How energy can improve your business

These forward-thinking businesses understand that optimising their energy strategy can help them to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and unlock new revenue streams to help them drive business growth. Businesses can also improve resilience and create a competitive advantage that will future proof their business. Rather than looking at energy as a cost of business, they are using energy data to inform their energy plans, energy management and overall energy strategy to make their energy a lever in their business growth.

It is imperative that businesses partner with a provider that has the right energy insight tools and a platform that collects and centralises granular device-level energy and performance data. This level of data will provide them with a deeper understanding of their energy estate.

Gaining a deeper understanding of energy infrastructure and strategy

Building management systems are often used to provide a top-level view of a business's energy estate. However, the granularity of device-level data provides businesses with a much deeper understanding of their energy infrastructure and can help inform their energy strategy.

Device-level data tracks the energy consumption of each device separately to provide businesses with real-time visibility of:

The costs of energy usage
Where energy is being used and potentially being wasted
How the business and equipment are performing
The risks to the business, such as equipment failures and downtime
Opportunities to optimise and monetise energy flexibility

Where energy is being used and wasted

Monitoring your energy usage at device-level gives you real-time visibility of how your business consumes energy. Gaining a deeper understanding of how your business uses energy will help you identify areas that can be optimised, potentially saving future costs or generating new revenue streams for the business.

Energy waste can be one of the biggest contributors to high energy costs. Without monitoring your energy usage at a device-level, energy waste can often go undetected and so the opportunity to reduce energy waste and improve efficiency is often not realised.

Energy waste is often the result of employees actions rather than the equipment. The intelligence provided by device-level data can also be used to help inform employees about how their actions impact on energy consumption and waste and the changes that can be made to their behaviour to help eliminate energy waste and reduce costs.

How the business and equipment are performing

Monitoring device-level data can help your business gain real-time visibility of how your equipment is performing but also how your business is performing. This data can be used to help you identify where changes can be implemented to improve operational efficiency, unlock value and reduce business risk.

Device-level data can help your business avoid costly downtime from equipment failures with real-time insights and predictive maintenance alerts. Granular device-level data can help your business analyse capital equipment to identify inefficiencies and determine when equipment needs replacing or requires maintenance to keep it working efficiently. This reduces business risks, optimises your maintenance schedule and extends the life of your equipment.

The data gathered can tell you when replacement or maintenance may be needed. It can also be used to perform a cost analysis to help you understand whether replacement or maintenance is more cost effective.

Data in action

A large international food and beverage manufacturer, for example, monitored the devices at their new logistics and distribution centre. By tracking their energy usage they were alerted to an increase in consumption and were able to investigate and identify the cause as a compressor that had malfunctioned. Being able to access this information quickly helped them reduce downtime and save £58,000 by reconfiguring the compressor.

By using real-time data, businesses can:

Accurately plan their energy usage
Turn equipment usage up and down as required, identify anomalies, improve their resiliency plan and use the intelligence gathered to help them set maintenance and energy budgets for the following year.

Conclusion

Real-time insights will enable businesses to make data-driven decisions to optimise their energy strategy and improve their energy management. Device-level data can also help drive business growth by informing decisions on using new technologies such as solar or CHP to help drive energy optimisation and unlock new revenue streams.