As a market leading provider of innovative software solutions for Real Estate and Facility Management, Planon has opened up its software platform. This allows organizations to maximize the benefits from the diversity of property technology (PropTech) as present across their portfolio. Most importantly, it helps them retain a single pane of glass on a portfolio level in a varied and dispersed landscape of fast-growing technology and digitalization opportunities.
In today’s reality, almost every building is equipped with a specific variety of smart building technologies and IT infrastructures. The extremely fast evolving PropTech market is increasing this diversity and variety of technology even further. Not just in a single building, but especially on a real estate portfolio, site, or campus level.
Although use- and business cases of individual technologies are attractive and beneficial, this trend also triggers additional complexity:
To enable cost efficient, scalable and value-focused digitalization in Corporate Real Estate and Facility Management, the Planon Platform offers unique capabilities that make it a true open application platform: it is open to other systems and enables the development of additional capabilities by others.
The Planon Platform allows a seamless ‘fit in’ of property technology that is already available within buildings, or that is preferred by building users or operators. This allows organizations to take maximum advantage of market innovations and eventual specific local or regional technology preferences. Most importantly, the Planon Platform provides the tools that allow organizations to deal with this complexity in an easy, cost efficient, scalable and manageable way.
Planon solutions are unique through their focus on CRE and FM business process that deliver tangible benefits in areas such as compliance, efficiency, productivity and sustainability. As well as the toolsets to easily connect PropTech, the Planon Platform also provides the tools to seamlessly embed these technologies in the business processes and workflows as supported by the Planon solutions. This creates tremendous new value opportunities in better and faster real-world business responses through decision automation, as well as enhanced portfolio decision making through a single pane of glass.
With the Planon Platform, organizations can gain maximum benefit from today’s and tomorrow’s technology innovations in buildings and the workplace, continuously innovate through a freedom of choice, strongly reduce integration costs and efforts, and retain a single source of truth with harmonized business processes.
The Planon Platform offers an extensive toolset to set up and configure Planon solutions, business processes, workflows, authorizations, catalogs etc. To connect 3rd party products and property technology, the Planon Platform offers multiple integration tools such as REST API, a state-of-the-art, flexible, and easy way to integrate applications. To embed these 3rd party products in the business processes as supported by Planon solutions, the Planon Platform offers a decision engine to configure decision automation, and to add specific business logic and actions to events.
For Planon partners or Planon customers that like to extend the existing Planon functionality with new applications (apps), the Planon Platform includes a fully integrated AppBuilder to develop, test and deploy new apps in an easy and scalable way.
The AppBuilder reduces software development efforts and throughput times and provides programmers with a programming environment that offers them better access to the existing Planon software objects and the toolsets mentioned above. In IT, this is commonly known as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). By facilitating programming, offering testing facilities, and making deployment of apps very simple, a programmer’s life becomes much easier, resulting in faster development of better solutions and lower cost-of-ownership.
"With the Planon Platform, organizations can gain maximum benefit from today’s and tomorrow’s technology innovations in buildings and the workplace, strongly reduce integration costs and efforts, and retain a single source of truth with harmonized business processes."
The sudden rise in remote working and digitization means we now have far less real-life communication and collaboration. Consequently, we have less real-life connections with people and miss out on nonverbal communication. Therefore we lack an essential element to understand the importance of a situation, to manage expectations or improve satisfaction. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help to determine nonverbal aspects in a remote and highly digitized world by detecting people’s moods and emotions by analyzing emails or voice messages.
For a Facility Management Service Desk, such AI technology can help to analyze the mood of a requestor. Based on that mood, it can determine the right priority, the right response, or the right feedback. This enables teams to do the right things to keep customers happy and to identify improvements for services. Ultimately, organizations gain valuable new insights about interrelations, including a person’s mood versus workplace utilization, indoor climate settings, or building preferences.
Its open architecture allows the Planon Platform to connect with any AI technology. Moreover, it allows organizations to embed this technology into the Planon business processes, such as the aforementioned Service Desk. Once a customer enters a request, the input is immediately sent to the AI technology and the result is fed back into the request in real-time. With the use of AI, Service Desk operator could immediately see colored emoticons, which represent the customer’s mood. Automated and configurable workflows ensure the right response to the request, and BI and analytics give the ability to strategize the new insights gained.
Smart building platforms, like Schneider Electric Building Advisor, systematically monitor the behavior of building control and climate installations by extracting parameter data, and analyzing this data to detect anomalies. Systems might be wasting energy (energy), assets in the infrastructure might be bound to fail (maintenance), or the building infrastructure does not provide the required environmental conditions (comfort).
With its integration tools, the Planon Platform automatically transfers these anomalies into diagnostics that describe what is wrong, and provide insight on how to remedy the situation. Based on configurable decision rules, these diagnostics are automatically assessed, and relevant interventions are generated and processed through the applicable Planon Solution, such as generating workorders, reviewing budgets, assessing portfolio priorities, or sending alerts. This enables you to create portfolios of smart buildings and drives immediate action on intelligence that is derived from these smart buildings.
Its open architecture means that the Planon Platform can connect with any smart building platform or technology. Moreover, it allows organizations to embed this technology in the Planon business processes, like the aforementioned workorder, budget, or portfolio management. This helps your organization to drastically reduce building operating costs, increase the value of assets throughout their lifecycle, improve building sustainability profiles, and enhance workplace experience for occupants.
Organisations must be empowered to respond to new challenges. In this blog Iwan van Eldijk explains how Planon’s solutions help building owners become future-ready.
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