How partnering in sourcing can help to innovate new customer solutions

Sourcing traditionally serves internal stakeholders. But what would happen if we put the external customer in the focus of sourcing? Or even further: What if sourcing partners were the backbone for building new customer solutions?

Let me give an example of how of we have utilised this idea and how partnering in sourcing had an important role when we developed our digital customer platform, Caverion SmartView.

The customer problem: Data exists but how to get hold of it?

Facility owners want to secure their investment and make fact-based decisions for a sustainable, efficient and well-managed facility operation. Plenty of data is in theory available for facility owners but collecting it would, in most cases, mean a lot of work and money.

Let’s assume the customer would collect and analyse all the building data all by themselves. This would mean several agreements with their service and solution providers, all with occurring costs. In addition, own development of analysis and visualisation of the data. Probably the project would have skyrocketing costs and require a large amount of human intervention before having anything ready.

Analysed data ready for business decisions – all with one agreement

As a large, international company and a leader in its field, Caverion has a wide network of partners providing various services and materials. This gives us an excellent capability to choose the most suitable sourcing partners when developing new services so we can offer one-stop-shop solutions with competitive pricing for our customers.

With our solution, the customer only needs one agreement for utilising all building data in the analysis. We ensure that the partners behind our solution are reliable and deliver good quality and follow our customer centric approach, meaning that for instance. the ownership of the collected data always transfers to the customer.

Our solution: Caverion Smartview

With the help of our sourcing partners, we developed Caverion SmartView - a digital platform that brings together all property data and provides real-time visibility to the operations, conditions and performance of one’s buildings.

With Caverion SmartView, our customers get an easy-to-use platform where they can have a view to all building data from one platform (and remember: one agreement!), whether it is consumption-based measurement or condition monitoring, for example indoor air quality, CO2 levels, temperature, lighting conditions, maintenance requests and so on. The platform can also visualise data from utility providers, including electricity, heating or similar.

When building Caverion SmartView, we are flexible and always strive to find the best possible solution for our customer. If the customer wants to include products from suppliers outside of our current partner network or collect data by themselves, that’s fine. If the customer might have for example an existing agreement for collecting data through sensors, this can all be built in.

With our solution, our customer saves time, effort, and money.

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