Effective Energy Management from Home—Part One

Hello friends and colleagues, and welcome to a new COVID-19 reality unimaginable only a few weeks ago. It is the sincere desire of everyone here at EnergyCAP that you and your loved ones are safe and healthy.

Life has changed, but life—and work—goes on. And for those whose duties include energy management, conservation, and cost reduction, your work may be more important today than ever before. Any organization with a budget that relies on revenue from taxes, student tuition, product and service sales to customers, hospitality, transportation or many other sources will most likely experience substantial shortfalls in the coming months. That gives a new urgency to effective management and reduction of utility expenses. 

But what’s the best way to do that while working from home? Sitting here at home myself, I feel your pain and anxiety. The best contribution I can offer is a series of blog articles, “Effective Energy Management from Home.” Each article contains tips on what you can do today—from home—to take your energy management program to the next level. When the series is complete, you’ll be able to read them all here.

Today, I’ll discuss two foundational topics: Database Hosting and the popular Energy Management Report Guide.

Database Hosting

If you’re one of the many EnergyCAP clients whose database we already host, you can skip to the next section. For those of you who have on-premises hosting, you may already be experiencing the difficulty or impossibility of accessing EnergyCAP from home. Although you may be able to VPN into your network, the increasing severity of security controls, dual authorization hassles and strict home equipment requirements make it harder than ever to connect and be productive. 

Our hosted clients can quickly connect to the very latest EnergyCAP software from just about any device running a supported modern browser. It’s that easy! And better yet, EnergyCAP hosting is less than one-third the cost of typical on-premises hardware and IT support personnel. I recommend you put “Move to EnergyCAP hosting” on your list of cost-reduction proposals for later in 2020. You can explore our Database Hosting Services at your convenience.

Energy Management Report Guide

Now’s a good time to take a close look at what you may have missed—our convenient Energy Management Report Guide. It’s a compilation of the most popular reports for Energy Managers, all newly created in Microsoft SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) in EnergyCAP Version 7. A huge advantage of new SSRS-formatted reports (those named Report-xx) over the legacy Crystal Reports (those named ANxx, BLxx, SUxx, CAPxx, etc) is that SSRS reports allow embedded links. Run a PDF or Excel report, and click on a building or meter link. If you’re logged in, you’ll be directed to that object in EnergyCAP. If not logged in, you’ll be prompted to log in, and then the system will navigate to the object. Simple and quick for you or any email recipients you choose.

Take a read through the report guide and visualize how each one could help to publicize, communicate, verify, analyze, identify…all great action steps for effective energy management. Most reports have extensive filter options that let you customize what you see and how it’s organized.

My personal favs:  Report-22, Report-10, Report-12, Report-19, Report-21. Try each one, and soon you’ll have some new favs, too.

Stay well! And best wishes that you can use your work-from-home time to become a more effective Energy Manager.