Pictures of the Future      Spring 2008

All-Inclusive Solutions

Thanks to the Siemens One initiative, Siemens is offering customers complete, made-to-measure solutions—for airports, hotels, hospitals, and entire districts such as the four-billion euro New Wembley construction project in London.

Children’s wish lists have hardly changed at all over the years. Near the top, they still include building kits as one of the most cherished presents for birthdays and Christmas. But whether they’re working on a pirate ship, a space station or an entire urban landscape, youthful builders achieve the best results when they put all the separate, very different parts together according to assembly instructions.

In a certain sense, companies like Siemens are like toy manufacturers. Their products are building blocks that can be combined in a variety of ways. But companies are usually known for individual products and less often for complete building kits including instructions. If a potential customer would like to build an airport, for example, he often collects the required components piece by piece from several companies and then combines them into an overall solution. Not infrequently, however, it turns out that some of the components of such projects are not compatible with one another. The consequences are added costs and a schedule in disarray.

Siemens has therefore set itself the goal of offering solutions from the customer’s point of view and putting more emphasis on its comprehensive range of products and services. The result is an initiative established in 2004 called Siemens One. The initiative is a mixture of systematic key account management and market cultivation across sectors. So far, Siemens One has proven to be a success. In over 40 countries, Siemens now presenting itself to customers with one face, nevertheless demonstrating its diversity in the context of complex projects such as airports(see Financing), hospitals, and hotels.

“To date, Siemens has supplied equipment for 5,900 upper- and luxury-class hotels,” says Michael Hartmann, Senior Vice President for Corporate Sales on the company’s Hospitality Market Development Board. An outstanding example of that experience is the Hilton Molino Stucky project in Venice, Italy, which has over 380 rooms in ten buildings. “In this hotel, we managed to integrate a large proportion of the Siemens disciplines,” says Hartmann.

Indeed, the individual building blocks that Siemens bundled together into a single package for the American Hilton Group’s Molino Stucky are impressive. They include integrated entertainment system for the guest rooms, fire protection systems, security technologies such as surveillance systems, building management and communications installations that provide guests with maximum security and the greatest possible comfort.

The challenge in the Hilton contract was not just the technical furnishings, however. “We have to know how the industry ticks,” explains Hartmann. “The customer doesn’t formulate technical solutions when he tells us what he wants; he only discusses with us the desired result.” Whether the customer demands comfort for the guests or energy efficiency, Hartmann’s team ultimately has to know which solutions will meet those needs.

Extensive meetings between the hospitality representatives of the individual Siemens divisions and the customer are therefore a must for understanding what the hoteliers want and have in mind. This process is facilitated by numerous Siemens experts involved in the project who have extensive experience in the hotel market. One of them is Michael Hartmann himself, who previously worked at the Kempinski Group and has attended various hotel management colleges.

All of this expertise is paying off. Today, Siemens’ hotel activities generate some €210 million in annual sales revenues. Large chains such as Hilton account for about one third of this amount. “This is a market where we can still do quite a lot,” says Hartmann.

Lisbon’s Hi-Tech Hospital. Siemens also sees great potential in hospitals, since more and more organizations are opting to have their facilities maintained and run by private entities. Such entities, because of their economic interest, prefer a comprehensive approach, as this is the only way they can optimize their operating processes and function economically over the long term.

A prime example of this is da Luz Hospital in Lisbon, Portugal, which Siemens furnished and equipped on behalf of Portuguese clinic operator Espirito Santo Saúde (ESS) and which represents one of the largest Siemens projects in the healthcare field.

Opened in 2007 as an “integrated healthcare campus,” da Luz includes not only a general hospital but also a nursing home and a retirement home—a unique combination of services in Portugal. Outpatient and inpatient treatment is offered in more than 30 departments and practices, primarily with technologies from Siemens. “As far as the diagnostic equipment goes, Siemens supplied almost everything in its product range, including computer and magnetic resonance tomographs and mammography equipment,” says Dr. Klaus Wecker, who represents the Siemens healthcare field in this reference-project.

Moreover, the da Luz project demonstrates what Siemens can provide all by itself. The list includes lighting systems, electric installations, power distribution, and a complex monitoring system with roughly 13,000 sensors for light, air, and temperature conditions.

The building includes a large number of technical refinements, such as HiMed Cockpit, a cross between an entertainment and examination system that can be used to surf the ­Internet, watch television or make a phone call. Doctors can use HiMed monitors during bedside visits to access a central database and ­retrieve a patient’s electronic file, along with lab data, x-rays and reports on diagnostic findings. This development from Siemens revolutionizes the workflow of a hospital.

The hospital’s Soarian system from Siemens is the most prominent example of workflow ­acceleration. “Soarian is the real centerpiece of da Luz,” says Wecker. “With this digital workflow solution, doctors and nurses anywhere in the hospital can access patient files, instead    of having to gather them together piece by piece in a prolonged and costly search of the archive.”

This makes internal hospital processes much more effective. Wards can better plan their work processes, bureaucracy is reduced, and the staff is relieved of many time-consuming burdens. All of this results in fast, patient-oriented processes. Patients therefore benefit from shorter stays, which is a boon to hospital operator ESS.

The high degree of efficiency promised by the combination of the many systems delivered by Siemens played an important roll in convincing the clinic operator to award the contract to Siemens. Unlike competitors, who can offer only individual products, Siemens was able to provide a competent key account manager, exceptionally well-coordinated liaisons between fields, a common corporate structure, and well-practiced cooperation among individual divisions.

Welcome to the New Wembley. Siemens’ many years of experience with comprehensive technical solutions were put to good use by British property developer Quintain Estates and Developments for a project in London. At the site of the redeveloped iconic Wembley Stadium, which was completed in 2007 in what is still a run-down industrial quarter, Quintain intends to surround the new stadium with a residential, shopping, and recreational complex with hotels, bars, movie theaters and about 5,000 residential units—in short, a city within the city, as it were. As far as Quintain is concerned, the ­sustainability of the new district is especially important, because the developer is also the future manager of the site.

Fit for the Future. For example, Quintain wants the technical solutions for the new site to be among the most modern on the market for many years to come, even following the completion of this mixed use development, which is scheduled to be completed in 2015. With this in mind, Quintain brought Siemens on board.

Siemens is giving Quintain and its partners advice on a range of technological issues and helping to realize the required solutions with   its own products and services. Although the ­gigantic project is still in the early stages of construction, Quintain has already made the first important technology decisions, thanks to help from Siemens.

For instance, fiberglass cables to the home will provide residents with leading edge telecommunication services, while ultramodern building technologies will reduce the energy consumption and carbon footprint of the new site to an absolute minimum. Additional solutions such as IT and traffic control systems are already being contemplated. “I’m sure that over the coming years we’ll supply a wide range of Siemens solutions and services for the New Wembley project,” says Gordon Carmichael, Siemens One project head.

As recently as the summer of 2007, Quintain and Siemens signed a 15-year agreement laying out a strategic partnership. Almost all the Siemens divisions in the UK are taking part in the project, including Siemens’ Research Center in Roke Manor. Carmichael reports that the potential contract volume is expected to reach several hundred million euros over the first ten years alone.

Quintain anticipates a total investment of more than four billion euros in the construction project. And Siemens One manager Carmichael is sure that the expense will be worth it. “The site will be one of London’s main attractions, with ten to 20 million visitors per year, not least because of Wembley Stadium and the nearby Wembley Arena for concerts and events,” he predicts.
                                                                                                        Sebastian Webel