The ambitious goals of greenhouse gases emission reduction set out by European Union’s climate action and environmental protection policy are challenging not only European sector of industry, power generation and transport, but also for the other domains of economy, including retail. Several regulations require retail in general, and chain stores in particular, to improve energy-efficiency of their business or to introduce standards of sustainability and responsibility with regard to the use of environmentally harmful substances. For example, the directive no. 2012/27/EU on energy efficiency enforces energy-efficiency standards for new constructions and major refurbishments of existing buildings. And further, the regulation of European Parliament no. 517/2014 introduces measures to support reduction of fluorinated greenhouse gases emission.

SESCOM as facility management company which successfully provides support to over 100 clients in entire Europe decided to address this challenge by introducing to the market business intelligence and big data analytics services dedicated to energy efficiency and sustainable facility management. SESCOM expects that digitization of processes, focus on data-driven optimization of facilities performance should bring significant savings to the budgets of its clients and also have positive environmental footprint.

Within this project funded by EU within H2020 SME Instrument programme SESCOM has accomplished several objectives, including the completion of technical and economical feasibility study, delivery of specification of business intelligence services to support implementation of EU regulations with regard to energy-efficiency and reduction of GHG emission, and preparation of a business plan to introduce those services to European market.

The feasibility study, including interviews conducted with stakeholders and end-users representing retail industry, has proven that the further development of SESCOM Business Intelligence solution is technologically feasible, economically viable in terms of profitability and has positive societal and environmental impact as the solution massively contributes to sustainable energy management.

The "SESCOM Business Intelligence Platform for Energy Saving and Smart Facility Management” project, which has been realized from September to December 2016, comprises four tasks covering investigation of EU regulatory context, gathering of technical requirements and design of system architecture, evaluation of operational capacity to deliver business intelligence services, and detailed analysis of business opportunity and assessment of economic viability of the project.

In order to organize the process of feasibility assessment and business planning, TELOS methodology has been adopted. This acronym stands for an analysis where Technical, Economic, Legal, Operational, and Scheduling aspects of a project are investigated. All results of the activities carried out have been included and summarized in extensive feasibility study and business plan document.

Finally, one of the most important results of this preparatory project is establishing of SESCOM Business Intelligence Competence Centre that is responsible for the transformation of the company into a data-driven enterprise providing data analytics solutions for clients in facility management and energy-efficiency sectors.

One of the most important conclusions resulting from this project is the diagnosis that digitization of the global industry radically changes methods of value creation in facility management. State of the art analysis shows that the industry evolves and changes business and technical landscape: the hitherto typical sources of revenue in facility management such as repairs, technical interventions, inspections, or maintenance are gradually superseded by increased automation and digitization of the industry. Reactive approach to maintenance is replaced by predictive techniques that help to foresee failures and faults and respond to them before they happen. Instead of on-site inspections telemetry and remote sensing supported by digital models (twins) of systems and installations help to monitor and simulate the health of the infrastructure, providing support for decision-making.

Hence, SESCOM has decided to bring to facility management methods and services that so far have been reserved for power generation, electricity grid, critical infrastructures, and production plants. In light of the conducted state of the art analysis and technical design of the targeted software system, SES-BI platform will support big data processing and the so-called 4V (Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity) challenge resulting therefrom. SES-BI will enable real-time data acquisition with the use of Internet of Things. Finally, SESCOM will implement algorithms that will supplement usual descriptive analytics with advanced diagnostic, predictive, and predictive methods with special focus on predictive maintenance.

Feasibility study shows that such approach has significant commercial potential. In order to exploit it, SESCOM has already designed several dozens of business intelligence and data-analytical services that will make up company’s portfolio encapsulated in the “SESCOM intelligence” brand.