STATE COLLEGE, PA.—A record crowd attended EnergyCAP’s annual Catalyst Training for Savings conference last month, where the company unveiled a beta version of the software that highlighted new directions in energy management. “EnergyCAP is all about helping clients derive value from utility bills,” said Chris Heinz, Catalyst Director. “Our customers are looking for new ways to make data transparent, intelligible, portable, shareable, and integrative. We’re creating ways for that to happen.”
The Catalyst conference is held each year for clients using the EnergyCAP utility bill management software. Attendance at the three-day training event has more than doubled in five years. This year, the Olympic-themed conference included a keynote address by Josh Davis, an Olympic gold medalist in swimming.
“With our new HTML5-based software, every report or data view will have an associated URL,” Heinz explained. “Sharing energy data will be as easy as sharing your favorite cat video on Facebook.”
Timesaving Customization Features
Data dashboards are becoming increasingly important, especially for government organizations that need to highlight energy use and energy savings, Heinz explained. The new software offers timesaving customization features to help users construct dashboards that present the most important data in ways that speed analysis and highlight savings opportunities.
Heinz said that more and more customers are expecting utility bill management software to be able to interface with multiple systems, including Accounts Payable, as well as internal or external resources or platforms such as Energy Star. EnergyCAP has received an Energy Star Partner of the Year award for Sustained Excellence. Developers are working to ensure that the beta software will be compatible with the latest Energy Star schema, so users will be able to submit required utility data to the EPA’s Portfolio Manager website automatically and get an Energy Star rating returned monthly. “These types of integrations save time and money,” said Heinz. “They also help ensure that our clients are in compliance with local or regional reporting requirements.”
Another integration that is coming in the new software is a Google Maps dashboard widget that will enable users to visualize all of their buildings as icons on a map view, or filter the view to see only the most relevant properties. By clicking on a building marker, they will access a high-level summary of that building’s characteristics and utility metrics, including year-by-year use and cost by commodity. If the energy metrics look suspicious, the user can click a link to further review the data via PowerViews, EnergyCAP’s rich data visualization tool. Dashboard widgets like this can also be embedded on external websites, bringing energy data to diverse audiences via the web. This is an ideal way to introduce stakeholders to their organization’s utility data.
The next Catalyst conference will be held April 11 to 13, 2017.
Go to EnergyCAP, Inc.
