Sustainability Blog Archive
Happily the national economic picture may be brightening. As the nation haltingly works its way out of the 100 year pandemic and the related economic crisis, the "Sustainable Business Building Group" has continued its work.
6 product examples have been assembled from the BiB (Building in a Box) kit of parts. These examples range from 3200-2700 gsf and meet the standards of being:
- High performance (energy usage)
- Sustainable (low carbon footprint)
- Healthy (productive and safe)
- Affordable (first cost and operations)
The United States is a market society. As such, markets both resist and sponsor change.
Building in a Box(BiB) is a “disruptive” concept and is a product, not a project in the traditional sense.
The Building in a Box (BiB) product is an ongoing design work at Wilkinson Building Advisors and the affiliated Sustainable Business Building Group.
The BiB product line plans to provide sustainable and energy effective solutions for such business use types as:
- Commercial offices
- Retail
- Light industrial
This product line will offer low first cost and operating expense solutions. Features include:
- High degree of off-site completion using structural integrated exterior panels and mass timber superstructure assemblies
- A kit of parts shipped to the construction site for superstructure and enclosure assembly
- Rapid and reliable on-site construction schedules
- Use of materials and assemblies that are environmentally sustainable including emerging mass timber products
- Point of use power generation and optional storage systems
- Advanced indoor climate systems designed workplace safety, productivity and economy of operations
The BiB design and construction team will provide end to end services from early planning to the delivery of a complete and operable building and site. On-board training services will be available to assure that building operations achieve the high degree of energy efficiency built into the design.
As a footnote and for for the reader interested in bigger picture of how to improve productivity in the design and construction industry, here is some suggested reading by the McKinsey Global Institute:
BiB engages SIP and CLT systems
The Sustainable Business Building group continues to envision a range of products that engage the structural integrated panels ("SIP") and cross-laminated timber ("CLT")
The sustainable commercial office is in the advanced stages of design.
First a diclaimer..
[(disclaimer and attribution) This is not a Wilkinson Building Advisors project or work product. It is a work product by Extreme Panel Technologies, Inc in Cottonwood,MN; 800 977-2635. This image illustrates the concept of off-site fabrication of enclosure systems.]
[Recognition of the designer; Sarah Susanska; Ms. Susanka is an architect and house designer with a reputation arising from the theme of "The Not So Big House."]
Then the exciting and sustainable design concept: Building in a Box
Wilkinson Building Advisors and its working group ("Sustainable Building Group") are planning a new and innovative way of designing, building, and financing environmentally sustainable and affordable small commercial buildings. Because these buildings will be flat pack shipped to the the project site, the design has been dubbed: a "Building in a Box" (aka "BiB").
The Building in a Box (“BiB”) product line will engage web-based commerce to rapidly deliver small commercial buildings with the following attributes:
- 3,000-9,000 enclosed square feet
- Your custom design assembled from a predesigned kit-of-parts on your site or our suggested locations
- Competitive first cost with substantial cost of operations advantages
- Lump sum and firm schedule proposals; operational cost estimates
- Rapid construction on your site using a high degree of off-site completion
- GAP financing of high-performance energy sparing features
- A constellation of advanced design and construction features
- Use of low GWP assemblies and equipment (Global Warming Potential)
- High performance enclosures systems for the Minnesota weather and low operating costs
- Point of use power generation (PV solar organic to the architecture) and optional onsite battery storage
- Advanced, applied building technologies: SIPs (structural integrated panels) and Mass Timber (including cross laminated timber)
- Interior climate systems with "0" on-site combustion and enhanced filtration
- Site selection guided by advanced GIS (Geographic Information System) analytics when needed to support your business.
The national health crisis (COVID-19) raises specific challenges in connection with building design and construction. These requirements will no doubt be ongoing after the pandemic is brought under control. The systems used in BiB solution will address these issues including indoor air quality and other pathogen spread control features.
Also and in many cases, these designs will yield a "0 carbon footprint" when considering C02 sequestration in the mass timber components, the all-electrical indoor climate system, and the value of the Renewal Energy Credits resulting from the organic solar power generation system.
Design and financial engineering combined..
BiB solutions have an additional benefit due the energy effective nature of the designs: long term financing AND preserving capital for the core mission. All of the BiB designs will engage energy efficiency design and construction to add the incentive of long term financing.
Further, the Sustainable Building Group has is extending its capabilities to include optimal economic geography in the site selection prices (paraphrase: "using realtime data to plan urban investments" -Jon Commers)
Taken together, expert site selection combined with sustainable design yielding low operating expenses will be strategically critical for most businesses.
To learn more, contact...
- Bob Vanney at Vanney Associates, or
- Terry Dieken at Extreme Panel Technologies, or
- Jon Commers at Visible City, or
- George Wilkinson at Wilkinson Building Advisors
More to follow at this post.......
There is a reason that Teams is a fast growing platform. It is affordable, has wide application, and its learning curve is relatively flat. It is flat however only if some basic lesson are applied.
- Find a balance between central and decentralized control; the ability to form a new Team should NOT be controlled by IT but the role should be bestowed on persons who evidence basic understanding of how to use the platform.
- As in all matters involving standards of practice for an organization, there needs to be an active and informed executive. Advocacy and learning support are critical.
- Organizational best practices should be supported by some useful templates that define the Teams, Channels, Post, files hierarchy appropriate to the business.
- The rhythm, frequency of posts to a Team should support common understanding but not get to deep in trivia. Remember, the point is to inform and leave a record for the group (the Team) and not obscure concepts with unnecessary detail.
