Simplified workflows with smart luminaires: Regent Lighting

Architects and designers are aware of the fact that the office today is no longer a static space where architectural and interior design decisions, once made, last for decades. On the contrary: the pace at which team sizes, spatial arrangements and processes change is high and thus, when furnishing office spaces, it is important for planners to consider all of this from the onset.

Office employees today, for example, often ‘hot desk’ and therefore can find it useful to be assisted in finding free desks quickly and easily. The complexity of planning modern office interiors increases with the number of employees, especially when solutions need to be found for several floors within a building.

Swiss manufacturer Regent Lighting has long been valued by architects and interior designers for the design and technical quality of its lighting. In terms of consulting, planning and implementation, its products and services not only address individual needs in the private sector, but also those in professional contexts.

The company supports architects and interior designers in finding suitable solutions to very different challenges. It may be thought that as a lighting manufacturer, office planning would be limited to lighting, but the company, with its many years of expertise in the illumination of large offices, corridors, conference rooms and workplaces, goes even further.

Based in Basel, Regent Lighting is specifically concerned with expanding the technical possibilities of its luminaires so that they become truly intelligent elements within a digital network, providing data in real time by means of integrated sensors that contribute to efficient and energy-saving building management. The right term here is ‘IoT’ or the ‘Internet of Things’ – the things we use everyday, such as lights, are becoming smart.

These sensor-controlled features are combined under the term ‘MyData Analysis’ – a sophisticated solution that offers real added value for facility managers and numerous other users in a building. The sensors integrated into the luminaires collect data from the environment and analyse it. This can be related to room temperature data, for example, or information on space utilisation or parameters that serve the ‘Find My Asset’ feature that helps to find specific devices within a building.

Those who are looking for an employee are also supported by the ‘Find My Colleague’ function. A facility manager can optimise the use of various rooms within a building on the basis of data collected and displayed on the ‘My Analytics’ dashboard, thereby increasing the well-being of the employees. Cleaning staff can use the ‘Smart Cleaning’ feature to orientate themselves by lights which indicate precisely and quickly which workstations should be cleaned. Furthermore, employees can save time searching for a free desk-sharing space thanks to the ‘Find My Place’ feature.

The result is efficient building management and significant cost savings. With MyData Analysis, Regent Lighting provides a crucial building block for Smart Buildings and contributes to a networked workplace that focuses on people and the individual processes of a company. And all this within an existing system that is an integral part of what is needed anyway – namely, lighting.

The fact that this is not just a dream for the future, but rather a current reality is demonstrated on an already successfully implemented project – in an office space that is larger than 75 football pitches! Regent Lighting is a partner on one of the largest smart building projects in Europe and is making an important contribution to saving costs, increasing efficiency and simplifying work processes.

A large company in Germany that works on international projects uses MyData Analysis to reduce operating costs, for example, where cleaning is concerned. Through the ‘Cleaning’ light function that can be activated, only the workplaces that need to be cleaned become illuminated. In this way, ’Smart Cleaning’ saves time, costs and resources. The basis for this is real-time data from the relevant areas. Sensors integrated into the freestanding luminaires collect data such as usage time, temperature, humidity and air quality in the office.

Incidentally, Regent Lighting has its own team that develops apps specifically tailored to the needs of customers and adapts the intranet front-end design including dashboard so that it matches the respective corporate image. This ensures that employees perceive the interface as an integral part of the company’s appearance and quickly find their way around the system. Pretty smart, right?

© Architonic