Building Operations Scorecard System

Want to lower energy costs by running your buildings more efficiently? Improve comfort? Actually free up your operations staff at the same time? It’s now possible with Interval Data Systems’ BOSS (Building Operations Scorecard System).

The BOSS provides you with a ranking of how your building is actually running on a room-by-room and system-by-system basis. Like any good boss, it doesn’t tell you want to do; it gives you the information to apply your expertise and do your job better.

It will help you finally uncover the root causes of those control system problems that adversely affect comfort, energy, and operations. You can actually address all three of these issues simultaneously—if you have a building-wide understanding of where you stand, and know how to find the root cause of the problems.

The Scorecards

The BOSS ranks every room and every mechanical system in the building on pass/fail basis for comfort, efficiency, and operations. The information is reported in a number of ways.

First is the Room Summary Scorecard, which provides a picture on how many rooms meeting your service level goals. In this example above, 150 rooms are scored, and while no one category fails more than 56% of the time, only 15% of the rooms passed all three criteria.

Behind the Room Summary Scorecard is the Room Detail Scorecard. It shows each individual room, organized by air handler, and the pass/fail ratings. Additionally, on the right side of the Room Detail Scorecard you’ll see an indication of which operational data led to a failure ranking.

You can see at a glance that this building has major efficiency issues, with sporadic problems in comfort and operations. Most rooms show airflow, specifically the cooling minimum, and reheat valves as the problem areas. Additionally, AH-02 has a supply air temperature problem that is affecting all the rooms it serves.

That AH-02 problem—turned out that someone had tied the cooling valve open, resulting in 48°F supply air and a waste of 150gpm of chilled water. No one noticed until the BOSS pointed it out.

Subsystem Scorecards look at the various primary and secondary systems and equipment throughout the building, such as air handlers, chilled water, steam and hot water, pumps, heat recovery units, etc.

It only takes a second to see how the air handlers perform. The spaces served by only three out of five air handlers are generally comfortable. AH-02 is the sole air handler with efficiency issues, so the efficiency failures noted by the Room Detail Scorecard outside of AH-02 are more likely due to trouble with the terminal systems. But, there are operational issues everywhere. Again, the right portion of the scorecard tells you what triggered the failure rating.

The final step is a list of the root cause issues and a series of recommendations to deliver comfort, energy savings, and maintenance efficiency simultaneously. These nearly always trace back to inadequate control systems programming, which means that many building flaws are built in from day one, and already there when the operations group takes over.

BOSS Applications

Your building scorecards are the ideal starting point for many traditional facilities functions such as building commissioning, retro-commissioning, determining operating costs, energy audits, evaluating your EMS system, etc.

The BOSS makes informed observations based on building information derived from your building’s energy management system, captured and presented using IDS’ EnergyWitness™ platform.

Energy Diagnostics: Your scorecards give you a complete overview how your building runs. Efficiency failures are the obvious place to start diagnosing energy issues, and beyond the scorecard, EnergyWitness enables detailed diagnoses of the root cause problems.

Operating Cost: Inefficiencies may be the obvious place to look to lower operating costs, but don’t forget that getting comfort under control will reduce hot/cold calls and associated maintenance labor. And, fixing operational issues such as thrashing valves and actuators can eliminate expensive equipment replacements.

EMS Evaluation: Are you getting the level of comfort, energy and operational efficiency that you thought you would when you invested in your modern control system? Turns out, your new EMS is as likely to place you at the bottom of the energy performance scale as at the top.¹ The BOSS knows where you are—and why.

Commissioning: It’s good to know that the fan works, valves modulate, etc. But what you really need is to verify that each space is comfortable and healthy, running at the lowest energy cost, and operating well. For any flavor of commissioning—new construction, retro, ongoing—the BOSS can verify if your building measures up.

BOSS Benefits

The BOSS provides benefits to more than just the energy manager. It provides directors, managers, control operators, field mechanics, mechanical/electrical technicians, commissioning and retro-commissioning agents, control contractors, and others a variety of benefits, including:

• A consistent system for measuring a building’s operational performance

• Measure your buildings’ operational performance using criteria that your facilities organization is measured by:

• Comfort and IAQ

• Energy cost

• Maintenance labor cost and equipment life

• Train the entire operations staff to use the scorecard to understand how the building performs and prioritize work

• Hold contractors/subcontractors accountable to deliver a system that operates as it should

• All data is instantly available, not limited to monthly paper reports

• Operational issues identified and fixed today eliminates premature equipment failures tomorrow

• Lead staff out of firefight and reactive mode to be predictive and proactive

• You get a complete view, good and bad, and can track progress over time

• Staff is engaged in the process, not dictated to by an outsourced resource

Got questions about the Building Operations Scorecard System? Take a look at the BOSS FAQ page.

Want to see how well your buildings score? Give us a call at 617-744-1091, or send an e-mail to info@intdatsys.com.

¹ Source: Department of Energy, Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey