Sustainability & Risk / Energy

Energy: Application Overview

The Archibus Energy application is a cost management program that provides alerts and reports that help you analyze your energy costs. The application includes tasks for developing the background data, entering and approving bills, importing meter data, and generating analytic reports that help you review cost and consumption metrics, generate forecasts, and what-if scenarios.

Key features include:

Load bill data using the Archibus Connectors. A sample Connector for loading energy bills is provided. System Administrators can use this as a model to define Connectors using their vendor's specifications..
Track billing discrepancies. You can link your meters to vendors meters, enabling you to track discrepancies between your internal meter's measurement and the measured quantity you are billed for.
Analyze weather regression with analytic reports. Unlike spreadsheets or your finance software alone, Archibus provides degree-day features for normalizing fluctuations in weather, energy-specific audits for finding errors in complex energy bills, correlation of consumption to building size and utilization, and what-if analyses to evaluate the potential costs of energy increases or savings due to conservation, renovation, co-generation, or demand-response agreements.

Prorate and aggregate bills so that they fit the data entry guidelines. The Bill Processing Exception Report enables you to identify bill data that is not entered for monthly periods, or has gaps in sequence. This report enables you to take actions so that the application creates cost records that the weather regression analysis model can use.

Typical workflow for tracking and analyzing your energy use

The following describes a typical workflow for tracking and analyzing your energy use.

Step 1: A business process owner establishes validating data.

This data includes:

Facilities background data, such as the buildings for which you are tracking energy use and the weather stations and heating and cooling utility types you assign to the buildings. See Managing Background Data: Facilities.
Accounting background data, such as cost categories and classes for rolling up energy costs, vendors and vendor accounts and utility rate structures for entering utility bills. See Managing Background Data: Accounting.
Utility background data, such as bill types, bill units and meters for rolling up energy bill. You can link an internal meter to a vendor's meter to track discrepancies between your measurement and the utility company's meter. See Managing Background Data: Utilities.
Deleting Raw and Processed Data. You can also set an application parameter that controls the number of months after which the application deletes raw and processed data. See Setting the Application Parameters for Data Deletion.

Step 2: A business process owner configures bill processing.

Use application parameters to determine whether or not bills must be entered for monthly periods and in strict sequence in order to be approved and archived. You can set this application parameter for all bill types or for just certain ones. See Configuring Bill Processing.

Step 3. A system administrator sets up the On-Ramp for the Energy Application.

The Administrator defines Connectors to automatically load bill data into Archibus, and associates these Connectors with vendors and bill types.

A sample Connector for loading energy bills is provided. System Administrators can use this as a model to define Connectors using their vendor's specifications. Once Connectors are defined, you can associate them with vendors and bill types. See Energy Application On-Ramp.

Step 4: A cost administrator loads bill data, or enters it manually.

A cost administrator can automatically load the bill data, or manually enter it.

Note: When entering bills using the Connector, for legacy data, you can bypass the approval process, and directly archive bills.

Load Bills (Automated entry). Once the System Administrator defines Connectors and associates them with vendors, for both initial loads of historical data and ongoing data entry, the Cost Administrator can schedule them to be loaded using the Connectors.
Enter Bills. Although the Connectors are the quickest way to get data into the system, cost administrators can also use the Enter Bills task to manually enter energy bills.bills and line items for the vendors and vendor accounts added as background data. After entering the bill, the cost administrator sends the bills for approval. See Bill Entry / Approval Process.
Entering Bills for Building Groups. If you receive bills that include more than one building on the same bill, you can define proration groups that enable the application to prorate the bill to the buildings using the method you specify.

Step 5: An accounting supervisor reviews and approves the bills.

The supervisor can review bills and their line items, and review variance reports that show current usage in relation to previous time periods. Approving a bill archives the bill so that the bill's data is used in the reports that analyze energy use. See:

Step 6: An energy manager reviews cost and consumption metrics, and generates forecasts and scenarios.

For example, the Measurement & Verification report uses the weather model calculations to show the amount of energy you would have used this year compared to a baseline period to help you evaluate the impact of changes you have made. What-if scenarios enable you to examine the financial impact of changes in % cost and % occupancy. See Energy Manager Overview.

Report on energy consumption data, such as consumption by building, floor, or equipment, in order to spot outliers and trends. See:

Utility Analysis Console
Meter Analytics Over Time report
Meter Analytics by Location report
Bill Processing Exceptions report -- Reconcile discrepancies in your data, so that the weather model analysis can process the data
Usage with Weather Model report -- Uses the Weather Model data that enables you to compare how much energy you would have used based on the baseline period usage patterns, and this year's conditions (such as weather and number of days.)

Step 7: A contract or operations manager reviews utility bill metrics.

Utility bill metrics can be reviewed for a selected portion of the portfolio by various groupings (building, bill type, or billing period.) See Utility Bill Metrics Report.

Optionally, an energy manager can update calculations.

There are several calculations that provide the modeling data used in the utility analytics reports. All calculations are scheduled to run every 24 hours based on a time set during the implementation of the Energy application. If you want to manually run the calculations sooner than the scheduled time, you can use the Update Calculations task to manually update your weather model data. See Update Calculations.