IQ Business develops EMIS
24 April 2012
In an environment characterised by spiralling energy costs, bottlenecks in supply and uncertain economic times, the demand on companies to better understand and manage their electricity expense is greater than ever. The rapid rate of cost increases of ranging from 16% to 25% per annum have in particular driven organisations to search for innovative tools and solutions to assist in demand side management.
The energy management information system (EMIS) was developed by IQ Business, the leading independent management consulting firm in South Africa, in response to a client’s need to enable the processes within their energy management function, thereby ensuring that they meet their energy-related challenges in a sustainable and responsible manner.
Together with business best practice and the industry experience gained, IQ Business has developed a comprehensive solution that allows clients to simply understand their energy consumption across single or multiple locations and service providers; identify cost saving opportunities; forecast and budget; and proactively raise issues concerned with energy supply.
Using bespoke, intelligent meter reading software, EMIS acquires consumption, instrumentation and attribute data from any number of distributed locations and stores this data in a structure that allows for easy consolidation, cost calculation and reporting.
Through integration with existing client systems, EMIS information is further enriched to allow different analyses from which to create meaningful management insights.
EMIS is a vital tool to help minimise energy spend and addresses the challenge that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”. Electricity invoices can contain errors amounting to 1% to 2% of the total amount invoiced. The Variance Identification Module allows users to easily identify any overcharges thus enabling a client to take real action to recover monies already paid.
The Tariff Calculator additionally further allows users to confirm a utility provider’s invoice calculations and ensure that the tariff selected for a specific location of site is optimal.
The ability to analyse consumption and cost related KPIs and profiles is key to the modelling of best practice operations and the subsequent identification of improvement areas. EMIS allows for data analysis and insight through both standard and customised BI views spanning multiple dimensions and facts.
Patterns and trends can easily be determined through comparisons across time periods, geographies and organisation structures. The inclusion of additional energy quality and efficiency KPIs can provide further insights and significantly improve operational decision making in the areas of infrastructure maintenance and power factor optimisation.
With broad-based consulting and project management experience, as well as an EMIS system that meets the rapidly expanding demand for energy information and insight, IQ Business has a solution that is both innovative and relevant in today’s economic environment.
As stated by President Jacob Zuma in the State of the Nation Address this year, “…to achieve sustainability, a pact will be required with all South Africans – including business, labour, municipalities, communities and all customers and suppliers. We must save electricity.”