Why we need software to manage our 3rd largest expense

Over the last 20 years I have had the pleasure to work with some of the most exciting corporate organisations in the world including Trend (who are now Honeywell) and Satchwell ( who are now Schneider). Their business models were predominately manufacturing and providing service and management of their products. A fully maintained product provides more product sales and more customer engagement. Throughout these 20 years my roles were embedded in the service and support aspect. Software played a significant part in our support function and the service of the products provided analysis and fault-finding tools. During this time our software not only provided the support to the products, but it evolved around supporting the operation of the organisation which evolved into energy management. The building management system provides 35% of the energy savings and by deploying energy management software to work in parallel, the savings are secured and increased.

When I left the corporate world in 2005, I found myself working as an independent consultant managing organisations’ energy usage. In the early days of doing this work I would be taking the organisation’s data in the form of billing or interval data and preparing reports in excel. Although I love working with excel it does take time to build your templates as each organisation is different. When you are building a business, time starts to become absorbing when you are coping with data especially when you have multigroup organisations. I would often find myself having to double back on issues when software would automatically close down the issues and deliver reporting.

Software plays a key part in managing energy in today’s world as it saves the time of individuals who are challenged with the energy management of an organisation. I still however, find many organisations are not embracing software in order to tackle this challenge. When I ask the question, “why have you not implemented an energy management strategy?”, their answer is always costs and time. The key reason to cost is taking software on board when you have so many meters or properties. I have always said, take a step back and consider energy management being a journey and this is a good example. The whole property portfolio does not need to be integrated with software to manage the energy, start by building the strategy slowly.

Software is a good place to start the process of managing energy, and if you have more than one meter, break it down into single points. The diagram below shows a basic process for a starter pack.

Software can be expensive, and organisations can get carried away regarding what to capture. Software will pay for itself, and I know that just by implementing software an organisation can save approximately 5% just by reviewing data. When they start using the software to actually analyse the data they will see these savings start to grow to 20%. The important thing to be aware of here is that the savings being made are reoccurring savings. They are savings the software will maintain year on year.

Software today has evolved, and we have seen some massive steps within the industry with IoT and AI, and it won’t be long before we start to see the energy experts role changing as the software will be able to predict and act. The energy expert will be in a position to take a step back from data collection and report and focus on exception reporting across all sectors. This is important as uniformity across the different sectors will be applied.?

Courtesy of Hark Systems Ltd

Not only will organisations be able to review consumption, but they will also be able to start to review other property areas like air quality and statuses. AI will start to give organisations the solution to correct the overspend.

The oversight problem I can foresee here is cost and if organisations want 100% visibility this comes with a cost. Sadly if we were to approach a project like this, the project would surely collapse, but the true costs of doing nothing then starts to hit organisation’s bottom line.

My solution to this, like everything with energy management, is to ‘take baby steps’. Start by collecting data from the main meters and then start making savings:

1.??????By firstly connecting the electricity meter or meters, you will be able to identify usage and savings from 2 to 20%. The electricity data is a straightforward starting point with either collecting interval data or manually inputting the data. Once this data starts to flow you will have either real time or day +1 visibility.

2.??????By connecting the gas meter, this is not as straight forward as the electricity, but the savings are once again aligned.

3.??????Water consumption once again is not straight forward, but you could be identifying leaks and waste with the visibility.

4.??????The savings made from points 1 -3, far exceed the benefits for connecting and monitoring other assets.

Once these steps are taken, the energy consumption then becomes available to many stakeholders in the business and each member of the system can then have their own reporting, based on their role.

The Facilities Manager – wants to see the profiles and how the organisation is running and reduce waste.

The Finance Manager – wants to see the cost of the profile and understand how much can be saved.

The pay off to this simple process is savings, and as I have said many times before, ‘We cannot manage what we do not measure’. ?I have worked with organisations around the world and have seen their savings increase once they have started to measure. It’s not just measuring though, but acting upon exception.

Your weekly call to action here is to review your electricity meter and see what needs to be done to collect that data and at what cost, as very quickly the cost will achieve a quick payback. It may be connected to interval data, therefore data collection could be free as the supplier can now give this to you.

If you want to know more about Energy Software, either reach out to me or go to Hark’s website and enquire. Tell them you have read my article and you want to explore how their system can evolve to provide you with 100% visibility of your utilities. ??

www.harksys.com or send an email to [email protected]

If you enjoyed reading this article or want to provide feedback, please contact Paul Webb at www.b2benergy.co.uk or send him a direct message. He will respond within 24 hours.

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? Paul Webb, 2021