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• Case Study 2

Successfully Streamlining and Managing Energy Usage Data

Summary of Problem:

A customer needed a more automated solution for handling energy data requests.

This particular client has been supporting commercial building benchmarking for Building Management companies by providing them with aggregated kWh values for their buildings. In the past, the demand for such data was very low and had a cost associated to its retrieval. Internally at the customer’s end, the process that had been implemented to extract this data was manual and very slow. 

Keeping up with demand:

In the early part of 2008, the customer’s Program Managers realized that the request for this data was steadily increasing and that the manual process would eventually not be able to handle the number of requests that were coming in. Also due to recent legislation, this data is now available to all Building Managers at no cost; resulting in a forecasted large number of requests in the near future. 
 

Our Solution:

This customer partnered with Calico Energy Services to lead the development process of the new system based on our deep domain knowledge and respective core corporate competencies.

• Through leveraging our Project Team, we began to follow a mature Six Sigma DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) process to capture information required for the successful management and implementation of a large-scale initiative.
• After the requirements engineering process was complete and the stakeholders were satisfied with the Define and Measure tollgates, the technology subgroup of the Project Team began to execute the Design/Analyze phase. This process resulted in a high-level design articulating the design elements such as system architecture, functional use cases, screen designs, report designs, etc.
• The technology sub-group then authored the Low Level Design which included all interaction with the ENERGY STAR ABS Web services API and the link between the solution under development and ENERGY STAR.  The software development effort was spread across a team of more than two User Interface Designers, six Developers, and four Certification Analysts. Complete transparency and clarity of every systemic detail was required. This phase concluded with an approval by the stakeholders on both technical and process design, enabling Calico Energy to enter the Build/Improve phase.
• During the Improve phase, the Dashboard status reporting was provided to the Project Team as both Technology and Certification teams were working simultaneously. While the technology team focused on the build and unit testing of the system, the certification team leveraged all High-Level and Low-Level Design documentation to author detailed test scripts. The team also ensured that every area of the system – with all potential data values – was attempted in multiple states.
• The system is now 100 percent operational 24 hours a day, requiring less than 0.5 resource time. This ensures that during the elevated monitoring control phase, the system is operating as expected within its anticipated performance ranges.

Results:

The system developed for this client, called the Green Certification™ is now enabling more Building Managers to access their energy usage data in a streamlined, automated manner. This in turn is making their ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager benchmarking process faster and more efficient.

Accolades:

AESP recognizes customer deployment of Green Certification^TM product of Calico Energy. Read more
EPA recognizes customer deployment of Green Certification^TM product of Calico Energy. Read more
Special recognition to the Green Certification^TM product of Calico Energy in the 2009 EPA’s Energy Star awards. Read more

2008 was the year when the customer went live with the Green Certification™ system – and the number of requests increased 500% from 2007 to 2008!

Total Number of Green Certification Users - December 2008
Program Managers	2
Program Analysts	4
Account Managers	83
Building Managers	146
Total Users	235

Active Building Count – December 2008
Active buildings	176
New Buildings (December 2008)	29

Requests Completed
This Year	491
This Month (December 2008)	136
Previous Month (November 2008)	125