CEO of Lucid, Will Coleman, was interviewed by Energy Manager Today regarding the benefits of centralizing data gathering and reporting. According to Coleman:
“Energy management remains a top focus for organizations that have committed to sustainability. Initiatives such as lighting and HVAC upgrades tend to be the most highly prioritized as they are considered to be low-hanging fruit and a good way to begin. But after the low-hanging fruit is harvested, organizations are increasingly opting for an energy management system (EMS) that goes beyond energy and can also centralize information like building operations data or facility production metrics, and use that information to identify deeper areas for savings.”
“Look at where you have the least visibility and the highest spend,” Coleman says. “If you have a lot of buildings, plug in the data and see whether each building is within the mean. For those that aren’t, identify potential savings. That gets you started on basic building performance.”
Too often, facilities managers think of the cost of an optimization program and do nothing. “But every building has the opportunity to be optimized. There really is a cost to inaction,” Coleman says. “Start with the base systems in your building. Then decide how deeply you want to go. Using technology to centralize data can really offer insights you can use to improve business performance.”
Although the article deals with building and energy management system related to it, the basic idea can be exploited in other sustainability issues. By combining sustainability related data, including economic, environmental and social data, into one software system, reporting, managing and analyzing the data is easier, more transparent and more efficient. Tofuture’s Corporate Sustainability Management software is widely used among companies from different business sectors for bringing all the sustainability related data into one place.
Photo by Sidharth Bhatia on Unsplash
