Member Spotlight Interview: CIM


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In our latest Members Spotlight Interview, we spoke with Paul Walsh, General Manager EMEA at CIM, a company that creates innovative building analytics helping large buildings operate at their peak performance.

Paul shares insight into the technology behind CIM, the problem they are solving and how their platform improved efficiency and sustainability across sites and property portfolios..


Q: CIM creates innovative building analytics software that helps operate large buildings at their peak performance. Can you tell us more about the technology behind this?

A: Large and complex buildings such as airports, manufacturing sites, commercial offices, and museums contain a wealth of granular data within their various systems and equipment. However this data is only as useful as the technology that can capture it and turn it into actionable information to improve performance.

PEAK is CIM’s SaaS building analytics platform that makes better use of existing data to improve building performance. PEAK optimises operational efficiency by collating and interrogating data from all existing sensors and equipment across a building such as chillers, boilers, air handling units, building management systems, and car park and weather systems.

Our team of engineers apply customised rules-based algorithms across this data in PEAK to quickly and easily uncover the root cause of issues. For example, failures and deteriorations in asset energy performance generate instant alerts detailing the location, root cause, cost impact and solution for faults. Each alert automatically becomes an assigned maintenance ticket, ensuring energy wastage is addressed without delay.

Q: What problem does CIM solve and how does it help the environment?

A: Operating large buildings—particularly the highly technical equipment that maintains temperature, air quality, ventilation and overall comfort—is challenging and expensive. Without access to building data, building management teams struggle to effectively manage many aspects of building operations such as legacy systems, operational and capital costs, multiple contractors, tenant comfort and energy consumption.

What’s more, heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems (HVAC) typically use more than 60% of a building’s total energy consumption, and up to a third of that energy is often wasted due to HVAC malfunction, performance degradation and improperly tuned controls. When you consider that the building sector is one of the largest contributors to climate change, accounting for 30-40% of global greenhouse gas emissions, this statistic is hard to ignore.

CIM simplifies operations by providing real-time accurate measures of a building’s systems and equipment performance, enabling building management teams to rapidly identify optimisation opportunities, repair technical or operational faults and implement logic controls to improve efficiency.

Q: Can you share insights into your PEAK platform and how it improves efficiency, sustainability across sites and property portfolios?

A: PEAK’s insights enable building owners and operators to extract the most value from their existing systems, equipment and people by giving them visibility and control over site and portfolio performance, so they can make faster and data-driven decisions.

PEAK is generating incredible commercial and sustainability results for global customers including large manufacturing sites, Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITS), superannuation funds, governments and some of the biggest property portfolio owners and operators such as QICGRE, Brookfield, the GPT Group and Dexus.

Our solution delivers the multifaceted monitoring and analytics required to centralise and maximise the performance of HVAC systems, and provide a new benchmark in operational and sustainability practices across building portfolios.

Once building performance is optimised, our clients can use PEAK to identify the most energy-intensive equipment, verify the impact to net-zero carbon targets by replacing it, and future proof investments in new, cleaner energy sources.

By using PEAK to improve building performance, our clients are able to deliver better, long-term value to shareholders and tenants.

Q: What separates CIM from competitors?

A: This building analytics market is somewhat crowded yet we always find that the quality of our software, our highly skilled engineers and data scientists, and complete independence remain important differentiators for CIM.
Our PEAK platform was awarded “Best in Class” in an independent, 24-month evaluation of international building analytics technologies led by The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). PEAK was the only analytics platform to achieve 91%+ in each of the seven judging categories, which is a great testament to our world-class, inhouse team of building experts and developers.

We also know that our customers are looking for an end-to-end solution that makes it simple and easy to make building management decisions. Rather than simply installing the software and leaving them to it, we provide 24/7 client-side engineering expertise as part of our SaaS offering. We support our customers throughout the entire building optimisation process, making it quicker and easier for them to harness their building data and drive more value from their assets.

It is important to mention that we are also fully independent. We do not sell professional services, BMS systems, equipment or maintenance like some other players in this market. We are purely focused on large building optimisation through accurate, unbiased and verified insights that are based on live and historical building data.

Q: Lastly, where do you see the industry headed in 2-5 years?

A: I see a very exciting and important future for building analytics and the property industry as a whole for many reasons.

At a building or portfolio level, technology such as PEAK is a game-changer and invaluable piece of the toolkit for anyone who owns or operates large buildings. It streamlines operations and maintenance practices for facility managers, helps sustainability teams track and improve progress against ESG targets, and owners increase the value of their assets.

On a much larger scale, this smart, data-driven approach is facilitating and accelerating positive behavioural change across the entire property industry and helping to solve some of the most pressing issues we face today. By using building analytics to harness the power of data, the built environment has the biggest opportunity to quickly and cost-effectively cut carbon emissions and play a critical role in curbing climate change. Many of our customers are using PEAK to fast-track their net-zero targets while also prioritising healthy buildings for tenants and visitors too.

www.cim.io

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