Joe Scanlin of Scanalytics joins the podcast to discuss how "instrumenting" floor surfaces allows facility managers to capture precise data for energy management and space optimization. This conversation explores the shift toward buildings that can predict future needs and act as intelligent partners to the people who run them.
In this episode, Edward Wagoner sits down with Joe Scanlin to explore the foundational role of flooring sensors in the rapidly evolving world of Proptech. Scanlin explains how his background in neuroscience led to the creation of building "brains" that use surface-level data to solve complex challenges like HVAC modulation and unauthorized "tailgating" at security points. The discussion highlights the immediate return on investment found in energy reduction and the long-term value of post-occupancy data for creating neurodiverse and highly utilized workspaces. Listeners will learn how this Department of Energy-backed technology maintains strict data privacy while providing the high-resolution insights necessary to manage modern facilities as dynamic, responsive environments.
This episode is sponsored by TMA Systems! Discover more at https://www.tmasystems.com/ifmapodcast
Time Stamps:
Joe Scanlin: [00:00:00] The building should be a partner of the facilities manager. It's kind of like the whole, these walls could talk, it's like the floors could talk, like, could you have a conversation with the building such that it was gathering all the information about how it's been used in historical patterns.
And it can do a really good job of predicting what will and may happen in the future. But ultimately it's the facilities managers that do the, magic of how do they take that information and apply it in a smart way to their specific building or campus.
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Today, we're looking at the future beneath our feet with host Edward Wagner and guest Joe Scanlon of Scan Alytics. We often [00:01:00] hear Prop Tech used as a broad buzzword, but today we're defining what it actually means for boots on the ground facility managers. We're managing a building as a live organism to using post occupancy data to drive real results.
Joe joins us to explain how floor sensors can do much more than just track movement, and we'll also dive into Howe's intelligent surfaces, protect occupant privacy. Now let's get into it.
Edward Wagoner: Hi everybody and welcome back to If FMAs Connected FM podcast. and I'm here with Joe Scanlin of Scanlaytics, who's a partner of Tarkett. And we're gonna talk about the future beneath our feed, our floor technology, which is so foundational.
Pardon the pun. And I'll be honest, not a lot I know about. So really excited to have this conversation. Great. And Joe, thanks for joining us.
Joe Scanlin: Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Edward Wagoner: So let's [00:02:00] just, let's just start at a, at a high level, a lot of people throw out the term prop tech. It's one of the big buzz words and we kinda just, anything technology, you know, prop tech, you need prop tech.
But tell us what that really means for facility managers today. How would you define that and encourage them to think about it?
Joe Scanlin: Yeah, that's why I think it's can be dangerous 'cause it is so broad, right? The way we think about it is, it's, it's everything, you know, software and hardware that has to do with really upstream things, which could just be software that's helping with leasing a building or managing it.
Sort of up from a soft perspective all the way to downstream things. Some of the things that we'll talk about today, which is sort of post occupancy data and managing a building as a sort of live organism. And so. So yeah, we, we see it as everything along that spectrum. And some of those things we, we think are, you know, good, qualified kind of, solutions for that and, and others that that, that I think are using that term just to get in front of certain people so.
Edward Wagoner: Well, and I use prop tech as like, you know, the technology on my iPhone.
I've [00:03:00] never thought about it. From a flooring perspective. Yeah. So I'm really interested in that. Let's, right now though, let's, let's think about, we've got an audience of facility managers here with us. What would you say are some of the top challenges that facility leaders are facing right now that technology like this could actually help them solve?
Joe Scanlin: Yeah, so, we see it as you know, a couple categories, right? So, as facilities managers, it's important to try to get out in front of. Events or things as much as possible while while sort of augmenting the workforce without coming across like it's replacing it or changing the way things are, you know, being done or the things that have wor are working.
And so, the ones that we've seen a lot are, are things like you know, energy management. So things like, you know, every building has and uses energy. So technologies and tools like this that, you know, post installation can without human intervention or with as little human intervention as possible.
