With global temperatures rising and energy costs spiralling, 195 countries signed the Paris Agreement in 2016, and with the EU committing to cutting emissions by 40% by 2030, the stakes are high for the owners of real estate. With FastLane, Royal HaskoningDHV set its target to make energy and CO2 emission reductions 30% faster and more cost effective with more collaborative, transparent, and agile processes.

“Of course, we want to increase revenue and make a healthy profit, but the biggest KPI for us is making the world more sustainable,” said Roland Hofstra, Lead Product Owner for FastLane. “In the long-term, FastLane will help reduce the costs of becoming sustainable for our customers, which is better for society and better for us.”

The biggest barrier to cutting the environmental footprint of factories, hospitals, or office blocks isn’t technology or finance. It’s the culture and mindsets of people and organisations. The siloed culture in the AEC (architecture, engineering, construction) sector that often exists between building owners, consultants, contractors and other stakeholders can hamper access to information about a building, slowing the process down and increasing unnecessary costs.
Many of Royal HaskoningDHV’s clients – including players in industry, commercial real estate, and the public sector – have portfolios of 1,000-plus buildings. “Details needed to get better insight into a building’s energy consumption are either unknown or buried amongst many different types of data,” explained Hofstra. “Gathering and structuring all this information was a time-consuming, error-prone process – until now.”

FastLane gives full transparency and access to this information to everyone at Royal HaskoningDHV, and its customers and partners, from strategic board level to operational asset managers and engineers. Via dynamic dashboards built on Tableau CRM, employees, partners and customers alike can view vital information such as building data, suggested measures, and portfolio business cases, enabling a more collaborative approach.

The FastLane team launched their ground-breaking solution in 2017. The platform, which is based on Sales Cloud, Community Cloud, Salesforce Lightning Platform, and Heroku, was first implemented across Royal HaskoningDHV teams in early 2018. Now, following thorough testing with early adopter building portfolio owners in the Netherlands, it’s ready to scale up in March 2019.

“The adoption of FastLane initiates a complete culture change throughout the organisation in terms of how we approach the way we work at Royal HaskoningDHV, including project and program management,” explained FastLane Co-Founder and Business Owner Teun van Schijndel. “It makes the journey from A to Z run more smoothly with greater automation and agility, setting a new standard in the industry. In the past, you would write a report and it would soon be out of date because, for example of financial, technology, legislation, and stakeholder dynamics.

“Now insights can be updated on the fly, which reduces the decision-making processes from years to months, and will hopefully eventually go from weeks to days. Community Cloud is really powerful in allowing us to do this. It allows us to share all the data we have collected on Einstein dashboards with customers and easily communicate what data or insights are missing, so we can build more accurate dashboards. It’s a whole new way of working.”

FastLane doesn’t just improve results for Royal HaskoningDHV’s customers though – it also accelerates the company’s sales cycle. “With greater transparency, we decrease the amount of time and effort it takes to do things, increasing trust and impact, and putting the joy back into collaboration,” said van Schijndel. “FastLane frees up our experts and sales consultants, so rather than focusing on stats and figures, they can focus on building customer relationships – we aim to automate all the mundane and time-consuming tasks so they can really add value.”