- The possibilities of engaging Guests should be fully explored and used where possible. BUT, beware that posts usually go to the entire team. Think carefully about guest selection, they usually get all the posts.
- Lastly, Teams is about working anywhere at any time the user can get on the internet. The mobile app for the iPhone is very helpful to stay informed.
- Take some time to learn in the early going. Don’t smother startup with top down controls; guide gently.
I’m a fan of Gini von Courter at LinkedIn Learning, her style helps us all to learn. Here is her current offering for Teams. It is time well spent:
Wilkinson Building Advisors is what MicroSoft calls knowledge workers; more than casual users but not developers. If you need to tinker under the hood, contact Craig Yellick at BlueNet:
As the recent international pandemic has painfully illustrated, internet communications and related computing is no longer optional. This is true for my industry: planning, design, and construction of buildings.
At this writing The Wilkinson Project Group (soon be dba Wilkinson Building Advisors) is providing complimentary support to persons and companies in our industry who are trying to get started and invest wisely (money and time) in the Office 365 suite of tools. We are NOT developers but rather so-called “knowledge workers” according to the MicroSoft hierarchy of learners. We are practitioners who have learned a lot over several years by trying and self-teaching. Thus, this initiative is named
DesignBuild360
In my estimation, MicroSoft has done a good job bringing us useful and affordable tools over the past several years. The tools are deeply integrated to web commerce and be bought (and turned off) as needed. In particular, spreadsheets are now better than ever; something very helpful to this industry. In fact, spreadsheets now can engage analytics and be a robust part of company operations (PowerBI)
All is not rosy however, here are a few recommendations and cautions
- TEAMS is a big deal to get rid of the tyranny of eMail. With a little setup help, it can bring organizational efficiency
- Monthly subscriptions can add up; take what you need and start slowly.
- Own the MS Office tool chest by subscription (Word, Excel….); everything stays current.
- If your business is spreadsheet based (such as estimates and budget reporting), PowerBI can be a game-changer. It’s worth getting some mastery.
- SharePoint is useful for content management (i.e. documents) but has a steep learning curve. The underlying logic is complex and usefulness can fall away quickly; get some professional help to get started.
- As you move forward from “newby” to User to Knowledge Worker, know when to get help rather than bury endless hours looking for that “unpublished” feature. Google is a gateway to a wealth of knowledge but be careful of the source date; 12 months is an eternity in the software world. MicroSoft has substantially ramped up its online documentation.
- LinkedIn Learning is also good; Genny
- Finally, MicroSoft phone support is world’s better than it was just a few years ago. Once again, reaching out often saves the day
My firm is here to help. I hope we do business in the future but for now the support is FREE. So, let’s all get through this together. A big dose of community will make a big difference as we all work to get to the other side of this pandemic. These forced learning times will transform ourindustry.
If you have read this post and find it useful, please pass it on to colleagues, workmates, and subcontractor. Let’s whack the virus, grow the learning tree, and celebrate American ingenuity.
Support for MicroSoft Teams during the national emergency
Written by George WilkinsonThis post recognizes that MicroSoft Teams (part of the Office 365 platform) is rapidly emerging as a powerful personal and business communication place. At this writing, the costs approaches zero, limited only by the skills of the User group.
For the next 60 days, Wilkinson Building Advisors will offer complimentary phone and web support for any person for business affiliated with the building planning, design, construction, and investment industries. Interested parties are encouraged to respond through this website or to .
Free Whitepaper: Project Fitness Guidelines
Written by George WilkinsonFree Whitepaper: Project Fitness Guidelines
We've made a set of checklists about how to execute successful projects, called the Project Lab Series. They are designed to inform investors, owners and designers alike.
Download the Project Fitness Guidelines now.
More...
Update
For Constrution companies that are "spreadsheet centric" (xls), Microsoft has devised a powerful and economical set of tools and workflow. Simply put, content from xls worksheets are pulled into SharePoint and manipulated in PowerBI. PowerBI provides data views limited only by the Users imagination. Because SharePoint rides the web, this container of data is available to a team whether down the hall or across the planet. More to follow later..., this is just my share on a Friday afternoon in the Covid-19 pandemic.
The original post follows
(My recusal; I have never been a MicoSoft evangelist, only a critical user.)
Many persons rely heavily on spreadsheets and they have been around for nearly 40 years.
In my opinion, the breadth of their use sometimes resulted in a kind co-dependency. By the turn of the century, in the opinion of this writer, MicroSoft Excel began to stall out. It was becoming complicated for the average user and there were big gaps in areas of application. In particular, database-like operations were awkward and often required a specialist for set-up.
Happily as MicroSoft began to catch up in the area of “knowledge worker”, web-based operations, useful tools began to emerge. In particular PowerBI as an “app” in Office 365 suite came on the scene. Both Gartner and Forrester reviews favorably recognize MicroSoft’s achievements.
PowerBI cleverly supports organizations dependent on spreadsheets. It provides a way to “source” multiple spreadsheets, to combine and manipulate them, and to graphically visualize the results. This process is sometimes call “Applied Analytics” and “Business Analytics.”(all the buzz right now)
To be fair, even though MicroSoft would like to hype revenue and sell this as a consumer product, there is a learning curve for Office 365 and the PowerBI app. For the average small and mid-sized company, hiring some start-up help may be wise.
Wilkinson Building Advisors and its partners can help you quickly to take off the training wheels and wring competitive advantage out of this suite of tools. Spend a little, get a lot!