduling systems.

These connected workstations and rooms will feed usage data into a software platform for operational insights. A dashboard will record real-time and over-time occupancy utilization, such as typical peak usage throughout a day made available for relevant building stakeholders (including PTC). The system can also re-open reserved meeting rooms if the occupants never show up through motion-based sensors.

A study by AskCody cites 70% of employees waste 15 minutes a day looking for collaboration space and meetings are reserved 92% of the day but 15% of reservations are never used. These features can have significant ramifications for workforce productivity and other operational efficiencies including lowering energy costs through intelligent lighting based on utilization trends.

Also illuminating the building are thousands of LED lights; LEDs are estimated to last five times longer than traditional bulbs (average lifespan of 25,000 hours) and require fewer watts, lowering electricity costs in the long term. These lights are made even more energy efficient through a daylight harvesting system, which optimizes natural lighting and offset the use of artificial lighting.

The Schneider Electric EcoStruxure building management system software platform manages and analyzes these connected lighting and energy components, including electricity meters that are on each floor reporting energy utilization trends.

This ascending innovation continues with Otis elevators (a PTC customer) programmed with a demand dispatching system, which groups passengers by floor destination, reducing wait and travel times and energy costs. The building contains other innovative and connected products (many are PTC customers) for furniture from Knoll, Herman Miller and Haworth, appliances from GE and Whirlpool and other fixtures from American Standard Plumbing and Kohler.

Augmented reality (AR) experiences occur both in and out of the building; the Harbor Way public plaza features an AR interaction with an 1896 shipwreck discovered during the construction of the building. The AR application is intended to be an interactive museum of the shipwreck and also depict the evolution of the Seaport district as a shipping port to its current status as the Innovation District. The building further appreciates the area's history with materials excavated from the sunken ship being repurposed for a board room table in 121 Seaport.

The building has already received accreditation for being one of the greenest buildings in the U.S. and these technologies will make 121 Seaport one of the most intelligent and innovative buildings in the area.

Related articles:

• New Home for One of the Top Places to Work in Massachusetts
• It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like PTC's Seaport Move

Tags:

• Industrial Internet of Things

David Immerman

David Immerman is a business analyst on PTC's Corporate Marketing team providing thought leadership on technologies, trends, markets, and other topics. Previously David was an industry analyst in 451 Research's Internet of Things channel primarily covering the smart transportation space and automotive technology markets, including fleet telematics, connected cars, and autonomous vehicles. He also spent time researching IoT-enabling technologies and other industry verticals including industrial. Prior to 451 Research, David conducted market research at IDC.