Environmental & Risk Management / Energy Management

Energy Management: Application Overview

The ARCHIBUS Energy Management application is a cost management program that analyzes 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.

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.

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.

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: Business Process Owner - Facilities.
Accounting background data, such as cost categories and classes for rolling up energy costs, and vendors and vendor accounts for entering utility bills. See Managing Background Data: Business Process Owner - 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: Business Process Owner - Utilities.

Step 2. A System Administrator sets up the On-Ramp for Energy Management. 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 Management On-Ramp.

Step 3: A cost administrator loads bill data.

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 load energy bills using the Connectors. See Load Bills.

Manual Entry. Cost Administrators can still use the Enter Bills task to enter energy bills, but the Connectors are the quickest way to get data into the system. As energy bills come in, you can schedule them to be loaded via the Connectors, or the cost administrator can use the Enter Bills task to enter bills and line items for the vendors and vendor accounts added as background data. When entering data for energy bills, you must follow precise sequencing for dates so that the application has the information needed to archive the bills and calculate energy use. After entering the bill, the cost administrator sends the bills for approval. See Enter Bills and Energy Management Bill Entry/Approval Process.

Step 4: 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 Review and Approve Bills, Accounting Supervisor or Energy Manager Reports , and Energy Management Bill Entry/Approval Process.

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

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 Management 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.

Step 4:. 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.

Report on energy consumption data, such as consumption by building, floor, or equipment, in order to spot outliers and trends. See the Energy Consumption Over Time report and Energy Consumption by Location report.

See Energy Manager Overview.

Step 5: A contracts 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.