Smart Building Strategy at Scale: Inside Bedrock’s National Command Center

With more than 20 million square feet of real estate under management, Bedrock is one of Detroit’s largest property owners, overseeing a diverse portfolio of commercial, residential, and mixed-use buildings. But managing such a large footprint came with a familiar challenge: fragmented systems, operational blind spots, and overwhelming volumes of alerts.

To take control, Bedrock set out to centralize building operations across its entire portfolio. The result? A purpose built National Command Center powered by KODE OS, delivering real-time visibility, remote control, and data-driven decision making from a single interface.

The Challenge: Fragmented Systems and Limited Visibility

Before establishing the Command Center, Bedrock’s operations teams were relying on siloed building systems, disconnected tools, and outdated manual processes. Managing HVAC, lighting, access, and more, across the portfolio meant navigating more than 10 different software interfaces, each tied to a proprietary platform from vendors like Johnson Controls, Honeywell, Siemens, Lutron, Simplex, Notifer, and others.

Beyond complicating day-to-day operations, it also made equipment procurement and servicing more difficult, often requiring teams to settle for systems that worked best within a vendor’s ecosystem, rather than what was best for the building. As a result, teams were stuck in a reactive environment, inundated with alarms and tenant calls, struggling to pinpoint which issues truly needed attention.

Key challenges included: 

• No centralized view across buildings and systems
• Redundant and non-actionable alerts 
• Delays in incident response and resolution
• Limited ability to optimize performance at scale
• Limited ability for knowledge & best practices sharing

With growing pressure to improve efficiency and tenant experience, the status quo wasn’t suitable.

The Solution: Smart Building Software for Real-Time Portfolio Operations

To achieve real-time control across its diverse portfolio, Bedrock took a two-pronged approach to modernize its operational technology stack, combining local system upgrades with cloud based intelligence. They teamed up with Tridium and KODE Labs to unify their building systems under one scalable strategy. The Tridium Niagara Framework® was deployed across all properties, serving as a local backbone to consolidate data from a variety of building systems. Each site uses Niagara JACEs as a standardized gateway, simplifying procurement and service contracting. These JACEs feed data directly into KODE OS, the cloud based smart building operating system that powers Bedrock’s National Command Center. Once ingested, the data is normalized and structured using portfolio-wide standards for naming, visualization, and historical tracking, making it easier to train users, manage assets, and deploy advanced analytics across the board.

KODE OS also integrates with a wide range of IoT devices and third-party software, including occupancy and indoor air quality sensors, using open APIs to combine real-time environmental data with operational system behavior. This enables Bedrock to deliver optimized comfort, sustainability, and performance across every building.

Key capabilities include: 

• Integrated System View: HVAC, lighting, metering, access, work orders, and more, unified across properties.
• Operational Intelligence: Insights into performance trends, recurring issues, asset health, and more.
• Remote Command & Control: Take immediate action without dispatching on-site teams. 
• Real-Time Alerting: Smart alarm management with context, severity, prioritization, and resolution suggestions.
• Role-Based Dashboards: Custom views for Operators, Engineers, Sustainability, Leadership, and more.

Together, this infrastructure forms the foundation of Bedrock’s National Command Center, shifting operations from reactive troubleshooting to intelligent, portfolio-level decision making.

“KODE has enabled our operational teams to have a single source solution into all of our BMS systems for 15M sq/ft and more to come. KODE OS aggregates our data into a comprehensive and easy to digest manner displayed on customizable dashboards where we can act by analyzing, predicting and make the changes required. This allows our local building Engineers and Property Managers to ensure a best in class client experience when it comes to comfort, which we believe is what our tenants care about the most from Bedrock.

Our Command Center profiles have changed from Building Engineers to younger profiles who understand big data working with senior experienced building operators while inside the buildings. With a centralized platform, our Building Engineering teams don’t need to have the level of experience that is required by our competition, allowing Bedrock to be ahead of the curve.

KODE has the best in class customers service and support. More importantly, by deploying KODE, we have saved millions of dollars through energy savings, operational efficiency and service contracts in the last 4 years.“

– Russ Holton, Senior Director Building Systems

The Results: Scalable Smart Building Management

With the Command Center live and over 100 buildings integrated into KODE OS, Bedrock has fundamentally transformed how it manages operations at scale. What once took days of reactive troubleshooting, filled with guesswork, scattered performance data, and manual reporting, is now addressed in minutes, often before occupants feel an impact.

Notable outcomes include: 

• Operational consistency across a large, varied portfolio 
• Faster incident response and reduced device downtime 
• Fewer false alarms and smarter resource deployment
• Enhanced tenant comfort through continuous monitoring & quick action 
• Streamlined reporting and oversight for better decision making

It’s a scalable model for building management and intelligence, one that brings together people, systems, and data to drive performance every day.