Integrated Intelligence in Modern Buildings

By Ben Thompson

The brand new, state-of-the-art building certainly looks like the sort of modern corporate edifice that management likes to eulogize over and employees love to work in. The glass and steel exterior, accented with redwood reclaimed from local water towers, is the epitome of commercial chic. The roof is an eco-friendly ‘living’ structure that supports and conserves wildlife systems while insulating the building and minimizing heat gain. A bright, airy atrium runs the length of the structure, letting natural light flood into offices located down a central spine and offering uninterrupted views of the tree-lined creek running through the campus. To the naked eye, Panduit’s new global headquarters building in Tinley Park, Illinois, is a shining showcase of what the modern, sustainable business is all about.

“We used this project to redefine how Panduit was thinking about our workspaces”
-Robert Smith, Director of Global Real Estate, Panduit

But it is under behind the gleaming glass facade that Panduit's new nerve center really shows its smarts. Buildings consume 72 percent of all the electricity produced in the US and emit almost 40 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to the US Green Building Council. But by integrating critical building functions that are historically siloed - such as control, computing, communications, power and security - Panduit's holistic approach to building design, construction and operation hopes to reduce energy use by as much as 30 percent.

"The new world headquarters brings to life our vision for creating environmentally sustainable and healthy places to work," explains John Caveney, Panduit's CEO. "We set out with a mission to create the 'building of the future,' and we feel we've set a new precedent by combining state-of-the-art visibility and control for all critical building systems, sustainable energy, operational cost savings and intelligent design features - all aligned under a single unified infrastructure."

The LEED Gold-certified building, which opened in April to great acclaim, provides state-of-the-art visibility and control into all critical building systems, integrated and aligned under a single, unified, intelligent infrastructure. Designed to maximize sustainability, global collaboration and innovation, the HQ will initially serve 800 employees and will be able to accommodate an additional 800. The five-story building comprises 280,000 square feet of office, conferencing and training space and will enable collaboration through unique design features such as open office concepts, shared workspaces and the deployment of the latest technologies to connect internal and external employees, partners and customers.

Bob Smith is the company's Director of Global Real Estate. As de-facto project manager for the development of the new building, Smith's team first conducted numerous interviews with senior management and other key stakeholders to establish exactly what it was the firm was trying to achieve with the new build and how that would help define who the company was. "We used this project to redefine how Panduit was thinking about our workspaces," he explains. "One of my big beliefs is that your physical environment affects the way you do your work, affects the way you live and the way you interact at home with your family, so I really wanted to make sure that this space - and all of our spaces in the future - supports who we want to be as a company."

That vision is guided by a number of key principles. "Every project we have, we want to demonstrate our global vision of the company," he says. "We want to focus on innovation, collaboration and sustainability, and whenever we design something we use those tenets to guide where we're going." For instance, in order to reinforce the fact that Panduit needs to be a collaborative environment, Smith explored the concept of open-office working. "Before, our environment was 70 percent closed offices; now, 90 percent of our staff work in an open-office work environment, and we've created 'touch points' where people can collide with and run into each other to increase that collaboration element."

Panduit has always been committed to sustainable practices within its manufacturing environments - even before it was cool to be green - and thus the LEED verification system was seen as a natural way to incorporate sustainability into the project. To ensure that Panduit's commitment to innovation and the environment were reflected in the design of the world headquarters, the company turned to leading architectural firm Gensler - a mutually beneficial partnership. "Through our relationship with Panduit, we better understand how technology and IT strategies can be a key component to sustainability, and the monitoring and control of a building's energy use," says Jay Longo, Senior Associate at Gensler. "Through the UPI vision, this building will not only be a standard office building, but a flexible workspace in which the occupants can control their environment more readily."

Indeed, it is the company's innovative unified physical infrastructure (UPI) concept that provides the real key to the building's success. Originally developed to deliver new ways to build converged physical infrastructure for smart data centers and connected buildings, the approach was so successful in reducing energy use, improving operational efficiency and minimizing running costs that Panduit decided to apply the same concept to the design of its flagship headquarters building. UPI provides a vision for the evolution of the physical infrastructure that aligns closely with - and provides a solid foundation for - the evolution of a logical systems infrastructure as defined by leading IT companies.

In this new headquarters, the company is practicing what it has taught clients for years - how to build sustainable, energy-efficient environments. The site is already being viewed as a model for best-in-class integrated buildings worldwide. By collaborating with UPI Technology Partners such as Cisco, IBM, EMC, Emerson, Fluke, Haworth, Lutron, Oracle and Tridium, Panduit is able to address challenges that cut across multiple business and technology domains. The company put together a large, cross-functional group - involving representation from facilities management, HR, marketing, R&D, external design consultants and technology partners - to talk about how it could incorporate unified physical infrastructure into the building, and the best ways to do that. "It was a very holistic approach," confirms Darryl Benson, Panduit's Global Solutions Manager for Connected Buildings. "We dived into every single aspect of the building design to make sure everything was aligned. And I think that's one of the differences that you're starting to see in the industry: traditionally, data and communication used to be kind of an afterthought, something you would tie into the building at the end. But with the prevalence of network infrastructure and data design, that needs to be brought in at the beginning of the process so it can be properly included in the design."

And besides the benefits provided by a happier, more motivated workforce and the obvious environmental gains inherent in Panduit's approach to building design, the project has also realized considerable cost advantages, too. Smith explains that the company has already been able to decrease its energy usage by between 30-35 percent as a result of utilizing the UPI concept and adhering to LEED standards.  And with LEED requirements accounting for around two percent of the total building costs, Smith estimates that the return on that investment will come in under five years, with the building design directly contributing to minimum savings of around $210,000 per year on energy usage, based on current rates. "Every light, every HVAC box in the heating and cooling system, has an IP address assigned to it and is connected back to the network," he says. "Because of that we're able to very effectively leverage all the natural light we have coming into the building, as well as rapidly adapt to changes in temperature. For instance, if it's a hot, sunny day, the system detects the amount of natural heat and light coming in and adjusts the lights and heating accordingly, so it's a big energy reduction."

The building is already attracting praise - from employees who love the working environment on the one hand, to industry experts impressed by the building's attention to detail on the other. "Green buildings are a critical part of the climate change solution and Panduit's approach is a great example of the impact we can have on energy use and our carbon footprint when we better integrate all the systems we depend on," says Doug Widener, Executive Director at the US Green Building Council. "This is exactly the kind of innovation we are looking for in buildings of the future."

Ultimately, Panduit hopes the headquarters will serve as both a functional, sustainable and innovative workspace and a showcase for what the company has to offer in terms of its technology solutions. "The infrastructure provides the foundation upon which our employees can better collaborate, and in parallel it provides the intelligence that we need in that building to provide for a truly sustainable environment," concludes Panduit President Tom Donovan. "Not only are we doing the right thing for the planet, we're also doing the right thing for our employees; we're driving higher employee morale, greater productivity and, ultimately, better financial performance, which is important to all of us."