PCL Construction and Microsoft are teaming up to fuel joint innovation and development of smart building implementations. Using knowledge combined from PCL’s engineering expertise and Microsoft’s engineering and R&D teams, PCL is leveraging advanced Azure capabilities to develop the next generation of Smart Building solutions.
“Smart Building solutions are important to our clients, enabling building operators to gain valuable insights, and it’s an exciting area to be involved in,” said Mark Bryant, PCL’s CIO, in a press release. “PCL Construction is delighted to be partnered with Microsoft to enable leading marketplace solutions.”
Supporting these solutions is the full range of Azure services, including Power BI, Azure IoT and Microsoft’s analytics and AI capabilities. Using these technologies, PCL, backed by Microsoft Azure, will be developing solutions to:
- Track workers, inventory and environmental conditions during construction to increase efficiency, improve safety and provide insight into the construction process;
- Reduce cost of management, maintenance and utilities by using the data collected to create improvements and efficiencies, such as automatically turning off the heat in an unoccupied room;
- Personalize and automate a building’s features, such as lighting, heating, cooling, room utilization and more, to create a more comfortable and productive work environment;
- Connect usage information from unrelated systems and integrate it into a central view to better monitor inefficiencies and issues, and to achieve peak optimization; and
- Drive environmental efficiencies and higher returns by optimizing the use of resources for utilities to reduce energy consumption and costs.