Make that more efficient. That's important as we see it because it translates to immediate and, and auditable gains, right? So if you're using less kilowatt hours [00:04:00] without impeding on the comfort, for example, of occupants, that's a real ROI that you can measure right away. So that's a, a challenge bucket that we see where everyone's saying, you know, want, we want our cost to go down, we want to use less emissions.
But we also don't want to compromise on the things that usually get in the way of that, which are, are things like occupant comfort. You can, you can make it really cold or really hot and save energy. But if the occupants aren't happy, you know, what's the point? 'cause that's, that's the purpose of building.
So that's one major category. And then and then the other, so that we see sprout from that. 'cause if you can get return on investment and show that right away, that value immediately with, with something like energy, you know, cost and, and emissions reduction. Then you can sprout out into things that might be a little bit more esoteric, but still important.
So things like pure space utilization optimization. Right. If you, if you asked me even gave me a map of my home and said, where do you spend most of your time and how do you move throughout the day? I'm gonna be wrong. And I think most people are gonna be wrong. The building knows that. It just hasn't had a real good way of recording that.
Once that information is there, what you can do with, you know, [00:05:00] space optimization after after the fact can help improve that utilization. And those are things that we're hearing a lot from customers as well.
Edward Wagoner: Love that phrase. You said, the building knows. How do we get the building to, to tell us about it?
So with that in mind, for people that are, that are new to this idea, people like me, I know about sensors. But what exactly are floor sensors and how do they work?
Joe Scanlin: Yeah. So it might make sense to get kind of the, the, the idea of, you know, why did we even start the company and why floor sensors? It certainly wasn't because we had a built a floor sensor and were trying to find somewhere to put it.
I don't have a background actually. When I started the company, my background academically was organizational behavior and applied neuroscience. So you might be wondering, why am I in floor, you know, flooring and sensors to begin with? But I was
Edward Wagoner: thinking that, yeah.
Joe Scanlin: Really came from, you know, we learned how.
The biological brain is built and how it operates. And we are looking at ways to, how can we apply that to some major challenge you know, in, in the physical world. And to me, buildings were the biggest, you know, most obvious candidate because we [00:06:00] spend, you know, 95% of our entire lives inside of buildings.
And there's been a lot of things as, as we'll talk about sensors and things that can connect to the internet. But that doesn't mean that intelligence is there, right? That just means that there's connectivity. But intelligence comes from. You know, being aware of the resolution of those sensors, how they're being used and how they're returning back to occupants in that space.
And so we looked at it and said, well, we've gotta build something that has applicability to all buildings that have already been built and all buildings that will ever be built in the future. And so we asked, what do those things have in common? And we narrowed it down to, well, they all have surfaces, right?
So they all have floors, walls, and ceilings. And so we figured. If we could instrument one of those surfaces to be the primary instigator of, of value creation by measuring what's going on inside of it, then we'd have something that could you know, produce this brain and do that. So that, that's how we wound up with floor sensors specifically.
And then the idea that being on the floor, the virtue of being on the floor in the biggest surface of every building is that you can also capture other things other than just occupant, [00:07:00] you know, movement and behaviors. You can also pick up things like. Leaks and temperature and humidity and the, and structural things.
Edward Wagoner: I didn't thought about like leaks as we started talking, but that's like a kind of a aha as you mentioned that I was like, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So you, you explained the theory of it behind it. What about some like real world applications that you're seeing in office facility? Something that, that our facility managers would understand?
Sure.
Joe Scanlin: The technology that I'm talking about was a result of a US Department of Energy Advanced Research Program grant that we received. And part of that was really just to be able to say, how can we deliver precise occupancy without impeding on privacy, to, to be able to control HVAC more intelligently. So instead of just having a motion detector go on and say there was activity, it can say there was activity that was the basis of, you know, how many people, two people, 20 people, 200 people. There's a very big difference in the energy requirements and usage for that broad spectrum.
And so by doing that in the, the kind of office commercial real estate space has been, [00:08:00] you know, first energy because as we discussed earlier. You can measure our performance the day after, right? So you, you can say, I use this many kilowatt hours typically, you know, this day or this week, and you can measure that immediately, the next period and say, did we use less without, again, compromising comfort?
