Remaining competitive as an independent business in the supermarket industry can’t be easy, especially considering it is dominated by a powerful, nationwide duopoly. For Metcash, a distributor for many smaller retailers including Independent Grocers Alliance (IGA), it is a daily battle to out-think and out-manoeuvre the ‘Big Two’. When the company decided that a high-capacity distribution centre was needed in Sydney’s west, it was evident early on that it had to achieve high productivity and efficiency targets to keep its clients’ costs down. 

The General Manager of Operations (GMO) at the new Huntingwood facility contacted Simon Alder of Alder Consulting to provide AV solutions for the 80,000sqm building (that’s six football fields), and it was clear from the outset that efficiency was a major concern. Of the initial brief, Alder says, “although Metcash is a very big distributor and wholesaler, its stores are actually quite small. So it had to do it smarter and more efficiently than everyone else but didn’t quite know what that entailed.” The original tender Alder produced was for traditional AV services such as video-conferencing, but after learning of Crestron’s push into what it calls Integrated Building Technology, he decided to widen the scope of his submission. He did some research and returned to Metcash with the suggestion that it combine the control foundation of an AV system with the latest in energy-saving building management systems (BMS) from Crestron. With a cost-benefit analysis revealing that a fully-integrated system could provide significant savings, Metcash enthusiastically commissioned his services. “The GMO was quite receptive to the idea of power and energy management,” says Alder. “Metcash is on a 15-year lease, and after two or three years, once it gets its return on investment, there will be significant cost savings. Every dollar it’s able to save on energy means less it will have to spend. It can then pass on those savings to all the independent stores.”

GIVEN THE GREENLIGHT

The technology that caught Alder’s attention was Crestron’s Greenlight system, which sits above traditional BMS services to control all facets of a building’s AV and energy usage in real-time. At the user end of the tech is the Fusion software, which brings multiple systems – such as lighting, air-conditioning and security – under the one umbrella. Alder explains: “Traditionally you might have a light switch and a thermostat and a security log, those sorts of things, on the wall, but what Fusion does is allow you to combine them into a simple user interface (UI). All the initial systems still do their own things in the background and we’re not actually modifying what they do; all we’re doing is using their capabilities by calling up the presets, or their functionality, and tying it in with the other systems.” 

A key example of this uniform integration is the innovative use of the building’s advanced Mobotix security cameras. It was discovered during installation that they could be linked directly to the BMS and provide accurate movement locations of forklifts and staff. This allowed the Fusion software to adjust the lighting system in real-time, based on activity on the ground. Alder explains they were not planning this approach from the outset: “Initially we were going to control the lighting with a beam catch – in much the same way as when you walk into a shop through the beam and a chime goes off. But then we’d just be limited to that beam, and when the shelves were getting stacked the beams would get knocked and out of alignment, so we were looking for a solution. Then we saw that the cameras were on every aisle, and could give us a detailed, per square-metre picture for the entire length of the aisle. So that gave us considerably more control and more flexibility, with the added advantage of the cameras being up out of the way.” The camera processing can also track the direction in which workers are travelling, which allows the software to progressively raise and dim the lights as they move.

Another important factor in minimising energy usage for Metcash was managing their array of over 80 forklift charging stations. In a normal setting this could present a significant and extended draw on power but through the Greenlight system Alder was able to link each station to the head-end control unit, giving the user the ability to restrict charging time to low-demand periods.