As a building or facilities manager, one of your most important tasks is to identify energy efficiency gaps and opportunities. It’s the obvious way to reduce costs and increase profitability – if you can do it accurately. One important aspect of this is understanding how your business compares with peers in the same industry, in the same location.
How do you do get the answer? In a word, benchmarking. Benchmarking site performance for energy management means comparing each site against both meaningful performance standards as well as peers. Before we get to the solutions, let’s look at what’s involved.
Benchmarking: what you need to know
The benchmarking process can be divided into six key steps, as follows:
Collection of site-specific energy data
First, you’ll need to verify that your metering set-up – the source of your data - is reliable and functioning (electricity, gas, water, HVAC, renewals, etc. as applicable). Then, you’ll need to gather data regularly, so you have the basis for making useful comparisons. You’ll also need the functionality to normalize the data you’ve collected, adjusting, for example, for floor area or occupancy levels, day, night, and so on.
Establish your benchmarks
Then, you’ll want to focus on internal benchmarks so that you can compare buildings within your portfolio, and historical benchmarks so you can compare current performance vs. past performance. You will also want to set up external benchmarks, using recognized standards like ASHRAE, or regional building energy codes.
Define your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
There are a lot of possibilities here, so you’ll be guided by your own priorities. But they might include Energy Use Intensity, Peak demand per occupant, Carbon emissions per site or, in the case of manufacturing sites, cost per unit of output.
Make adjustments
This extends the normalization we referred to in point 1 to allow for objective site comparisons. For example, you might want to normalize your weather data (degree days for heating/cooling) or make adjustments for occupancy and operating schedules.
Benchmarking
You’ll need to create or have access to dashboards and graphs so you can easily visualize your sites ranked by efficiency, or industry peers. It might also be worth using scatter charts (for example, energy use vs. floor area) to help identify outliers. Of course, you need historic as well as current data.
Flag anomalies
That means continuous monitoring and alerts, using your Building Management System or Energy Management System software to automatically flag anomalies, track improvements (particularly after any adjustments you’ve made), and more.
Summing all that up, benchmarking involves collecting and normalizing data, creating benchmarks, tracking KPIs, and staying on top of your dashboards. Do it properly and you’ll expose performance inefficiencies, know when and where to make targeted interventions, and have valid cases for investing in improvements where necessary.
Benchmarking in action, with NexRev
So far, so good. Now, let’s put the basics/theory into practice with a benchmarking use case. We’ll imagine we’re managing a chain of restaurants with several sites spread over several states. We want to understand how these sites are performing and how they compare to similar businesses in the same locations across our company’s footprint. That involves a lot of work and resources, right?
Wrong.
With NexRev’s AI innovations allied to our Freedom solution, benchmarking is made easy! You’ll not be able to instantly access both macro and micro pictures of your energy consumption, site-by-site, across your entire portfolio but you’ll be able to compare and benchmark against your peers in each location. Here are some examples of what you can expect from NexRev AI:
Peer group overview
Detailing your own and industry peer locations that have been evaluated, key operational information (hours open, number of employees, etc., climate zone (ASHRAE) information, and benchmark data sources (for example, Energy Star Portfolio Manager, ASHRAE Standard Targets, Public Utility Disclosures). Also, relevant context is highlighted (related HVAC, lighting, etc.) You’ll instantly understand the field your business is playing on.
Comparative Energy Usage Summary
Our agents will report in chart form facility size, annualized electricity use, annual energy cost per square foot, energy efficiency score, comfort and sustainability score, typical peak load and lighting operation regimen for all facilities.
Key differences and contributing factors
NexRev AI will identify, for example, differences in exterior lighting practice, HVAC scheduling, equipment efficiency, peak kW demands, renewable energy offset (if applicable), building envelope quality, and occupant behaviour so you’ll know exactly where you stand.
Target Recommendations
Our AI agents will point you directly towards the steps you can take to achieve optimal performance, for example by converting exterior lighting to dusk-to-dawn sensor control, optimizing HVAC schedules and demand response, or evaluating your building’s envelope for air filtration. More than just benchmarks, you’ll get a step-by-step action plan.
Estimated Impact and Returns
Not only an action plan, but we’ll give you clear estimations of the impact of recommended steps. For example, refitted lighting control/LED projecting a 1st year reduction in site energy costs of $4.50-$6.00 per square foot, with return achieved within two years. We’ll also aggregate the impact of all recommendations with a summary making you aware of the total impact on savings over 1, 3, and 5 years.
The point is this. With NexRev’s AI agents, you can not only make adjustments that enable you to better compete with your peers in the same location, but you get actionable information to improve your performance and maximize the value of your business literally within minutes, at any time.
NexRev AI innovations put critical, often hard-to-find operational information at your fingertips, so you can benchmark and optimize your operational performance, site by site, across your footprint. And we bring together publicly available information into a comprehensive report, so you can benchmark accurately with AI from NexRev doing the work for you.
Optimize with NexRev
NexRev is the leading provider of cloud-based, multisite energy management systems, backed by AI and delivered by SaaS models, that help businesses eliminate energy waste and reduce costs.
Our innovative Freedom™ EMS/BMS solution brings process-driven intelligence and AI to facilities management, providing complete remote control and centralized visibility of your energy-consuming devices across complex, nationwide property portfolios for leading brands in retail, theatres, restaurants, commercial, and industrial facilities.
With NexRev Freedom, our customers reduce waste, optimize energy management, and generate permanent cost savings by making the right decisions.
To begin a discussion on how we can help you to reduce energy costs and waste please email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