The way we see it is we, we treat it like we treat our smartphones, right? Which is we've got this sensor that makes the building kind of like having, you know, your, your smartphone and. The idea is that the, the after you have something like energy, you can use that same information that same data that's coming in to solve multiple different applications without having to change the sensor out.
So they can actually say, this was used this much and take it even further and say, actually a bathroom that gets, you know, 250 paths throughout the day also needs on average, you know, two liters of additional soap and one additional roll of paper towel or something like that.
Edward Wagoner: You're uh, singing a song that CIOs like to hear pay for one implementation, but we get multiple opportunities to leverage that, so I'm sure that'll resonate with a lot of people. Let's [00:09:00] just talk a little bit about the, the, the biggest if you, if you could share an example of a facility, an actual facility that's benefited from this technology.
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Joe Scanlin: Yeah, so we've got a, a campus with multiple buildings in Southern California that that's usually using the example of, they were using a lot of occupancy sensors or motion detectors to try to capture that precise occupancy. 'cause they've, they've already actually had a great success with reducing their overall campus energy load in usage.
But what was missing was this occupant behavior type of thing. So they're in the, the, the movie space. And so they were hit, you know, by, by COVID and Rider strikes and those other things that. Made it very the pain really acute that like, Hey, our buildings are up in there, but we know that there's really no usage in these, but they can't modulate the HVAC because they, they can't deliver a report that says this is exactly what the usage was when in, in, in each zone.
So starting with that, and then again, augmenting the other things that they already had in place. So things like security where if I, you know, scan a badge. That badge scan system might know that, that I have the credentials to enter that space, but maybe the floor tells them that like, well, there's one badge scan, but there was, there was a, a tailgate because there are now two [00:11:00] signatures of people in that space.
But also other things like, you know, are there people from a security perspective, are there buildups in areas that there shouldn't be? Is there sort of these predicting behaviors of where and how people are moving that might be concerning and how can they get in front of that?
Edward Wagoner: People have always asked me, can you solve that piggybacking security problem? And I've always said no. Yeah, and you just gave me a technical solution for that. I, I love that. And again. Another example of one implementation and, and multiple opportunities to, to use it. If you think about all of those opportunities, what in your opinion is the biggest value add for facility leaders when they adopt technology like floor sensing technology?
Joe Scanlin: Our opinion is, it's about augmenting those roles instead of trying to re replace or, or add. Even if it's not replacing a lot might say that, oh, you know, we're gonna give you something that you can manage or control. Which is just, again, more sort of responsibilities that might lead to distraction, that might lead to, you know, poorer work.
And so the way that we see it is that, again, the building should be a partner of the [00:12:00] facilities manager. It's, it's like we mentioned before, it's kind of like. You know, the whole, these walls could talk, it's like the floors could talk, like, could you have a conversation with the building such that it was gathering all the information about how it's been used in historical patterns.
And it can do a really good job of predicting what will and may happen in the future. But ultimately the, you know, it's the facilities managers that do the, the magic of how do they take that information and apply it in a smart way to their specific building or campus. There's a lot of things that are broad, like of course, energy management, all those things are broadly applicable across any building.
But there's also unique circumstances where, you know, we install it in, you know, convention centers versus in office, and it's like, well, they have different, maybe security needs that that, that they might use the information uniquely to their, their, you know, purpose or connect it with another system that they have.
And so that, that's kinda how we see partnering with them to to make it so that it's under their control. And giving them the ability to kind of do more with the same level of staff in, instead of saying you have to have a, you know, [00:13:00] PhD in, you know, data science to be able to run this bus.
Edward Wagoner: So, and I wrote a question here and you've actually, I think partially answered.
I was gonna ask you, how do these sensors help with things like safety compliance, tenant experience? And you mentioned sustainability earlier, but I'm wondering if there's some other. Like real examples you'd wanna offer up in, in that area. Yeah. 'cause a lot of those are where people are focusing these days.
Joe Scanlin: Yeah. Well, to, to give you an example not, not quite in the office space, but, but as a a, an application extension is we, we also do a lot of work in the, the sort of healthcare and senior living space where we're doing things like helping them actually predict a fall before it happens based on gate deterioration, those types of things.
