The One Question All Energy Utility Companies Should Be Asking Before Making Another Real Estate or Workplace Management Decision

Everyone – and everything – is connected today. And no one knows this better than energy utility companies. If you’re a utility company, that doesn’t come as news to you. But if you’re like most utilities with stricter regulations and less margin for fiscal ‘experimentation,’ it’s a constant challenge to manage the growing complexities that come with a hyper-connected workplace.

Asking yourselves one question can set you on a course to creating a measurably more efficient workplace. It’s a course where your human capital and real estate portfolio management decisions come from intelligent analytics and relational data – all channeling through one centralized source that integrates data from all areas of your operations.

And that question is…

“What is your Total Cost of Operation?”

Understanding Total Cost of Operation (TOC) is key to effectively managing a utility’s real estate portfolio. The problem comes when companies accumulate various point solutions over time and try to connect them as workplace management tools. Eventually, they will not have the ability to relate data and strategically analyze their portfolio. Consequently, these managers have to gather data from multiple sources to produce reports and facts.

Why Energy Utility Companies Are Most At Risk: Stuck in Time.

Immobility (the inability to be a responsive organization) is a symptom of a point solution system and is one of the contributing factors to stifling an energy utility’s ability to operate at peak performance. Ironically, some facilities resist new systems simply because they’re stuck with that old boardroom refrain that is anti-change: “Why change something if it’s getting the job done?” While this question is always one to consider in making enterprise-wide decisions, in this case it fails to recognize today’s utility company’s evolving, dynamic and interconnected workplace. It’s simply making efficiency and productivity a factor of the adaptability of a utility company’s management team.

The Solution: Go from Siloed to Centralized with an Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS).

What is preventing utilities from achieving their ultimate goal of calculating TOC? The fact that their information is not gathered in one centralized source. Their warehouse of information is known as siloed – where data is kept in separate repositories and is incapable of working with other managerial systems.

The solution comes from transforming a siloed environment into an integrated data system – consolidating data into a live, web-based IWMS where users from each department in the utility company benefit and utilize live data simultaneously.

The Implementation of ARCHIBUS Web Central: The Preferred IWMS Tool

So your data is integrated. Now what? The answers are clear and centralized just like the solution: ARCHIBUS’s Web Central. Web Central is a virtual database where all data can be viewed, analyzed, and generated. This web-based portion of ARCHIBUS is what makes this IWMS system the preferred tool for energy utility companies that want to control costs and save time.

Why FMP Is the Utility Company’s Choice: It All Comes Down to Answering that One Question.

The reason energy utilities come to FMP is that they realize they cannot effectively calculate the Total Cost of Operation for a single building, let alone a campus of multi-purpose building. While their legacy systems have accurate data, the data is not relational within departments and creates costly redundancies and inefficient siloing. Having the live data in a dynamic, centralized database makes all data relational between departments and accessible through the cloud. A multitude of actionable reports can be generated, companywide and on demand, aiding in the calculation of the Total Cost of Operation – an energy utility’s main goal in becoming more efficient, responsive, and productive.