Client: Municipality of Alkmaar

Case Study Alkmaar Municipal Office

The retro-fit of an existing office building is the perfect moment to introduce smart building technology. This way the office becomes healthier, a more pleasant place to work and better suited to 21st century flexible business practices, on top of being more energy-efficient. The Alkmaar’s municipal office has been completely remodeled. bGrid is chosen as the smart building solution and collects the data and provides insights on how the employees are actually using the building.

The challenge - How to change to more task, team and project oriented?

The municipality of Alkmaar is ambitious; it has set the goal of becoming the most innovative 100,000 plus municipality in the Netherlands by 2021. This includes fully digital working, all tech solutions in the cloud, and working together more closely with other departments, organizations and other municipalities.

Furthermore, Alkmaar’s Municipal Office changed the ways employees work. With cloud computing and mobile devices, people can work more remote and flexible. Their performance is no longer evaluated based on the number of hours spend in the office, but based on task, team and project.

Embedding new technology and changing a culture is never easy, but on top Alkmaar also had challenging budgets and tight time constraints to meet.

To meet the objective of providing a modern, flexible office, the building was completely gutted to create 4,500 square meters of open working spaces. A cafe in the centre of the building now provides an attractive, light-filled meeting place. This encourages idea sharing and project collaboration, as well as giving employees a pleasant environment to relax and socialize. The bGrid® solution was implemented to lift the building to the next level and help its users.

The solution - Collecting data to continuously improve the employee environment

Alkmaar’s project team worked with bGrid to implement a smart building backbone, used for climate & light control, space monitoring and optimization of the building. An end-user application makes it easy to find colleagues or available meeting rooms around the building. It also enables the Facilities team to control the use of space in the building and the indoor climate. ‘We were successful because bGrid is an open system and we were able to work collaboratively with them’, says Patrick Langendijk, project manager of the municipality of Alkmaar. ‘They were always able to talk us through any issues and we solved problems together.’ The bGrid technology enables Alkmaar’s data science team to monitor temperature, humidity and occupancy levels across the entire building. In the future this data will make the building more energy efficient and therefore save costs.

‘We now have a beautiful environment that our employees love working in.  And, over the next year we will be collecting data and gaining insight on how we are using the building. This will help us to continuously improve the employee environment in terms of health and efficiency’, concludes Patrick.

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“We chose to work with bGrid in part because their smart building solution could be easily integrated with our systems. Our employees are starting to enjoy the benefits of flexible working and bGrid’s technology is helping people to adapt.”
Patrick Langendijk, Project Manager, Municipality of Alkmaar
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