The same thing can apply though to tenant experience, which is like, what, what are, are we using as tenants of a space? Truly versus like what we might say we need and how, how often am I spending time you know, as an employee in a space in front of like a, a window with natural light or whatever.
Which, which again, we, we know has an impact on productivity and, and, and happiness and [00:14:00] those types of things. And so, so he's also done some work in the, the, the space with the topic of things like even neurodiversity, which is like, how do we make it so that we understand how to. Not just build and design a space that we think will work for all these people with, with different kind of needs in inside of a work environment.
But, but measure it after the fact because we c you know, we can see a great design and I think commit to that. But there's not a lot of things for post occupancy sort of data that allows for, let's call it a design audit every, you know, on a routine basis to make sure that the space is actually doing what it's supposed to do.
Edward Wagoner: And I love the fact it's helping everyone regardless of our different abilities perform to our, our best in the, in the space. So we've just pulled HR into it there because that would've to be appealing for, from a place to work. So as a CIO, I know there's always hurdles to implementing new technologies. There's always a little bit of work when you're doing something new. What are some of the challenges that facility managers should be aware of if they're considering implementing this type of [00:15:00] technology?
Joe Scanlin: Yeah, I think broad you know, at the onset it's, it's, it's also about level setting about what it is we're providing them versus a system that, an additional system they have to manage.
Right. So if we don't do a good job of sort of showing them how, you know, what it is exactly, then, then there's, there, there could be some hesitation upfront of like, I don't want another thing I have to log into and do all that where. We have to specify like, Hey, look, this is once it's set up, it's connected to the BMS and all those types of things.
You, you know, that you can control it that way. But then there's also, it's, it's a, a, a, a physical device, right? So there is we, we don't need to cover a hundred percent of the floor, for example, to deliver these applications. In many cases, it's a very small percentage of the gross square footage of the building.
But it might still involve the coordination of the facilities team to. You know, to install originally or to, to get it on the network. So of course that's a recurring theme is like, you know, can these things, are they end-to-end encrypted? Is there security in the data? Before doing the installation, that's usually a hurdle, is how do we get it on the network effectively versus is it going to be a, a used, you know, solution.
It's [00:16:00] more like, how can we actually do that initial implementation?
Edward Wagoner: So have to ask this question. And this is the question that kills a lot of prop tech companies when they go into big organizations and that's around data security.
Joe Scanlin: Yep.
Edward Wagoner: They don't have the right answer for it. So how do you address privacy and data security, especially in this day and age, where it seems like every day our security's being breached.
Yeah. How do you approach that?
Joe Scanlin: Well, the nice thing is, is one of the core tenets of our founding is, is it's inherently. Privacy, preserving data. So it's our, it, it's as, as high resolution as maybe a camera, but I'm, we are not associating it to a name or anything like that. And so, and part of that was a benefit of working with the Department of Energy where we, we had independent review boards and we actually had to satisfy the conditions of the Privacy Act and GDPR and those types of things.
So out of the box, it's privacy preserved without compromising the, the resolution you would get, which is usually, again, a trade off that's made. But then even, even then it's, it's end-to-end encrypted. So even if someone were to somehow get into the device itself it would be sort of [00:17:00] gibberish.
You know, we, we, we keep a lot of the stuff that we do entirely on premise as well. So
So from a data and from a occupant perspective we've addressed. Privacy as, as thoroughly as we we, we think we can.
Edward Wagoner: You had me at the Department of Energy. I know their former CIO. She's award-winning. Incredible. So if you've worked through their process, that, that gives me a lot of comfort. So let's look out five to 10 years.
Where do you see this technology going? What should facility managers be looking for in the future from this?
Joe Scanlin: We think more and more of the buildings that that will have this type of, this high resolution type of information we'll be able to create that kind of collective intelligence and that we'll see a new wave of using technology off of that to improve space for occupants, but also for just efficiency of running the building, if that makes sense.
Edward Wagoner: Thank you Joe from Scan Alytics. Appreciate and Tarkett for joining us in this podcast.
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