How do you reduce energy and costs, provide fresh air, and do it without much effort? The answer: with the “Fresh Air Manager”. But what does it do exactly?
In Switzerland and around the rest of the world, there is hardly a company that does not ask itself how to tackle all these problems: how to save energy and costs, how to create the right conditions for the crown, how to become more sustainable and how to use the opportunities of digital innovation.
The “Mobiliar Arena” in Gümligen near Bern with space for 2350 spectators including 1450 seats as well as several side rooms also for business events is operated by the Foundation for the Promotion of Youth Sport for Kids. Fresh, healthy air is a key issue for the operation of the arena. When the hall was built in 2018, a ventilation system was also installed, and corresponding target values were defined. But this classic, static approach has two disadvantages: First, you don’t know exactly what the air quality is like, and certainly not in real time. You may feel it, you can also measure the temperature or the carbon dioxide content, but who wants to constantly turn the knobs so as not to filter too little during maximum occupancy and not too much during rest periods?
On top of that, there are usually fixed intervals for changing the consumables, especially the air filters. Here there is great potential for optimising energy costs and air quality. Because if you change the filters too often, it costs a lot of money and does not protect the environment. If you change the filters too little, the ventilation system has to increase its performance and use more energy to achieve the set air turnover when the filters become increasingly clogged.
Realtime measurement, visualisation and alarming with networked sensors
The solution for this complex profile of requirements in terms of air quality, energy and cost reduction is the use of digital, innovative sensors in combination with a control system that continuously measures countless values of air quality, displays them graphically in real time and immediately indicates necessary measures if required – “making the invisible visible”, so to speak. Those responsible at the Mobiliar Arena were immediately prepared to support the tests when the company actoVent in Grossaffoltern in the Bernese Seeland presented the project to them.
For its part, actoVent combines the advantages of digital transformation for the benefit of its clientele with those for its own company. actoVent managing director Franz Penka: “The idea was not simply to continue to function as a large B2B trading portal for a wide variety of products, but to offer ‘fresh air as a service’, so to speak. In other words, to integrate all suppliers on one platform and to provide our customers not only with individual products, but with an overall system that makes the entire ventilation operation more efficient and takes a lot of work off their shoulders.” The idea did not come out of nowhere: the sister company penka GmbH Luft – Klimatechnik in Weinstadt near Stuttgart in Germany already has 30 years of experience in ventilation and air-conditioning technology.
In concrete terms, this happens via the fresh air manager from actoVent, a digital platform that brings together all the companies involved in the process, displays the measured values in a dashboard and optimises the processes around clean air on a data basis. Roman Bühler, hall manager of the Mobiliar Arena, is more than satisfied with the actoVent project so far: “We have only saved a good 20 per cent of energy so far – per month we only consume 5500 instead of 7000 kilowatt hours in the summer months.” The return on investment of the hall with actoVent is “amazing”, a further expansion is likely; according to Bühler, actoVent has probably found a gap in the market here.
“It’s worth it!” says the company Gebäudesversicherung Bern.
Another actoVent customer is the Bern Gebäudeversicherung (building insurance company) based in Ittigen. In a first step, one floor was equipped with eight sensors, and the employees can always call up the current values in their working environment by means of a QR code on the sensor. Corinne Fleury, Head of Innovation and an architect by training: “We are always interested in trying out new things and optimising our building in terms of energy. By cleverly balancing heat and ventilation generation, we can not only create a healthy and comfortable working environment, but also save energy.” For example, he says, it quickly becomes clear when a room is getting too warm, and the heat no longer literally just goes out the window.
How the fast customer data processing works
actoVent has the task of organising the right products for the customer from almost a million products from over a thousand partner companies, and it does this using a single platform. In addition, all customer data must be processed and, if necessary, the products and service technicians must be brought to the customers immediately.
Franz Penka: “Of course, you could also do this with conventional IT. But the effort involved would simply not be manageable. Since we already use SAP in our company, it was obvious to work with the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) and the HANA database in order to be able to build our platform in a few months. And we didn’t want to wait forever for the ‘perfect’ solution, we wanted to go live quickly and gradually.”
Thanks to SAP BTP, the actoVent platform did not require any extra complex programming.
The platform business model of the future – also for SMEs
actoVent, which won the Bronze Award in the category “Digital Commerce: Innovation & Creative Commerce” at the German Digital Awards in Berlin in May this year, works together with AGILITA. This SAP partner in Zürich helps SMEs not only to implement SAP solutions quickly and efficiently, but also to create enthusiasm for what is possible with SAP. Managing Director Sandra Völler contradicts the prejudice that SAP is only something for the big players: “We are the partner of our SME customers in their digital transformation. We bring ideas, processes and technologies to them that lead to innovations in the market.” Therefore, with the Fresh Air Manager service platform, AGILITA and actoVent have made a truly sustainable solution marketable.
