WHAT’S NEW? Selecting a new analytics platform
Optima Energy Systems shortlisted three different business intelligence vendors when deciding how to replace its existing reporting system. Infor Birst consistently scored highest in the company’s evaluation scheme.
Turton said: “Two areas Birst did well was the ease of application embedding and the ease of development. Because it was a cloud-based platform, it was also highly scalable.”
Adopting a self-service approach to embedded analytics meant that Optima Energy Systems could avoid the lengthy process of submitting report specifications, as well as the subsequent design, development, testing, and release work. The aim was for Infor Birst to allow customers and their consultants to create reports in a fraction of the time.
Secondly, Optima Energy Systems wanted to improve the look of its reporting offering with a modern web-based user interface. The core system was already robust, and the numbers already accurate and trusted by customers, but a modern UI would improve ease-of-use and appeal to future customers—driving increased sales as well as further adoption.
The adoption of a modern web- based UI for analytics coincided with a new web front-end for the core product that Optima Energy Systems hoped that all customers would move to. Neil Turton, Product and Development Director at Optima Energy Systems, stated that: “Roughly 50% of our existing customer base is now on our web front-end thanks, in part, to the modern web-based analytics from Infor Birst.”
Built on Birst’s cloud-based analytics platform, Optima Visualizer offers a wealth of features to support data discovery and analytics, including:
● Fully white-labelled portal that is consistent with the Optima Energy Systems brand.
● Secure data access applied at the user level across all reports and dashboards.
● Fully customisable dashboards that deliver precisely the information customers need.
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● Fully customisable user profiles to ensure users only see what they are authorised to see Geo- mapping shows site locations, helping visualise campuses and clusters of buildings.
● Displays of both dynamic and static data.
● Real-time capabilities.
● Support for all kinds of data, not just utility and process information.
● Comprehensive drill-down and drill-across functionality Integration of customers websites, video, and social media feeds.
● Image and document importing.
● Scalability to hundreds of thousands of meter points.
Optima Energy Systems also took advantage of Birst’s multi-tenant architecture, which significantly speeds up the process of onboarding new customers. Optima uses Birst’s networked BI capabilities to manage one master space that applies to all customers, and ensures that each customer inherits data and application changes whenever they are made.
Networked BI dramatically reduces the administrative costs of maintaining and growing the customer base and allows customers to extend their own analytics domains safely.
Business results
● 30% reduction in report development overhead.
● 50% increase in customer adoption.
● £1,000s of pounds of energy cost savings for customers.
Cutting energy costs with Optima Visualizer
Optima Energy Systems’ typical user is an energy manager or energy analyst who spends their time looking at trends in consumption of energy, gas, electricity, and water. They track statistics like daily energy usage year-over-year, and then by using Birst, can monitor those trends throughout the day.
They might be able to see that somebody mistakenly left equipment running, leading to an unusual spike in overnight consumption. The main aim of using Birst is to monitor and reduce those costs.
Turton believes these kinds of insights can have essential impacts on business costs. He said: “For example, a supermarket with hundreds of sites around the UK: if they can find a behavioural pattern that can be changed, that will reduce their energy usage across many sites, and that is a huge saving.”
Predicting the future
Optima Energy Systems hopes to grow its implementation of Birst’s smart analytics technology by using it to integrate weather data in the analytics process. For week-to- week comparisons, for instance, the company may use AI to observe the correlation between temperature and gas usage patterns—predicting future costs based on current temperatures and weather forecasts.
Infor builds business software for specific industries in the cloud. With 17,000 employees and over 68,000 customers in more than 170 countries, Infor software is designed for progress.
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