Unleash Your Productivity: Part One

That’s a wrap! 

The 2017 edition of EnergyCAP’s Catalyst Training for Savings Conference came to a successful conclusion Thursday, April 13. And 100 EnergyCAP users–representing a wide range of organization types and sizes–departed State College, PA with an expanded arsenal of utility bill and energy management skills.

New EnergyCAP users benefitted from two full days of hands-on training, while those with EnergyCAP experience enhanced their skills in sessions covering workflow & automation, bill splits & chargebacks, interval data import & analysis, EnergyCAP APIs, and more. Attendees also had the opportunity to see and download the newly-released Report Designer v2, in addition to gaining pre-release access to the HTML-based EnergyCAP Version 4. 

This year’s Catalyst theme was “Productivity Unleashed,” and the conference kicked off with a keynote address from Laura Stack, a noted expert in employee and team productivity and author of What To Do When There’s Too Much To Do. Stack encouraged audience members to ask themselves, “What is my productivity ROI?” and suggested that tasks be prioritized via placement into one of four categories:

1. Life or Death
2. Can Become a Crisis
3. Want to Do It Soon, But Will Not Die From It (Analogous to a broken bone)
4. Pain (Think: Burn, minor cut, or headache)

Productive workers, according to Stack, are willing to “say ‘no’ and set boundaries.”

Closing the productivity loop, EnergyCAP, Inc.’s Founder & CEO, Steve Heinz, presented the final keynote titled, “10 Tips to Unleash Your Productivity.” Tips 6–10 are presented below, and the top five tips will be provided in a future follow-up blog.

Tip #10
Run the SU62 report to identify meters with mixed units of measure.

It is not uncommon to have situations where the units of measure change over the billing history of a given meter (e.g., water meter changes from gallons to kilo-gallons). The EnergyCAP unit system has a feature built in to identify and offer the option to convert the historical “native” units to be the same unit of measure for the entire billing history. Learn more by consulting EnergyCAP’s online Help Manual.

Tip #9
Create a Place Group.

EnergyCAP’s Groups & Benchmarking functionality makes it easy to highlight buildings and meters that have abnormal use, cost, or demand. And it’s these buildings and meters that most frequently offer the greatest opportunity for cost reduction and energy savings. Learn more via an informative online video.

Tip #8
Rely on the new BL34B report to identify utility bills not yet received.

We suggest setting your report filters to identify bills that are more than 10 days past their expected arrival date. Why have you not yet received them? Were they lost in transit? It may be worth making a call to the vendor(s) to find out.

Tip #7
Reports CAL06 and CAL07 help you identify errors in historical data that may be producing misleading reports.

The multi-year trend reports display monthly energy cost (CAL06) and use (CAL07) data, making it easy to spot any data abnormalities that may signal billing or data entry errors that need to be corrected.

Tip #6
Optimize your utility bill auditing with the “Visual Bill Audit” report (AN27).

EnergyCAP users commonly “eyeball” their utility bills to identify any obvious issues or mistakes, and that’s a good thing. The AN27 report supplements the eyeball approach by displaying newly entered bills in easy-to-understand trend charts and tables that visually ID potential bill-related issues. 

Productivity tips 1–5 will be presented in a future blog, so stay tuned. In the meantime, we hope the above tips will unleash your productivity and help you get even more value from EnergyCAP. 

If you attended last week’s Catalyst conference, thank you. Please share your favorite conference memories below. For those who were not able to attend, we’ll continue to pass along conference insights and how-to’s via future blog articles. And all EnergyCAP users should plan now to attend the next Catalyst conference, which will take place September 25–27, 2018.