How QuadReal Saved $350,000 in Consumables in 12 Months with Real-time Supply Monitoring

This partnership started at Commerce Court, a large 50+ story office complex with over 7,000 visitors a day in downtown Toronto and a spend of nearly $1,000,000 a year on consumables such as paper towels, toiletries, and soap.

Since implementing Mero, QuadReal has seen 12x ROI, with $350 000 recovered from wasted consumables in 1 year. In addition, cleaners are now spending more time on valuable tasks such as deep cleaning of railings, elevators, and stairways - increasing labor efficiency by 20%.

This is the story of how they realized those massive savings.

QuadReal was presented with a competing solution for supply monitoring sensors that was asking for a huge upfront payment.

This solution was not retrofittable. It was going to force QuadReal to use their refills - charging 2-3$ extra per refill compared to their current supplier.

No way were they going to change supplier and pay extra.

“They’d be losing any return on investment that they might have had from the system. It made no sense until Mero came along and provided a retrofit solution. It became much more effective in the long for the building manager”, said Nathan.

Unlike its competitors, Mero’s sensors are designed to fit over any dispenser on the market - there’s no need to be locked into a specific supplier, 3-year contracts, or replace any equipment.

Its peel and stick sensors require no drilling, alternations, or wiring and can be installed by anyone in 30 seconds or less.

As is typically the case with Mero, its team had a good relationship with the cleaning provider right from the beginning.

“I met Nathan and Cole (co-founders) years ago when the sensor was only a prototype. Hallmark is always looking for new innovations so we stayed in touch. When the system came out, we decided we needed to partner with someone that was providing results.”, said Philip Clementino, President at Hallmark.

He added: “We worked with another company in the past but there wasn’t much success. A lot of these companies don’t provide support for the system. Our clients want to make sure it works. And because it’s new, they’re not familiar with it. So support is key. Mero has provided that.”

The Hallmark team thought the Mero system was something that could help on a big scale in bigger buildings.

They introduced Mero to the property manager at the time.

Thinking it was a standout solution that could make a big change, he championed Mero upward all the way to the VP of smart building innovation.

“This gave him the opportunity to shine and bring a solution from an operations level to the portfolio level - which is not typical exposure for a property manager. I believe he got promoted since then”, added Nathan.

“We always tell our clients that other companies we’ve worked with haven’t followed through. They haven’t provided us with results or a product that was working effectively. Mero does come through and they are responsive. That’s a big reason why we choose to keep pushing the product and we still are to this day,“ shared Philip.

Mero started by installing sensors for a few months to monitor a baseline of what cleaners did without the Mero alerting system.

What the team found was that cleaners often threw out 50 to 60 percent of a roll every single time they entered the washroom. Because the washroom at that time was so busy, they never really knew the next best time to enter.

By using this routine-based cleaning, they were focused solely on ensuring tenants didn’t find any thing empty by preemptively throwing away perfectly good supplies.

Result: a huge waste of usable supplies that ended up in landfills.

Almost immediately after turning on the Mero system, cleaners were routed on a just-in-time basis. They were able to save up a difference of 35% of those rolls. The cost-benefit can be up to $350 000 for the entire building.

Per Nathan: “We usually think of toilet paper towels as cheap, but that’s a mistake. Large buildings tend to spend up to $1,000,000 per year on consumables. And the average portfolio size for a major property manager is around 80 buildings. When property managers are working at this scale, these savings are extremely impactful.”

QuadReal had a sophisticated smart building technology stack comprised of Premise HQ (data aggregator), Xander Kardian (occupancy monitoring), Kode Labs (smart building software), Connected Sensors (leak detection monitoring), and more.

With such a complex ecosystem, it would be easy for an additional solution to add overhead.

Mero’s integration capabilities allow it to connect one-to-one to each integration partner without added complexity or loss in data quality.

This means it can work with and enrich any existing building system, transforming its raw data into cleaning insights that properties can use immediately.

More specifically:

“We built an API with their existing occupancy monitoring solution. This allows us to pull the data from sensors as if it was our own right in our platform without going through a middle layer. This lets us perform analytics much faster without any loss in data quality”, specified Nathan.

This unique capability to fit perfectly with any building system makes Mero a cornerstone of any property manager’s smart building journey -regardless of its level of complexity.

It also means the following:

A holistic, 30,000-foot view of any building portfolio in the world.

And Mero providing granular cleaning data and insights leading to better collaboration between building service providers and PMs and additional savings in labor cost and consumables.

That’s how Nathan envisions the smart building journey evolving through the partnership with Mero.

“The goal is to be an integrated solution and be the subject matter expert on a specific use case. Wide-angle approaches are not going to work. It takes a full business and operations to win a specific vertical.”, he specifies.

Mero obsesses over cleaning efficiency every day. Because its solution focuses on one operational item, its team knows how to provide value in that specific area.

That allows it to scale really well.

“You’re doing a disservice if you try to use a one size fits all solution. We’ll be working with other technology providers who think the same way and are the best at their verticals whether it’s air quality or access control. Then creating the most seamless way for us to integrate with one another.”

Nathan also believes more property managers will realize the potential of Mero beyond cleaning and unlock cross-functional use cases.“

We’re focused operationally on cleaning. But that doesn’t mean a leasing agent couldn’t use our data by providing occupancy data for new tenants.”

“Or for mergers and acquisitions. Imagine increasing the sale price of an office building from 100 million to 200 million because you can produce the data to prove that its been fully occupied and is in a prime location. That’s where the huge upside is going to come from rolling out technology and forward-thinking companies like QuadReal can take full advantage of that.”