Kendra Scoops up Two BCIA Awards
We are thrilled to announce that Kendra was honoured twice in the 2020 BCIA Awards, for ‘Best Service & Maintenance Provider’ and the ‘Smart Buildings Award’.
The BCIA Awards are the biggest awards in the controls and BEMS industry, recognising innovations, product development, effective project delivery and exceptional training. Terry Sharp, President of the BCIA, says “The annual BCIA Awards are established as a beacon of excellence across the industry. The high level of independent scrutiny from the judges adds further value to the awards for both finalists and winners.”
Chris Mills, Managing Director at Kendra, commented:
“As always, we were delighted to be shortlisted as finalists in this year’s BCIA awards. To receive two awards has been a fantastic achievement and testament to the hard work, dedication and innovation from all the of Kendra team.”
The Smart Buildings Award
The Smart Buildings Award was a new BCIA award for 2020 to reflect the fast-moving landscape of the industry, awarded in recognition of a project which demonstrates how smart technology has been used to enhance the user experience in a building/complex. We were delighted that our installation at UCL’s Student Centre made Kendra the inaugural winner of this award.
The emphasis of the project was to provide a mix of learning spaces, creating different types of individual study and group collaboration settings, as well as more social learning environments.
The Student Centre was designed to achieve a BREEAM ‘Outstanding’ rating reflecting exceptional environmental, social, and economic sustainability performance – one of only 320 in the world.
To meet the design brief, Kendra installed an EcoStruxure Building Solution to provide control & monitoring of systems that needed to have open protocols, cutting edge control technology and IoT-connected software and services that deliver operational insights.
Key to the success of energy efficient operation of the building, Kendra developed sophisticated strategies for the buildings mixed mode of operation to extend the “passive” period of operation. This required high level integration of the below systems –
- Ground source borehole system
- Embedded concrete floor cooling
- Natural ventilation system
Using a combination of external data from a weather station and internal conditions, sensed via the various sensors, the BMS system selected the most appropriate mode of system operation.
Integrated room controllers were installed throughout the building to incorporate a range of intelligent features to control & monitor occupancy, indoor air quality and temperature, to maximise space efficiency and reduce the building’s energy costs.
Intuitive dashboards were created to present real-time insight information to building occupants.
During post completion seasonal commissioning, extended logging data was used for seasonal adjustments to system performance to ensure that the building services installation was operating at optimum performance throughout all seasons of the year.
The Student Centre was one of the most comfortable buildings on campus during the 2019 heatwave, this is particularly impressive because the building does not have air conditioning which is testament to the mixed mode control strategy deployed.
The Best Service and Maintenance Provider
The Best Service and Maintenance Provider award recognises that whilst providing ground-breaking new projects, we also continue to innovate and provide outstanding levels of customer service excellence to a wide range and growing number of client’s for whom we provide service and maintenance.
“It is particularly pleasing to win this award as it is was supported by two outstanding client references.” Chris added.
The references highlighted to the judging panel showed the proactive approach, guidance, support, and innovative project solutions that resulted in Kendra being viewed as a ‘highly valued support partner’ by their customers.
“Kendra have not only gone above and beyond in supporting CBRE and the technical team with the reactive approach. Kendra have additionally put in place and added value with innovation and solutions to aid us through the freak summer weather. This has been a valuable improvement to the operation and the continued resilience to site, I feel that had Kendra not been here it would have added extra strain on CBRE.” Dan Fisher | Engineering Service Manager CBRE | Global Workplace Solutions
Chris concludes “Whilst COVID-19 meant the ceremony this year was virtual, we are very happy to receive the awards which recognise two very different aspects of our outstanding team.”
Kendra were finalists in four categories in the awards ceremony and celebrate the achievement of our two engineers reaching finalist in Engineer of the Year (Ben Richards) and Young Engineer of the Year (Ronnie Stevens).
