Energy Management Software

Prepared by Paul Webb, MIE Chartered Energy Manager

I have been lucky to develop some amazing energy management software programmes in my working life for various companies. I have also managed to mastermind some very clever tools to help myself deliver best practices and management of all utilities.

Software plays a very big part of what we do every day and the software has evolved over many years, to enable us to have data to hand every day which is critical. During my day to day management of utilities I would use MS Excel to collate reports, which can be very powerful, but when communicating to customers and groups it is always better to use web based platforms to enable data to be communicated freely around the world.

In addition to the data being transmitted just sending the data should not finish there. The data needs to populate into management information and provide the organisation with clear messages.

Management information then needs to be broken down into levels based on who the audience is. For example if you wanted to communicate that the organisation had energy targets and that last month they had achieved such targets with everyone’s contribution, then a simple graph with the target line and the actual values would be perfect. Everyone in the organisation can then relate to this.

Then on the other hand The Board of Directors may want to know how much money that saving has provided, but as a headline.

The Finance Director may want to know how much the energy saving was as a cost against his budgets and is the organisation hitting their budgets now and forecasted for the future.

In 2005, I had the opportunity to create such a system and we actually helped the organisation save 2% of their utility spend because we were giving everyone visibility to the data in a format that related to their role in the company. Simple traffic light indicators were provided daily with monthly reports for the board.

Such software programmes have moved on from 2005, and they are becoming more and more available to organisations with multi platforms for Desktop, Smart Phones and Tablets.

Data is important, when managing cost it is critical. Speed of data maybe critical but not to the level of ‘Real time’ now this is my own personal opinion but receiving data on a real time bases including Energy Alarms can be far too much. So, it is important to trim the data management information to daily.

The reason for saying this, if I said last month your bill was 20% higher than the previous month what would your reply be if I said, “what did you do last month as an organisation?” (bearing in mind the bill has arrived at the end of the first week of the new month). You would probably struggle to answer.

However, if looking at the data yesterday you would take one look at the data and explain exactly what happened yesterday. I know I would, and I know I have done.

This is where software starts to come into its own, the time to collate this data and put it into a format can take time and to complete  this day in day out will take a toll on an individual. So, software processing works very well here.

One last point to remember is accuracy and verification of the data dare I say, ‘Poor Data In, then Poor reports out’. So, the Software does need to have a verification process.

There are many systems on the market, and they all have their benefits, it is about finding the right system for your organisation. Some companies include the software as part of their service, and some have a subscription cost but remember the key objective here is that by managing your energy daily with software could save you 2% of your utility cost if managed. So, it could payback for itself very quickly.