Issue link: https://resources.tangoanalytics.com/i/1527886
Copyright 2024 Tango. All rights reserved. A lack of effective and automated tools is holding firms back from properly collecting and sharing data across business units. Sustainability data tools should be as robust and feature-rich as operational and financial systems and possess flexible integration capabilities to share data across all CRM, AI, and cloud-based applications utilized by employees. For example, carbon accounting or pricing software tools should be able to seamlessly connect to energy data collected at the source and to the platform where financial risk assessments and reporting take place. Additionally, it is important that most employees have some level of access to these tools and delineated dashboards with the pertinent metrics to their teams for planning and operations. It is likely that effective sustainability operationalization cannot occur when data is collected and analyzed within manual entry spreadsheets. Firms should strongly consider optimizing their data to generate actionable insights through the use of automated, cloud-based sustainability data management systems. While the upfront costs of these platforms may be a deterrent, the time and labor saved, or errors diminished by eliminating manual data entry is a worthy return on investment. These systems can also provide a single source of truth for both energy and sustainability-level data where team members can turn to pull data and generate reports. Automated data capture that can monitor sustainability over time at both a meter level and portfolio-wide view is invaluable. A feature that can track progress and goals over time in both the short term and long term is also a priority for firms looking to see continued improvement and true sustainability integration within the business. 02 Optimizing Data Toolkits and Organization Always start by considering the why behind the metrics and KPIs. Why is the energy use of your buildings high, why are your carbon emissions beyond your threshold? This ties heavily into conducting deep dives within your internal processes and across business teams to uncover the hidden inefficiencies and root causes of insights yielded by the data. 03 Understanding the Context Behind Performance Data KPIs, energy, waste, water, and sustainability metrics are of little to no consequence unless someone takes responsibility for turning the insight into an action. Facility managers and engineers can use sustainability metrics on building performance, waste, energy use, and more to identify easy-to-fix problems within current in-house processes that may be contributing to excess resource waste (i.e. electricity usage times and leakages). Performance data on sustainability that is integrated with energy use can often reveal unusual variances or statistical oddities within data collected continuously over a period that employees can use to implement new technology or methodologies to improve energy efficiency and ultimately reduce costs. 04 Making the Most of Efficiency Metrics and Cost Savings