An introduction to Data as a Service (DaaS)

Your guide on how to get your energy and utility data into tip top shape and keep it there without any capital investment or more staff.

DaaS is Data as a Service and with a good DaaS contract you get all your data in one place in an open platform that can import from anywhere and export to anywhere, it’s your data. Critically you can then do something with your data to enable good decision making.

Being in a position to make business-critical decisions from your data is a marathon not a sprint so the sooner you set off the better. With any long journey, having a trustworthy companion is a sensible idea. With Optimal Monitoring that’s our cutting-edge AI tool (EMMA AI). Using machine learning, it will constantly check your data against its ‘no normal’ rule – which simply means that there’s no ‘one rule fits all’, approach. Normal is whatever normal is for you. EMMA AI is clever enough to figure that out for each site or estate. Benchmarking against best practice is then the next step.

Here’s how to start your DaaS journey

First footstep: You need a survey, a schedule of what you have and a data quality analysis of what you have, fitted up to what you’re trying to achieve in cost management and carbon reduction. A bit of advice from a firm that has the tools to make this a quick and painless exercise, working with you rather than for you is the best approach.

Second footstep: Put all of the data onto a suitable platform, Optimal Monitoring’s ISX platform is a good example. Then let the technology normalise it, in other words make it comparable. Now you can use this for a high-level analysis, ideally of a trailing twelve months of data, to see how complete and how variable it is so that you can make some informed analyses. E.g., How much would you save if you operated at best observed performance level everywhere, every day?

Third footstep: Start flagging up anomalies and abnormalities. Look at variances in data between different sources. E.g., the Building Management System (BMS) tells you the building is too hot but the heating continues to kick in. Next, start fixing faults automatically and quickly in a short pilot, for instance a 90-day trial. Use this information to populate an AI engine like EMMA AI to start giving your team detailed recommendations as work tickets so that you start right away to reduce excess consumption and emissions whilst looking at longer term trends to permanently drive down baseload emissions and soaring energy costs.

Fourth footstep: Ramp it up baby! Roll the programme out across the estate so you have gigabytes or terabytes of data, all flowing seamlessly into one place, available for immediate analysis. Let EMMA AI throw out recommendations in real language, straight to the appropriate person. Pointing out where data is out of sync or absent, flagging up trends and opportunities 24/7/365 so there’s no backsliding, no running around trying to get five different data streams to work in an Excel sheet.

You’ve just started mining your useless siloed data, your digital exhaust, and turned it into hard cash.

Fifth footstep: Keep your data accurate and up to date. Data is like eggs; they go bad over time. To prevent this, you must have a system that is always looking at anomalies and abnormalities to make sure they represent changes that you are aware of and approve of. Quite often data errors are a cumulation of lots of small, inconsequential changes that individually you would never take any notice of but cumulatively amount to a material change. EMMA AI will trigger an alert when the quantum represents a significant change from your specific, normal state that it has determined from its original analysis of the entire site or estate. That is not something that a human being could or would want to do. It must be an automated process, it’s so repetitive and granular.

So, there you have it. In a nutshell, that’s what we at Optimal Monitoring do. We’re an end-to- end solution from advisory to platform to AI to bespoke technology development. For a fraction of the amount, you save in reduced energy bills we’ll help you turn your data into something really valuable – knowledge. Knowledge you can act on and turn into long lasting and recurrent wealth.

Our DaaS service will keep your ever growing and diverse data in tip top shape, all in one place so that you can spend your time and effort using it rather than just maintaining it.