ARCHIBUS NEWS: Top Strategies for a Greener Corporation

Are you interested in saving money, conserving energy, reducing water consumption and your carbon footprint?  Then you're likely interested in "going Green," and ARCHIBUS can help.  

Here is a quick review of Top Strategies for a Greener Corporation, an article put out by Forbes, Kolmer, and Miller in case you have not yet had the chance to read it:

Environmental sustainability or “going green,” is one of the most popular and important initiatives in the workplace today.  The article by Forbes, Kolmer, and Miller describes how these increasingly common goals of reducing energy use and energy consumed can be accomplished in a variety of ways, all of which a good and effective IWMS system can help with.
Commercial building energy use accounts for 18% of all CO2 emissions.  These emissions can be reduced easily by better utilizing office space through IWMS systems.  Not taking advantage of your IWMS systems 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).  Essentially, if a company utilizes its space planning and management software by conducting space audits on 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 will 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 but 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 #1 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!

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BAATUG Wrap Up: Quarter 1

This quarter's Bay Area ARCHIBUS Training & User Group was an awesome event!  The training was great and everyone seemed to have a wonderful time mingling afterwards.  RSC is incredibly grateful to Stanford for hosting the training event.  The facility and food were phenomenal!

This quarter's training covered Moves, Adds, & Changes in ARCHIBUS.  We took a deep look at how to manage moving people in ARCHIBUS Client Server / Web Central, and in RSC's custom SpaceView tool.  We also covered some great tricks clients can use to do quick, custom reports using ODBC and Excel.

Here is a taste of what we covered in the meeting:

In order to get to 98% accuracy in employee locations you need to do the following 3 things:
1. Have a regularly scheduled employee synchronization with the HR department
2. Have a single move process that is followed EVERY SINGLE TIME
3. Walk the floors on a regular basis (quarterly or yearly).

To find out more about our quarterly BAATUG events, please contact us or comment below!

All-Hands on Deck!

Being a virtual company has its advantages and disadvangaes.  One of the advantages of being a virtual company is the ability for staff to create their own schedule.  One of the disadvantages, is that we don’t get to see each other in person as often as we’d like.  Our version of the water cooler is a series of hipchat messages or quick gotomeeting.

A few times a year we are blessed with the opportunity to get together as a group.  One of these opportunities is our annual “All-Hands” meeting.  It’s a chance for everyone in the company to get together, discuss our goals, the direction we’re headed in, and bond.

This year we were lucky enough to hold our meeting at Bridges Golf Club.  If anyone lives in the East Bay Area and has not been there – go!  It’s really a must.  The venue is gorgeous, the food is to-die-for, and the service is wonderful.

Here are a few highlights from our  meeting:

 

Half way through our meeting we did a pretty fun activity.  Have you ever heard of the Pinewood Derby?  If you grew up in Boy Scouts or have a child currently participating, you know what it is.  But for those who don’t, Pinewood Derby is a model car race.  Boys create cars out of wood and race them down a simple track.  We did a modified version and carved our cars out of soap bars.  It was a blast.  Some people were incredibly creative with their design while others built their cars for speed, and speed only.

We finished our time at Bridges by breaking off into departments and regrouping to share our ideas.

Afterwards Bob treated us to a fun time at the BlackhawkAuto Museum and dinner.  This is another must-see in the Bay Area, especially if you are a car lover.  Our docent was incredibly knowledgeable and had personal stories about each vehicle.

Listening to the docent's neat experiences

RSC is one of the few lucky companies, where all staff truly does enjoy interacting and working together.  We are grateful for any opportunity we have to get together!