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Are you interested in saving money, conserving energy, and reducing your water consumption and carbon footprint? Then you’re likely interested in “going green”, and ARCHIBUS can help.
This post is a summary of Top Strategies for a Greener Corporation, an article put out by Forbes, Kolmer, and Miller:
Environmental sustainability or “going green”, is one of the most important initiatives in the workplace today. These increasingly common goals of reducing energy use and energy consumption can be accomplished in a variety of ways, all with which an effective IWMS system can help. Commercial building energy use accounts for 18% of all CO2 emissions. These emissions can be reduced easily by better utilizing office space, which is what IWMS systems do. Not taking advantage of your IWMS system results in wasted HVAC and lighting costs as well as over expenditures in operating costs (e.g., utilities, taxes, janitorial or maintenance, and physical assets). By using simple vendor-neutral conservation strategies, your company’s carbon footprint and unnecessary expenses can be drastically decreased and potentially avoided altogether. The article outlines six different ways to accomplish your company’s sustainability goals:
1. Stop Wasting Space
Sounds easy, right? Well, it is! “The faster [companies] implement better space management the faster [they] gain the added environmental and economic benefit of lowering energy use and operating expenses” (2014, p.2). If a company utilizes its space planning and management software by conducting space audits on a routine basis, operations are easily consolidated as vacant space is eliminated.
2. Alarm Your FM Department
Through the integration of a company’s BAS HVAC alarms to its building ops software, the location of problems can be identified on building drawings. This integration will also “automate issuance of work orders when energy management systems detect performance failures of heat traps and other system components” (2014, p.2).
3. Manage Data Center Heat
Maintaining a balance between power and cooling is the greatest challenge for data centers. Operational costs may eat up over 50% of some tech budgets on top of whatever it may cost to construct additional space to house these data centers. To ensure company efforts are not being wasted, implement a “data center management software [that] provides easy graphical visualizations and automatic updates to sever rack inventories” or implement hot/cold aisles in data centers (2014, p.2).
4. Don’t Get Caught in an HVACcuum
Most offices and data centers are not in use 24/7. Too many offices receive round-the-clock HVAC support. Using IWMS software and building drawings, your company can reconfigure space and consolidate HVAC intensive data centers and other operations to reduce after-hour electricity consumption.
5. Telecommuting is Key
Embrace the power of telecommuting! Telecommuting is perhaps one of the greatest ways for a company to go green. The article describes one company generating 29,000 fewer tons of CO2 emissions and savings of US$63 million in one fiscal year by cutting 6,660 office seats” (2014, p.3). Furthermore, telecommuting reduces transportation-generated greenhouse gas emissions by reducing commuter traffic.
6. Use KPIs
Key Performance Indicators are the benchmarks against which progress is measured for sustainability initiatives, cost reduction goals, business process improvements and other activities. “A well thought-out environmental sustainability strategy can deliver up to 10% — and possibly as much as 20% — savings and operational costs” (2014, p.5). As Forbes, Kolmer, and Miller describe, the role IWMS systems play in “going green” are key and the benefits of having a quality functioning system is clear.
Did you know that ARCHIBUS was recently ranked as one of the World’s Largest Software Companies by Software Magazine? That’s just one of the reasons why ARCHIBUS is the number one solution for real estate, infrastructure, and facilities management in the world.
What is your company doing to reduce their carbon footprint? Need help achieving your sustainability goals? Reach out to us here at RSC. We’d love to help you create a greener tomorrow!