Blueprint for Success: Implement Insights

Recently, we released a white paper entitled Blueprint for Success: the 5 Steps to Digitizing Building Operations and Improving Returns at Scale.

Perhaps the most salient reason to deploy a building operations platform would be to increase NOI by decreasing operating expenses.

In a perfect world, all the recommendations that come from the software would be immediately actionable and intuitive to operating staff. While this is true for the low-hanging fruit, maximizing ROI requires technical collaboration between on-site teams and data experts.

In this video, client success manager Subhan Mansoor, explains how to get every type of insight across the finish line.  

Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Subhan Mansoor, and I’m a client success manager here at Enertiv. This is the third video on Blueprint for Success, and in this video, I’ll be talking about how to implement insights.

What we mean insights is any recommendation that our software makes after it analyzes the data streams that are coming from your asset on a minutely from each piece of equipment. These recommendations, or insights, are geared towards one objective: to increase your NOI by decreasing operational expenses.

But before we implement these recommendations, there are a couple of considerations that we need to consider. In a perfect world, all the recommendations that come from the software would be immediately actionable and intuitive to your operating staff and a guy like me and my team wouldn’t even have a job.

But unfortunately (or fortunately), there are some challenges that we need to overcome before we really start unlocking the high-level savings that exist in your assets.

The first reason that savings are being overlooked is the unfamiliarity with the data by you operators. This is something new and they’ve been used to working a certain way for a long time. Obviously, they’re not comfortable with a third party, especially a tech-driven third party, coming in and telling them what needs to happen and how it needs to happen.

Understanding these problems, we came up with a repeatable success roadmap that enables us to push every recommendation, in one form or another, to the finish line.

So, first we collect the data (with which we went into detail in the first Blueprint for Success video), and then bifurcate recommendations in two major categories. The first one is the low-hanging fruit, something that’s immediately actionable, and the second one is a little more nuanced, where you really need to understand the asset before you can unlock the savings that are out there.

A quick example might help bring this concept together. For the first one, low-hanging fruit might be an A/C that is operating in the middle of the winter, go turn it off. That’s a no-brainer, the operator would immediately understand it and the software sends this out as an alert or a recommendation and it immediately gets taken care of.

But the second, more nuanced example might be, if we catch a VFD condenser water pump running 24/7 on a flat load that’s servicing 4 or 5 water sourced A/Cs that are ramping up and down based on a schedule. The condense water pump should be ramping up and down, but it’s not. So, to implement such an insight, we would require more information from the on-site staff and there will be a technical collaboration so we can understand what the required set points of the VFDs would be, the minimum threshold for the RPM on those pumps so the overall head does not drop below the cooling tower’s requirements, etc. A lot of things need to be done before we can push VFD modulation recommendation all the way to the finish line, and thereby unlock significant high-impact savings.

This process is facilitated during quarterly touch points with the on-site staff where we meet to ensure that everything that’s been discussed is being understood and any considerations that need to be considered are done so before we move towards implementation.

This is, in a nutshell, how you would approach technically incorporating insights and recommendations that come from equipment-level data.

In the next video, we’ll be talking about how to introduce organizational change so you too can be a tech-enabled real estate company.

Again, my name is Subhan Mansoor, stay tuned for the next video. Peace out.