As we have recently learned, building automation already makes our lives easier. It enhances the feel-good atmosphere in the workplace and can increase the productivity of employees and room users. Nutz GmbH has created a product which places the human user at the centre of its attention.
The source of this is driven by the motivation of many individual employees at Nutz GmbH. Thomas Gisnapp has been part of the building automation team for a year now.

Mr. Gisnapp, you have been a Project Manager for 12 months now and are responsible for all documentation in your department. You describe yourself as having had a real career change, how is that?

After my part-time further training as an electrical engineer, I found myself in plant automation in a company that manufactures machines for the pharmaceutical industry. I dealt with the technical documentation of the plants and worked out the specifications, such as the functional description, from the customer’s requirement specifications. The technical documents I created were also part of the operating manuals.
At first glance, plant automation may appear to be very similar to building automation, but if you look more closely, you immediately recognise that these are two very different areas with different systems and different customer requirements. This is why I feel I have really had job diversification

What motivated you to switch from plant automation to building automation?

I wanted to take the step into building automation because I was impressed by the innovative technology / developments? and the focus on people. After my conversation with Christian Gruber, I also realised that this was an opportunity for me to become part of something great. My job is no longer just to produce documentation according to standards that have already been defined, but to redefine the standards and raise them to a higher level.

What is your motivation and what is your goal for building automation?

This is an easy question to answer! For me, user-friendliness has the highest priority, so it is simultaneously both the motivation and the goal.
In a building where many different tradesmen and consequently different systems come together, there is a large amount of data, parameters and sometimes separate user interfaces to be integrated. Added to this are the different stakeholders within a building.
For example, the room user is only interested in the control of the blinds, the room temperature and the light. Facility management, on the other hand, requires completely different parameters and data such as the current energy requirements of the building. Our task is to put people in the foreground and to develop a concept that does justice to this. In this way, it is equally important for us to create a functional description for the user that describes the entire area of individual room control as well as an easily understandable system description for the facility manager or the building owner. In this way we want to achieve that the respective requirements are exactly matched to the user groups. They should only receive the information they really need, and experience shows that less is often more.
For me this is user-friendliness and this is enVision Buildings!

Like your colleagues you are also involved in the realisation of the M8 work and create in Munich East. To finish, can you tell us how far the project has progressed?

The first tenant has already moved in and the employees have received training for the user interface, where they can set their own personal feel-good atmosphere. We are in the final stages of the remaining rental space, some things still need to be programmed and here and there one last adaptation to individual customer requirements.
We are incredibly proud that one of the most intelligent buildings in Germany is now – almost – finished and that we can make a small contribution to climate protection.