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How The Clarient Group's ROI Matrix Steered a Smart Building Program Toward Cleaning Contract Savings That Were Easier to Prove Than the Original Use Cases
The Clarient Group applied its ROI prioritization framework to a building owner's smart building program and found that the fastest-provable savings had nothing to do with the program's use cases. The win came from adjusting cleaning contracts based on occupancy data.
Owen Dalton, Smart Buildings Lead at The Clarient Group, described the framework at NexusCon 2025. The matrix plots smart building use cases along two axes: the tangible benefit and the speed of measurement. Use cases that land in the short-timeline, high-tangibility quadrant get prioritized, regardless of whether they were part of the original business case.
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"This allowed us to start to focus efforts on adjusting cleaning contracts using building occupancy data, which was an unintended initial use, but this ROI framework kind of steered us towards pulling those levers," Dalton said.
The framework draws on the Eisenhower Matrix and the JLL 3/30/300 rule to help teams categorize benefits into easy, medium, and hard-to-monetize buckets. TCG pairs it with a go/no-go decision matrix that scores each use case on desirability, cost, complexity, and whether the required systems already exist, shifting conversations from which vendor to buy to which problems are solvable now.
Dalton also recommends modularizing solutions for budget conversations. Rather than presenting a sprawling technology scope, TCG packages related components into named modules. A "mobile credential module," for example, bundles hardware retrofit, software upgrades, and middleware into one cost unit that budget holders can evaluate and approve.
For service providers helping owners scale smart building programs, proving value early matters more than proving the value originally planned. The use case that keeps the program funded may not be the one that launched it.
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The Clarient Group applied its ROI prioritization framework to a building owner's smart building program and found that the fastest-provable savings had nothing to do with the program's use cases. The win came from adjusting cleaning contracts based on occupancy data.
Owen Dalton, Smart Buildings Lead at The Clarient Group, described the framework at NexusCon 2025. The matrix plots smart building use cases along two axes: the tangible benefit and the speed of measurement. Use cases that land in the short-timeline, high-tangibility quadrant get prioritized, regardless of whether they were part of the original business case.
"This allowed us to start to focus efforts on adjusting cleaning contracts using building occupancy data, which was an unintended initial use, but this ROI framework kind of steered us towards pulling those levers," Dalton said.
The framework draws on the Eisenhower Matrix and the JLL 3/30/300 rule to help teams categorize benefits into easy, medium, and hard-to-monetize buckets. TCG pairs it with a go/no-go decision matrix that scores each use case on desirability, cost, complexity, and whether the required systems already exist, shifting conversations from which vendor to buy to which problems are solvable now.
Dalton also recommends modularizing solutions for budget conversations. Rather than presenting a sprawling technology scope, TCG packages related components into named modules. A "mobile credential module," for example, bundles hardware retrofit, software upgrades, and middleware into one cost unit that budget holders can evaluate and approve.
For service providers helping owners scale smart building programs, proving value early matters more than proving the value originally planned. The use case that keeps the program funded may not be the one that launched it.
Register for the next Nexus Labs event.
Sign up for the newsletter to get 5 stories like this per week:
This is a great piece!
I agree.