Digitalisation Delivers Operational Efficiency Benefits for Industrial and Commercial Businesses

22 December 2021

Industrial and commercial businesses are never far away from the requirement to maintain operational efficiency across their business operations. Whether it is a solo building or a vast estate with buildings across a region or country, there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

Operational efficiency is the ability to understand how a building, a portfolio or collection of properties and the systems and assets are operating. It is often a bespoke solution that is required to ensure efficiencies are in place for financial, operational, legislative or environmental reasons.

Smart operational efficiency goes one step further than meeting guidelines or requirements - it aims to identify areas for improvements. For example, improvements in performance through maintenance, run times or in energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Firstly, let’s look at what issues industrial and commercial businesses are currently facing. While environment and social governance policies (ESG) are often front of mind the ever-present Covid security must also be considered. In addition to this, the recent concerns around high energy-intensive businesses being hit this winter due to rising wholesale gas prices. Now is the time to digitalise to improve operational performance, remove inefficiencies, identify and cut energy waste and align consumption patterns with fluctuating day prices.

This is where data and digitalisation is the answer to achieving (more than) adequate smart operational efficiency. Digitalisation technologies can help in many ways from the data and insights they provide to the audit trail needed to report on improvements, carbon emissions, ESG and the management of covid security.

1. Digitalisation for operational efficiency

For businesses to have a smarter approach to operational efficiency they need to collect the data to be able to analyse and improve. This can be achieved by deploying a variety of sensors and IoT-enabled devices across their estate, which is then connected to crucial equipment within the building, allowing you to see the operational activities and performance of the systems and assets in real-time. Once you have this data, you can run it through several big data, analytics and machine learning algorithms to deliver actionable insights. The information is turned into a story and that story tells the tale about the building and how the systems within it perform; from here you are now able to make data-driven decisions.

2. Digitalisation for the development of data stories

Data alone cannot provide the insights you need to make those decisions. The data needs to be turned into a story. One that advises of any issues, performance concerns, maintenance requirements, potential H&S events, energy consumption and carbon emissions.

The story needs to tell you what to do and how to do it; that’s where CODA comes in. CODA collects the data from the devices connected across your building or estate and turns that data into actionable insights whilst also making actions for you through programmatic controls.

The digitalisation of your buildings and assets is critical for operational efficiency and improvements to energy consumption and cost and environmental impact.

3. Digitalisation for improved maintenance routines

Once you have the data you have the insights to be able to change the way you manage and maintain your buildings and the systems and assets within them. Instead of the normal scheduled maintenance or reactive maintenance (when a fault occurs) practices, data-driven insights offer real-time visualisation of the systems and assets, enabling maintenance teams to drive better response times, deliver against remote maintenance opportunities.

Spotting an issue before it ‘breaks’ will extend the asset’s lifecycle and reduce any business interruption due to system or asset downtime.

Identifying activities that can lead to a fault could allow maintenance teams to react in advance of the fault occurring, again extending equipment lifecycle and eradicating any system downtime and business interruption.

4. Digitalisation for building occupiers health and wellbeing

How the building occupiers operate systems in the building or interact with the systems, their demands on the internal environment and H&S management are all possible once you have digitalised a building.

Managing system and asset operation, on and off times, internal temperature and ventilation levels are all achievable with digitalisation practices.

Monitoring and managing the internal environment aligned with energy efficiency, internal air quality, covid security, and ventilation levels is vital for building occupiers post-pandemic.

Being able to actively manage this through CODA and evidence through dashboards and apps, provides the confidence that the building is working with the health and wellbeing of occupiers in mind. You are also displaying your ‘green’ credentials for energy efficiency – something of importance to building occupiers as social value and environmental impact is also a key concern.

It’s also now no longer just a NetZero pledge.

The latest concern around rising wholesale prices for gas, as announced in September 2021, is likely to have a considerable impact on businesses this year and into 2022 when energy contract renewals come up. Companies need to look to operational and energy efficiency practices now, ready for the potential price hike.

Digitalisation practices provide this route to energy efficiency. Once we have the data and understand where inefficiencies lie, we can make the change and see the results, reaping the financial rewards from reduced energy bills.

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IIf you would like to know more about how CODA can help, please get in touch with the team at info@codacloud.io or call us on 0345 241 2889.