Commercial Rollout of EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics for Luxury Fashion Retail Brand

Bisagni Environmental Enterprise (BEE), founded in 2009, is a sustainability-focused engineering consultancy, sourcing, and technology company specializing in creating green buildings. The company began its partnership with EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics™ (formerly Wattics) in 2016 when it was contracted by a world-renowned fashion house to install a robust energy monitoring and management system for all of its brand divisions, stores, and offices in Asia Pacific (APAC).

The partnership marked BEE’s foray into energy management and its introduction to advanced metering systems – the latter being a prerequisite for acquiring the credits necessary to achieve Gold LEED status in the fourth iteration of the USGBC’s green building rating system.

EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics is proving to be instrumental for LEED consultants like BEE to earn points toward achieving LEED v4.1 certification through the deployment of advanced metering and monitoring-based commissioning, for which the energy management platform, with its machine learning capability, is a key enabler.

An Integrated Approach to Sustainability and Holistic Occupant Wellness

BEE had already been monitoring indoor air quality and other metrics that promote sustainability in buildings and the wellness of its occupants through its software platform, QLEAR, developed by the company’s Founder and CEO, Alessandro Bisagni. The project with the global fashion house prompted Bisagni to seek out a partner with the necessary energy metering, monitoring, and analysis capabilities to meet his client’s requirements–for which he approached EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics.

The fully white-labeled energy management system (EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics) could be easily integrated with BEE’s intelligent building management platform, reducing time-to-market and implementation. Furthermore, BEE could offer its client a proven system to deploy as its own while leaving the development and maintenance of the energy management component to EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics.

Armed with its expertise in intelligent building management and leveraging its partnership with Wattics, BEE was ready to begin preparing for the rollout of an energy management solution for its client, aided by its testbed in Shanghai, China, where the engineering consultancy also has its headquarters.

“The first step was to create a questionnaire to determine the hardware requirements for each store location,” said Bisagni.

“Before we started this project, we needed to know how many meters we needed, and a simple question like this proved to be the most difficult part of the process because a company this fragmented with all these different locations and many stakeholders, didn’t know how many distribution boards they had, so they didn’t know what it was that they had to meter.”

Once BEE received and verified the information they needed to ship the hardware, Bisagni and his team began creating the necessary materials for installation, including an instructional video and step-by-step guide in the appropriate language. BEE chose EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics for its software offering and its ability to provide a turnkey hardware and software solution.
EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics provided over 200 pre-configured plug-and-play meters connected to its hardware-agnostic energy management platform.

With the metering systems installed and the platform receiving data, BEE could begin creating energy alerts for each site to be notified as soon as cost or consumption deviated from an expected pattern or pre-determined KPI–a valuable tool afforded through the EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics dashboard for goal-setting waste monitoring, and failure detection.

Benchmarking & LEED performance

Having the ability to receive and normalize meter data from multiple project sites in the same geography and of similar size, BEE created a benchmark specific to the fashion retailer’s business for energy use across all of its retail stores.

Furthermore, with the data received, BEE could determine whether the LEED projects were performing better than the non-LEED projects.

“By comparing stores in the same geography and of similar size, we are able to see which stores are performing well and those that are performing poorly. In the case of a poorly performing store/site, having this data and being going back to my client and say, ‘you have a problem in this store and it should really not be performing like this, let’s try and investigate why’ is invaluable. The benefit to the client is really win-win,” said Bisagni.

One such example was a LEED-certified flagship store located in Shanghai which demonstrated poor air quality primarily due to a renovation that increased Total Volatile Organic Compound (TVOC) levels. A decision was taken to run the HVAC system 24/7, significantly improving air quality conditions. BEE could immediately run an analysis using the activity tracker and operations analyzer tool in the dashboard to create a ‘what if’ scenario and evaluate the viability of running the HVAC 24hrs a day regarding kWh and cost.

“Because we had energy metering and the complementary analysis tools at our disposal, we were able to tell [the client] exactly how much extra this [running the HVAC 24hrs] was costing. This was obviously not something we wanted to do long-term, so when the renovation work was finished, we went back to regular practice and we saw that the air quality levels were maintained. So the issue really was the renovation and so, we were able to prove from a cost perspective how implementing this action made sense.”

BEE used the activity maps in the EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics dashboard to find that the store was occupied at night and the cleaning staff on duty were using unapproved cleaning products, directly related to the spikes in TVOC levels in the space at night.

Key Figures:

• Revenue increase from software (March ’16–March ‘17): 150%
• Growth in customer base (March ’16–March ‘17): 150%
• Largest deal closed as a result of partnership with EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics: €200,000
• SaaS revenue due to resell (March ‘16 to March ‘18): €320,000

Looking ahead

Since the start of its partnership with EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics, BEE has expanded its energy management services to 18 countries with over 200 projects. With six regional offices in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Italy, and, more recently, India, BEE will continue to grow its global footprint over the coming years. The company already has an established presence in the US, Canada, and Asia Pacific. BEE plans to expand further into the Middle East and Africa, with South America included in its geographical roadmap 2019.
To continually solve the challenges of its customers, Bisagni said: “I’m looking to go to what’s next, what is the next big thing, and I want to try and marry together all of the great accomplishments that we’ve done with energy metering and LEED certification.”

To view the video case study of this case study, see the Youtube video below:

“How a global luxury retailer became the first in the world to achieve Gold under LEEDv4.1 O+M green building certification”