STRATA KK CREATED A BESPOKE IOT ANALYTICS PLATFORM, ENABLING LIVE BUILDING SYSTEMS TO ENTER A NICHE SERVICE MARKET.

ABOUT THE CLIENT

Live Building Systems (LBS) are a firm based in New York City, and they know that the buildings are the core of New York; generations come and go, while the buildings endure. LBS recognized that landlords and building managers need real-time data analytics to assist with building management.

Buildings require an immense amount of resources and care. This care is an ever-increasing challenge while the infrastructures that provide electricity, water, gas, and oil to the city’s >1 million buildings are rapidly aging.

Often it is usage statistics and IoT sensor data-monitoring that can provide the first warning of leaks from such aging infrastructure. LBS recognized that modern IoT tools supporting real-time tracking and, ultimately, optimizations, are crucial to improving the efficiency of building management. It is this Software as a Service (SaaS) that they wished to offer their clients.

THE CHALLENGE

LBS conducted their market research and they were convinced that the niche existed. They needed the platform, but no commercial solutions were available to enable access to all utility activity in real-time for landlords and management companies.

LBS partnered with Strata and worked together to define the requirements of the building operating system intended to enable the monitoring of resource usage at scale using IoT devices.

THE SOLUTION

Strata KK consulted to produce the requirements specification for the analytics platform. It was this specification that drove the final product. Strata KK was also responsible for all aspects of technical support, including software development and system architecture for LBS’s first 3 years.

THE DESIGN PROCESS

The Strata KK technical team applied an agile process to finalize various aspects of the system design process. The team was responsible for all documentation which included design documents, test documents, and the data dictionary. To ensure the highest level of code quality and maximum system uptime, the Strata KK team utilized various testing methodologies and tools such as CircleCI, Sentry, and Selenium. They also handled all system documentation including the installation guides and user manuals.

The team was responsible for all components of this SaaS system, including the design and implementation of the user interface (UI).

THE PLATFORM

The final solution consumed multiple REST APIs and packaged data into a bespoke REST API, to provide a robust data pipeline into the analytics system. The final platform required a backend system, which is a hosted Postgres database, RDS, from Amazon Web Services (AWS). This choice ensures easy replication, future expansion, and effortless scaling.

For the frontend, modern libraries such as React and Flask (Python) were applied. The resulting UI provides an easy-to-use dashboard and reporting platform that supports optimizations in the daily workflows of LBS’ clients.

THE OUTCOME

The Strata KK team developed an effective platform to enable access to all building utility activities in real-time. The LBS software provides utility consumption as data streams. This enables LBS to provide their clients with a SaaS platform that enables analytics and diagnostics to address costly inefficiencies, at speed.

The product launched LBS to be the leading company in its sector. Due to the effective pricing model offered by Strata KK, LBS was able to grow without external funding, leveraging a significant advantage over competitors. The tool allowed LBS to grow rapidly and work efficiently at scale. LBS are now well placed to take on the remaining challenge-increasing their market share.

As of 2019, LBS has saved their clients over 11,888,288,622 gallons of water (worth $160,491,896), 12,281,172 gallons of oil (worth $40,036,620), 11,271,794 therms of gas (worth $13,244,357) and 28,334,359 KWh of electricity ($5,100,184).