Daniel is a highly skilled engineer with experience in smart buildings, digital twins and industrial automation and an in depth understanding of the industry. Our Smart Buildings NSW consultant, his experience includes end-to-end project delivery from value proposition to project management and customer success.
Having worked throughout Australia as well as internationally he holds an impressive track record of delivering major projects across multiple sectors including commercial, retail, residential, health, education and more.
A broken remote control triggered Daniel’s journey towards engineering, where he excels in the intersection between the digital and the physical. He reflects on one of his career highlights, helping a major property developer create a digital building transformation strategy for a large property portfolio.
What inspired you to become an engineer?
Understanding the internal working of things, I remember looking at a broken remote control and wondered what happened inside those circuit boards. How something so small can have a major impact.
Overall, I also always liked how engineering transcends borders and languages. Which is something we feel every day at NDY.
Why digital (smart buildings)?
Smart buildings present a very interesting intersection between the digital and the physical, where a mobile app can interact with a critical machine such as a chiller and where abstract activities such as data analysis can lead to important energy savings.
What’s your career highlight project?
Helping customers on their digital building’s vision is something we’re really proud of, we have recently supported a prominent and well-known property development company in assessing all of their operational technology across more than 20 assets, providing an understanding of their present status and recommendation and guidance for future upgrades. The report and insights provided to our client have been instrumental in helping them make informed decisions to optimise their operational technology infrastructure and pave the way for a successful digital building transformation journey.
The framework and methodology created for this project has proven very successful and we are now leveraging and implementing it with a large portfolio owner in New Zealand.
Tell us about the smart buildings engineering on this project.
The scale of the project was impressive, assessing the technology maturity, cyber resiliency and network connectivity of over 300 different building systems across 22 sites (including retail and commercial) was a tough task, but the real challenge was to distil, categorise, prioritise and score the systems based on the information gathered via site or desktop audits to provide valuable information and insights that could be easily understood and actionable.
What innovative new approaches are you seeing when it comes to smart buildings?
We are seeing the adoption of modern IoT communication protocols across control systems such as the BMS. We are also seeing typical non-connected systems become ‘smarter’.
We see a constant trend of IT and software practices being adopted heavily in building technology products, e.g., cybersecure products and platforms.
The industry is lowering entry barriers to advanced platforms, such as HVAC analytics or chiller performance, by adopting cloud native deployments and SaaS subscription models.
Last but not least, the industry is finally agreeing and adopting industry standard naming conventions for building data, to ensure systems interoperability and ease of data analysis for years to come.
Where do you see the future of smart buildings design heading?
A very near future where all engineering disciplines adopt ‘smart’ digital technologies by design, and where technology is so accessible and widespread that all of our carbon emissions targets are achieved, and where buildings can provide safe, healthy and dynamic and productive work and social environments.
What tech are you playing with at the moment?
At home I’m playing with Arduino Microcontrollers and the MQTT communications protocol. At the new Sydney office, we are about to explore LoRaWAN (wireless) technology and infrared-based people counting sensors.
What legacy do you want to leave, when it comes to your career?
I’d love to transmit everything I’ve learned over the years, to peers, young engineers and customers in order to make technology more accessible and hopefully tackle many of our modern challenges, including decarbonisation.
Would be amazing to know that, in 20 years from now, the NDY smart buildings team design the technology infrastructure that helped real estate portfolios across Australia achieve zero carbon emissions while providing future-proofed spaces for generations to come.
What is it like for young engineers in smart buildings?
I think it is a very stimulating and exciting space, young engineers have exposure to all the other disciplines; mechanical, electrical, comms, security, audio visual, fire, hydraulics, etc.
But we also get to play with data, visuals, algorithms and control sequences. Jumping from hardware to software and from the macro to micro.
If you feel comfortable to do so, tell us a bit about your background (culturally).
I was born in a city called Veracruz, in Mexico which is a city of contrasts, with scorching hot and humid weather, beautiful beaches, super rich in nature and history, from the Olmecs to having the first city hall in continental America.
I’ve always been very proud of my culture, the cuisine, the syncretism and the blurred lines between family, friends and community.
How does diversity of background and thought influence how you deliver your projects?
Understanding where you’re coming from and understanding a group of people as part of a culture, helps you reflect on the world around you and truly understand the challenges of other cultures and people.
The values of family, community, friendship and helping others, resiliency and appreciating everything we have despite hardships or adversity is something I attribute to my cultural upbringing.
When you can immerse yourself in other cultures you learn to appreciate your own, and you notice and appreciate the similarities rather than the differences, this helps you empathise with people around you, customers, colleagues, etc., and bring different perspectives into a conversation or in this case a project.
Tell us a bit about good smart buildings design. What are the key considerations?
Good smart building design starts with understanding your customers’ vision and aspirations, but also involves really understanding their business goals and their day to day jobs-to-be-done and pain points.
Aligning all of this with global or macro challenges such as energy and waste reduction or procuring healthy indoor spaces is paramount before we even start discussing any type of technology, hardware or software solutions or designs.
Helping your customers cut through the noise by providing hands-on and expert advice is something we do, and we highly recommend in an ever growing smart building vendor landscape.
