When IBM Global Real Estate (GRE) won the Sheila Sheridan International Facilities Management Award (IFMA)¹ and the Institute of Directors Golden Peacock Award² for its sustainability-driven initiatives in September 2022—just months after gaining a Gold Accreditation as a 2022 Green Lease Leader³—they were additional milestones in IBM’s long record of environmentally responsible behavior. In a broader sense, these awards showed how IBM as a company has stayed true to the values its then-CEO Thomas J. Watson Jr. embedded in IBM’s DNA nearly 60 years ago, “to be at the forefront of those companies which are working to make our world a better place.”
With over 42 million square feet of space under management across over 600 locations and nearly 100 countries, IBM has a responsibility to improve sustainability of its facilities and operations. The company believes that responsible real estate management can be a part of the solution to the planet’s biodiversity and climate crisis.
Like other corporations, IBM is on a journey to not only reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, water consumption and waste, but also to measure its progress toward sustainability goals. Additionally, IBM is facing a range of complex challenges to successfully deliver this across a diverse facilities portfolio.
Facing this sustainability challenge, IBM GRE is using IBM technology to track, analyze and report its progress toward sustainability goals in a timely, accurate and authentic way. IBM is using the insights it generates to align its decision-making with what is good for the world.
Simultaneously, IBM is learning as an example to help guide its current and future clients on their sustainability journeys. Businesses and organizations are looking for mature, real-world solutions that can shorten their path to sustainability, while helping improve the efficiency and performance of their operations. In that sense, IBM—in using its own solutions—is “client zero,” and it is eager to tell the story.
The contours of IBM’s sustainability transformation vision began to take shape first in a meeting with Dr. Kareem Yusuf, General Manager of Sustainability Software at IBM. The key takeaway of these discussions was the opportunity to extend the capabilities of GRE’s integral platforms: the IBM® TRIRIGA® solution for facilities management and the IBM Maximo® solution for asset management. Clients have communicated a need to make sustainability and environmental impacts of decisions more transparent and embed these insights into the day-to-day real estate, facilities and asset management decisions.
GRE aims to provide the right mix of buildings and facilities that enable the best and most productive experience for IBM employees around the world, whether they work in offices, manufacturing sites, data centers or any other kind of environment. It is about managing space. This involves a staggering number of decisions ranging from room configurations and leasing terms to capital project planning and facilities maintenance.
IBM announced its net zero commitment by 2030 amid increasingly stringent sustainability reporting requirements of the US, UK and EU, and the aggressive 2030 carbon neutrality goals they support. These changes meant both more detailed and more frequent reporting requirements. Taking stock, the GRE sustainability solutions team recognized that standardizing, integrating and centralizing GRE’s operations onto IBM’s TRIRIGA and Maximo platforms could assist IBM on making progress on its sustainability goals.
Determined to meet these challenges, the GRE team began working with process specialists from IBM Consulting® to create the outlines of a plan. In their ideal scenario, sustainability and operational data would be extracted and captured automatically and in real time from TRIRIGA and Maximo, where it was generated and stored in a centralized, enterprise-wide repository.
But the team soon realized that the practical barriers to getting there were significant. For one, GRE had been relying on many disparate tools—some from third parties—to extract, process and report sustainability data. Collaborating with the Chief Data Office, the team transformed and cleaned up its data, setting the stage for the next part of the transformation.
GRE decided to use Envizi (now an IBM company) ESG data management and reporting software to help consolidate sustainability data, including key elements from TRIRIGA and Maximo, into a single, auditable system of record. Having evaluated some 35 sustainability reporting solutions on the market, the GRE team selected the Envizi software as a service (SaaS) solution based on its automation capabilities, its ease of integration with core systems like TRIRIGA and Maximo, and its ability to deliver valuable dashboard-based insights.
Today Envizi is used to collect data from more than 6,500 utility bills IBM receives globally each year and summarize total energy consumption, cost and renewable electricity purchases across IBM to save many hours of calculations. It can calculate GHG emissions based on this energy data, enabling IBM to track progress towards its goals for greenhouse gas reductions and renewable energy purchases. Energy conservation efforts are also tracked through Envizi, along with the associated avoidance in GHG emissions and expense.
IBM’s implementation of Envizi—whose offering is now known as the IBM Envizi™ ESG Suite—began about one year before the announcement of IBM’s acquisition of Envizi in January 2022. This acquisition builds on IBM’s growing investments in AI-powered software.
While measuring and reporting sustainability impacts is a huge part of GRE’s unfolding sustainability journey, the other side of the story—the way GRE is able to embed insights into operating decisions—is equally compelling. In the realm of sustainable operations, process design is key to measuring and managing energy consumption, GHG emissions, waste and water consumption.
To that end, the GRE team worked with IBM Consulting specialists, facilities management providers and the IBM Sustainability Software Team in a series of immersive design thinking workshops. Through these workshops, the IBM team identified more than 450 use cases focused on facilities management, portfolio optimization, workplace experience and sustainability. Using the IBM Blueworks Live solution, the teams redesigned the GRE business processes to align them with TRIRIGA, Maximo and Envizi’s out-of-the-box capabilities.
As CTO for Asset Management Solutions—with technical responsibility for the Maximo and TRIRIGA platforms—GRE team member Eric Libow played a pivotal role in the effort. He sees the practical, value-based approach of the workshops as a kind of template for IBM clients to meet their own sustainability goals. “Our clients are not looking to buy ‘interesting’ technology, they are looking to get real results,” Libow explains. “What we are doing provides them with a realistic framework—using real data—for showing the payoff of their sustainability-driven investments.”
GRE tracks assets globally, so the sustainability use cases are widespread and diverse. But few illustrate the potential for sustainability-focused optimization more richly than data centers, whose power consumption (for computing and cooling) make them an especially strong opportunity.
As GRE’s transformation continues to unfold, it is already achieving solid results. The GRE team has simplified its data collection process and streamlined its IT architecture. These changes are helping IBM to address the increase of sustainability reporting requirements.
Over time, as the extent of condition-based facilities and maintenance management practices grows within its portfolio, GRE expects to achieve major improvements not only in its sustainability metrics, but also operating costs. One big reason, says Libow, is the ability to share these sustainability-optimized practices—along with the insights and data behind them—with GRE’s network of trusted maintenance partners around the world. “The broader the scale of our data-driven practices, the more agility we gain toward hitting our 2030 carbon-neutrality goals.”
In addition to providing a model for its customers’ sustainability journey, Sustainability Manager Stacey Gifford sees IBM’s role of “client zero” as demonstrating a kind of leadership that transcends conventional business considerations. “IBM has a very clear-eyed view of its responsibility—to the world and to its peers—to make all our sustainability reporting as accurate and transparent as possible, and our actions authentic,” says Gifford. “Like the rest of our team, I am proud to play a role in that mission.”
1Sheila Sheridan International Facilities Management Award (IFMA)
2Institute of Directors Golden Peacock Award
3Gold Accreditation as a 2022 Green Lease Leader
4 Architecture 2030
The GRE team oversees more than 600 locations covering over 42 million square feet across nearly 100 countries. With such a large global footprint, the GRE team uses the IBM® TRIRIGA® solution for facilities management, the IBM Maximo® solution for asset management and the Envizi ESG data management and reporting software to help consolidate sustainability data, including key elements from TRIRIGA and Maximo, into a single, auditable system of record.
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