User Manual

FIVE ACTIONS TO TAKE TODAY

Most companies are in the early stages of the journey toward a sophisticated

use of big-data and analytics for enterprise energy management. Through

our interviews and quantitative data collection, we’ve unearthed advice

that should make those efforts more productive.

1. Learn from Your Peers. It’s important to not only spend time familiarizing

yourself with the providers, but also with what others have implemented

and how they went about procuring systems. GM’s Hildreth recommends

“researching other companies that have done it. We participate in industry

organizations and other groups to share best practices. Get out there and

ﬁnd out what your competitors or your peers have done successfully and

what they used for the business case. If you learn someone did something

on a two-year payback, that’s positive information you can take back and

put into your business case to sell internally.”

2. Align Incentives with Actions. Many of the executives we interviewed

create energy trend reports that are distributed to upper management.

These reports often provide for a deeper dive into the data. B-K’s Gray-

Donald notes, “This carries a lot of weight because energy use intensities

form part of the annual incentives for various property managers as well

as regional vice presidents. They have access to energy data on a pretty

ﬁne-grained basis through a software-as-a-service tool. And they’re able

to perform detailed analytics. Whether they do or not is up to them. But if

their performance is off, it does get noticed by more senior people.”

3. Reserve Money to Address Issues. NREL’s Steve Frank advises, “You

cannot expect to pay money to a vendor and not reserve any money

internally to address the problems that will inevitably come up.”

4. Consider Enterprise-wide Budgeting. Several of the executives we

interviewed emphasized portfolio-wide budgeting rather than budgets for

individual properties. Following this scenario, a site doesn’t get its own

funding for a project. Rather, the data gets shared across multiple sites

and doesn’t get lost in one location. This allows projects to be tracked

along with other projects, along with the savings, costs, MVPs and ROIs,

etc. This becomes a database for seeding new projects or identifying

projects that should go into new construction.

A ton of data

doesn’t do

any good if it

doesn’t turn into

information.