Prioritization. Economies of Scale. Best Practice Sharing. When a company operates many different facilities, it can be challenging to fully understand how and where to deploy resources and attention best. At many companies, each building operates independently. Although there are many benefits to autonomy and decentralized decision making, the Portfolio Facility Audit will bring to light financial and energy performance opportunities across the facility portfolio.

This knowledge is fundamental for creating a strategic plan focused on energy efficiency and optimizing operating costs. By participating in a Master Facility Audit, your company will have a report that centralizes the data from each of your buildings and puts them together in one report. This report will provide an unbiased overview of your energy performance and identify areas for improvement.

Foresight will work with you to develop an effective way of communicating with each facility to gather all the necessary information. From there, we will create a plan around energy efficiency and cost reduction opportunities. Our team will collect this information by working closely with your team onsite in a minimally invasive manner.

We will focus on developing three key baselines for each of your buildings:

• Operational Baseline – Learning how each building operates is vital to building a strategic plan that will ultimately be effective and actionable. This includes the hours of operation, production starts and stops, shift changes, etc.
• Technical Baseline – Learning what technology and equipment are in each facility is vital to identifying areas for improvement within a building as well as across multiple buildings. This includes lighting, HVAC, compressed air, and manufacturing equipment at each location.
•  Data Baseline – Learning how much energy each building uses -- and their respective costs -- are critical components of building a realistic strategic plan. We will gather and review at least 12 months of historical utility bill information from each facility.

When Foresight has collected all the necessary data to establish these operational, technical, and data-driven baselines, we will then identify and prioritize cross-portfolio energy efficiency opportunities. In this, we will include energy reduction and cost-saving options within each facility, worst and best-performing facilities based on energy use per square foot, and energy efficiency projects that could be implemented across multiple facilities.

The collected data and energy efficiency opportunities will all go into a robust report that will include estimated investment budgets, ROI calculations, and any potential utility incentives where applicable. The Portfolio Facility Audit report will generate a holistic, precise, and actionable energy management plan around your facilities.

• Centralizes information across your entire facility portfolio
• Establishes baselines for each of your company’s buildings
•  Allows a high-level view of what energy efficiency opportunities have the most impact
•  Enables the “80/20” rule: Where can you apply 20% effort and achieve 80% impact?

Client Profile
58 location manufacturing company, with four general use types of buildings: office, retail, warehouse, and manufacturing. The smallest facility is under 4,000 sq. feet, and the largest facility is over 750,000 sq. feet.

Before Foresight
Multiple locations were run by different facility managers who made decisions based on their own goals and knowledge of their buildings. The line of communication between other facility managers and the corporate sustainability team was not always smooth. This meant most energy efficiency projects were done one at a time, instead of collaborating and making these projects work across multiple buildings, which could have resulted in a lower ROI or a more considerable impact on the total portfolio energy usage.

After Foresight
We collected data from all 58 locations, including an inventory of lighting, HVAC, building controls, and compressed air. Foresight was able to assemble this information into one place instead of it being spread among different stakeholders. This shared knowledge allowed a better cross-team understanding of the company’s energy use as a whole.

Foresight was able to identify where the vast majority of the client’s energy consumption and spending was located. Foresight found that over 80% of electricity and nearly 95% of natural gas were used in only nine of the 58 buildings. Foresight developed and presented a strategic plan to target these high-use facilities first to make a drastic impact across their entire company.

Frequently Asked Questions

If we collect the data remotely, the cost typically ranges between $750 - $1,500 per facility. If we do on-site data collection, the price can vary due to travel, but typically falls between $1,500 - $4,500 per facility we visit. Other factors that drive our pricing are the size and use type of the building and the desired depth of data the client wants us to collect.

By and large, we will need about 1 - 2 hours of your team’s time per facility from which we collect data. Much of this is determined by how accessible the data is from our client’s internal systems.

Herman Miller partnered with Foresight to conduct Master Facility Audits across each of their global sites. The goal was to consolidate relevant information on the energy-consuming systems at each location to help our corporate team prioritize energy efficiency projects and opportunities. Working with Foresight allowed us to collect and analyze data quickly, and develop a strategic plan to achieve our energy reduction goals.

— Sr. Safety & Sustainability Manager, Herman Miller