Rajesh Monga, General Manager (India) American Express Account – CBRE was in School to addressed students of Real Estate & Urban Infrastructure on “Corporate Real Estate & Facilities Management”.

He started his lecture by focussing on Sustainability. It is this word we will talk about a number of times, but what is it? What makes intelligent buildings?

Intelligent systems dictates options without any disruptions. An outage of few minutes can spell disaster for any damn thing today. We're so dependent on technology. So concepts like n+1 so you build one particular facility which is your UPS system and then you build a copy of it of it which is n+1. So now you close down your laptop and have your backup. You have your 4 segments with deals with employees and safety. Environment, health and safety. Constants like the window air quality, because you work in closed spaces, open spaces, etc. Air quality is one of the requirements, drinking water and basic amenities comes under FM. And then you have Ergonomics. 8-9 hours, some people work even 10 hours, 11 hours working on desktop or on a laptops what kind of furniture they use.

Mr. Monga explained that employees try to alter spaces which are already fitted out. Like whenever you have built a particular space you have certain concepts, certain information of over a period of time, your requirements of the business change. Or you can have your one large floor plan, 40,000 sft, 50,000 sft and one big floor which has only work stations and no cabins. Except meeting rooms you will have, no cabins. everyone, irrespective of their designation, whether it is an entry level, manager or one of the later levels, they all these seats on the floor. Do you see any advantages of this kind of plan? This may be is new working space technique and better utilisation of space.

The culture is very very important yes, but apart from that what are the clear benefits? Utilization of space. For that particular concept, one can really save yourself a lot of space. Otherwise one person sitting in large cabin, according to designations, would really put a stress on the supply of sft area you have with you.

He explained that lot of companies today depend only on Indian companies because we typically do these jobs best. A banking organization may not know too much or you know they might not have the bandwidth of having people appointed on their team for events. So they also refer to somebody who knows the job. So one person from the company side can tell the relationship between the FM Company and the client company. Reality in virtual and virtual in reality. When I am sitting in my office I need a lot of virtual worlds to be available to me.