June 29, 2026 | Case studies
The Point case study
Industry estimates suggest that commercial buildings typically waste around 30 percent of the energy they consume.
Planned maintenance schedules send engineers to service equipment that is running perfectly while genuinely failing assets go undetected. Landlords pay for layers of outsourced management and receive periodic reports that may or may not reflect what is actually happening inside their buildings. For most of the industry, this is still normal.
At The Point in Paddington, Tishman Speyer decided it did not have to be.
Scroll to discover more
Earnings savings realised
Energy reduction vs baseline
Water saving identified
Data sources monitored
The Point is a major commercial office building in one of London’s most prominent locations. It needs to deliver reliable comfort for occupiers while responding to rising energy costs, tighter sustainability requirements and changing patterns of use. Rather than manage those pressures through the traditional layered FM model, Tishman Speyer engaged Acutro to provide a converged intelligence layer across the building’s mechanical, energy and water systems. The objective was not simply to monitor the building but to understand it, in real time, and to use that understanding to drive measurable improvement.
A building in transition
The Point had recently undergone a major plant lifecycle upgrade, replacing its boilers with air source heat pumps. That transition made it critical to ensure the new systems were not only installed correctly but operated in a way that reflected how the building actually performs day to day. New technology on its own does not guarantee better outcomes. Without continuous operational intelligence the risk is that expensive equipment runs inefficiently from the outset, with problems only surfacing once energy bills arrive or occupier complaints escalate.
Acutro Core brought together five data sources – BMS data, energy metering, plant performance telemetry, IoT feeds and weather inputs into a single operational view. For the first time, the building’s owner had a unified picture of how every system was performing, how they interacted, and where the gaps were. That visibility became the foundation for everything that followed.
What the data revealed
With continuous monitoring in place, Acutro’s building performance team began identifying inefficiencies that would never have surfaced through conventional maintenance or periodic review.
Buffer-vessel preheating. The first area was the relationship between thermal comfort in occupied spaces and buffer vessel heat-up time. The existing preheating sequence was running plant earlier and harder than the building actually required. By analysing how the building responded in use, Acutro refined the sequencing so that heat was available when needed without the excess energy expenditure. Comfort was maintained. Waste was removed.
Seasonal control. Working with the BMS provider, Acutro implemented summer and winter mode strategies using outside air temperature as the changeover trigger. Central plant now runs to maximise heat recovery wherever possible, while terminal units provide the local trimming needed to maintain comfort in occupied areas. Each change was validated against live operational data before implementation, and the platform continues to monitor the impact of each strategy. If conditions shift or building use patterns change, the intelligence layer surfaces the variance before it becomes a problem.
Hydraulic circulation and water quality. Acutro introduced a hydraulically optimised circulation strategy to ensure effective flow across every part of the building. This gave the platform a clear basis for monitoring terminal units that were not achieving circulation as expected, allowing underperforming areas to be identified early before they developed into wider comfort, maintenance or water quality issues. In a building of this scale, catching a circulation problem in one zone before it cascades into adjacent areas can prevent weeks of reactive work and the occupier disruption that comes with it.
The numbers
From April 2024 to March 2025, energy use at The Point fell by 11.23 percent against baseline performance. After weather adjustment using degree day analysis, which strips out the effect of milder or harsher seasons to isolate genuine operational improvement, the saving was 10.06 percent. In realised terms, this amounted to more than £80,000 of energy savings over the period.
Acutro also identified unnecessary losses in the chilled water system during cooler periods. By analysing circulation behaviour and plant operation, the team estimated daily waste of around 1,766 kWh from pipe heat gains and additional pumping energy. For November alone this represented 35,328 kWh of avoidable consumption, equivalent to around £7,066 at 20 pence per kWh. Across the full winter period the identified saving opportunity was estimated at 141,312 kWh, or approximately £28,262. This figure is a projected opportunity surfaced by the platform, distinct from the realised saving above.
For a commercial office building of this scale in central London, these are not marginal gains. In a market where occupiers and investors increasingly scrutinise energy performance, verified, data-backed improvement of this kind carries real commercial weight.
Isolating the optimisation effect. Because the heat pump installation and the Acutro deployment overlapped, these figures are measured against a stabilised post-commissioning baseline taken once the new air source heat pumps were operational, rather than against the building’s old boiler performance. This ensures the reported savings reflect Acutro’s contribution to operational optimisation, not the plant upgrade itself.
Why this model is different: pay for outcomes, not layers
The results at The Point are significant in their own right, but they also demonstrate something more fundamental about how commercial buildings should be managed.
In a traditional FM structure, the insight that drove these savings would not have existed. A conventional arrangement would see the landlord contract an FM provider, who would subcontract a BMS specialist, a water treatment company, an HVAC maintenance provider and an energy consultant. Each would operate in their own silo, report separately, and none would have visibility of the others’ data. The FM provider would sit in the middle, coordinating on spreadsheets and adding margin at every layer.
That model has a structural problem. Nobody in the chain owns the question of how the building is actually performing. The BMS provider maintains the system as configured. The maintenance contractor delivers scheduled tasks. The energy consultant reviews bills quarterly. Waste sits undiscovered because the incentive structures do not reward finding it and the data needed to identify it is fragmented across separate contracts and separate systems.
What Tishman Speyer have done at The Point is step around that structure entirely. By working directly with the converged intelligence layer, the landlord has real-time visibility of how the building is performing across every system and every discipline: the buffer vessel issue, the chilled water losses, the circulation problems. In the traditional model these would have surfaced as occupier complaints or unexplained energy spikes months after the fact. At The Point they were identified from operational data and resolved before they escalated.
Every intermediary in the traditional chain adds margin without necessarily adding intelligence. When the landlord works directly with the intelligence layer, the engineering insight, energy analysis, BMS optimisation and compliance oversight come from one integrated view rather than four separate contracts each carrying their own overhead. The landlord pays for outcomes, not layers. And critically, it now has an independent, continuous, data-backed means of verifying that the people it pays are delivering what they promised, transparency that does not exist in the traditional model, where the FM provider controls the narrative and the landlord receives filtered, periodic reports.
What comes next
Beyond energy optimisation, the next stage of improvement at The Point will focus on data-led maintenance. Rather than relying on standard SFG20 schedules, where tasks are triggered by calendar frequency regardless of actual asset condition, maintenance will be targeted based on real system behaviour and performance data. Engineers will go where the data says they are needed, not where a spreadsheet says they are due. It is the shift from fixed schedules to living intelligence.
What is emerging at The Point is a model where the landlord is building a direct, undiluted understanding of what its buildings need in real time. The intelligence sits with the asset owner, not buried inside an outsourced maintenance layer that interprets building performance and reports back on its own terms. The building tells the landlord what it needs. The landlord decides how to respond. The supply chain delivers what is asked of it and the platform verifies that it was done.
On the strength of these results, Acutro and Tishman Speyer have agreed to roll out Acutro Core to three further London assets in 2026. The landlords who invest in understanding their buildings directly will operate them better, spend less, and hold their supply chains to a higher standard than those who continue to outsource that understanding to the very providers who benefit from its absence.
See what your building is trying to tell you
About Acutro
Acutro provides an enterprise-class data-led maintenance platform purpose-built for the UK built environment. By integrating with existing BMS, IoT, energy metering and CAFM systems, the platform aggregates and normalises building data to deliver real-time asset health scoring, predictive maintenance intelligence, automated fault detection and energy optimisation. Acutro deploys a simple pricing model against the volume of data points captured, reinforcing the mission to create easy to deploy, enterprise-class solutions that are accessible to FM service providers, managing agents and asset owners of all sizes.
