12 October 2023

Professional services company Deloitte opened the doors in Waterfall City, Johannesburg, during the pandemic. According to Deloitte, smart cities combine optimised building and operational automation with intelligent space management to enhance the user experience, increase productivity, reduce costs, and mitigate physical and cybersecurity risks.

The new smart building was, accordingly, designed and constructed with an emphasis on creating a sustainable, safe, and productive environment, and complies with a Silver Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Green Rating. As a single-tenant facility of 42,500sqm, this fully digital and sustainable smart building facilitates a dramatic cultural shift for this progressive organisation.

The green building, a first of its kind in South Africa, is ergonomically designed to enhance the wellbeing of its occupants, delivering a workplace that supports a rapidly evolving talent pool and offers a huge range of different work activities and styles.

A truly smart building

As the sole distributor of PointGrab smart sensing technology for smart buildings, Cataly5t was appointed to work with Deloitte to enhance the user experience while maximising real-estate value with workspace analytics.

The PointGrab platform, together with more than 1,000 smart IoT ceiling-mounted sensors across the building, has allowed Deloitte to analyse and optimise the utilisation of all floor space, including desks, meeting rooms, open plan workspaces, focus workspaces and booths. As an organisation that has embraced activity-based work, the sensors also cover casual seating areas, couches, lounges, coffee, and restaurant areas, etc.

The sensors provide Deloitte with accurate information about the space utilisation and the number of people in each space whilst preserving the building occupants’ privacy. Deloitte has taken this a step further by integrating the sensors into their booking system, enabling users to see which workspaces are available, based on bookings made, as well as real-time occupancy data.

The PointGrab system sends live and historic data via its API to other smart building systems to enable a truly smart building ecosystem. The data includes:

• Average and peak space utilisation data
• Desk occupancy
• Meeting room occupancy
• Occupancy of activity-based working
• Foot traffic counting
• Visitor management and usage of public areas such as receptions

“Deloitte is a pioneering firm in advanced working environments, and as such, sets very high standards of quality, service and accuracy. We are proud that our innovative sensing platform has been deployed in the largest hot-desking environment in the industry,” said Doron Shachar, CEO, PointGrab. “We are sure that PointGrab’s solution, with the assistance of our partners at Cataly5t, will make it more efficient for Deloitte to manage their real-estate costs effectively while optimising this innovative space for their talent’s wellbeing and productivity.”

“In 2022, the approach to buildings and offices will become more flexible and dynamic, with the growing need to be able to adapt quickly to unexpected changes and new requirements,” said Johan van Niekerk, managing director of Cataly5t. “Adding smart workspace technologies, like PointGrab’s sensing platform, to an organisations workspace, facilities and real-estate management strategy, will be vital to business cost-effectiveness, workspace-to-workforce relevance, adaptability and sustainability. Cataly5t has experienced first-hand with Deloitte, the value that comes with smart building technologies like these.”