How about your level of greenhouse gas emission?

Are you taking the necessary steps to conserve energy and reduce utility expenditures?

In December, SchoolDude.com announced the release of its newest product – ConserveDirect. In partnership with with SchoolDude’s solution for utility tracking and analysis (UtilityDirect), ConserveDirect allows institutions to track ENERGY STAR ratings, greenhouse gas emissions, and plan conservation programs – all in one easy-to-use dashboard.

Benefits include:

• Reduced energy costs by implementing and monitoring conservation programs
• Allows for easy participation in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGYSTAR program
• Simplified reporting with straightforward reports, enabling clients to customize and publicize information to school and community stakeholders

This latest product development came to life when SchoolDude.com CEO, Kent Hudson, saw clients struggling with rising energy costs.  “As energy costs skyrocket and our clients face budget cuts, the pressure to better manage energy costs will be greater than ever – in fact, the greatest in our lifetime.  The average school or college’s energy bills have gone up by 30%-40% over the past several years, causing a significant impact on other resources such as maintenance, staffing, and ultimately the classroom.  Our vision is to arm educational institutions with the tools and data to succeed in energy conservation and management.  ConserveDirect represents our next step in building out a suite of products in the energy domain in education.”

Energy management has become a mission-critical component to reducing costs and operating districts efficiently and effectively. The ENERGY STAR program was designed in cooperation with the EPA to allow buildings to earn an ENERGY STAR certification. A variety of buildings qualify for the program, including k12 schools and campus dormitories. By earning the certification, schools demonstrate their commitment to reducing environmental impact and can even qualify for promotion by the EPA to a variety of news outlets.

If you are interested in learning more about how ConserveDirect can help you track and earn your Energy Star rating or how in conjunction with UtilityDirect can help your school save money by reducing costs and maximizing your budget, contact us! We would be happy to show you a demo or just review your school’s needs and answer some of your questions.

A common need for many clients is the ability to modify the output (columns and rows) of our reports. Many times, an Excel Pivot Chart (click here to view an interactive guide) fills the need for a unique output format.

However, for our IT market, the customizable query feature in ITDirect and ITAMDirect can fill that need as well. Queries allow you to choose your search criteria and output fields to create personalized reports to fit your needs.

This will give you some different options beyond advanced searches or other standardized reports. Queries can be used to generate:

• A report showing you Open Incidents that are over a certain days aged

• A report for your staff that will show their Open Assigned Incidents:

• A report showing Unassigned Incidents

• And much more!!

Another common use of the query feature is to pull in some of the Asset details that do not show up on the Advanced Search output (for example the Asset Description or Item Number).

These queries show up on your home page dashboard and can be easily pushed out to your Technicians’ dashboard once you’ve completed the setup. Of course your staff, (Supervisors, Technicians, and Site Resources) also have the ability to setup their own queries to meet their needs.

Below we’ve included a few frequently used sql statements you can use to build queries in your ITDirect account today.

Last Month Incidents: [Date Created] >= DATEADD(mm, DATEDIFF(mm,0,DATEADD(mm,-1,getdate())), 0) AND [Date Created]

Open Assigned work to “login user”: [Status] IN (“New Request”,”Work In Progress”,”Parts on Order”,”On Hold”,”Waiting More Information”,”Open Extended”,”Waiting Funding”) AND [Assigned to] = “##LOGINUSER##”

Open Incidents over 3 days old: DateDiff(d, [Incident Date], GetDate())>3 AND [Status] NOT IN (“Complete”,”Closed Incident”, “Void”, “Duplicate”)

To learn how to create queries in your account, click here to view an interactive guide. You can also give us a call at 1-877-883-8337 or send an email to support@schooldude.com. We would be happy to help you create a few queries to get you started!

Consistently, we heard the same thing: one of their biggest challenges was “energy.” 

This got us thinking. If these utility costs are not managed aggressively, they will crowd out other vital parts of the budget including maintenance staffing and education.  Energy costs represent approximately 1/3 of the M&O budget and around 2%-3% of the school district budget.  While on the tour, we heard countless stories like this:

Facility Manager:  “I need to hire a replacement for my retiring electrician.”

Boss: “Sorry, you can’t hire a replacement as we’ve had some major surprises on our energy bills.  You’ll have to make do.”

So, if this is what our educational institutions are up against, how can things change?  What will be the payoff for the hard work?

Dr. Deming, a famous quality and statistics guru said, “If you want to improve something, all you can do is start with where you are.  Don’t worry too much about whether where you are is good or bad but find out what is possible and work towards that and measure how you improve over time.” 

According to the US Department of Energy a typical school district can save 10%-15% by changes in behavior or increased awareness of the problems.  A 10% savings can equate to $25/student per year.  In a school or district with 5,000 students, that then equates to $125,000 in savings per school year!

Over the next few weeks, we will be sharing more with you on energy conservation and best practices.  We’ll even be highlighting some great success stories!  In the meantime, you can get started today.  Check out the list below of basic energy saving opportunities:

One of these concepts applies to a question commonly asked by our MaintenanceDirect clients:

“Should I run my reports on count of work orders or sum of hours?”

Before we tackle that question, let me add a brief disclaimer: Any report your generate has the potential to help raise awareness on the work that your department is doing, and that is a positive thing.

Some of you may have heard about Dude Ratings, which is how we gauge client implementation and utilization. For this metric, we look at the count of work orders relative to student enrollment.

Labor hours are not a focus for us, because not all of our clients choose to track labor hours in MaintenanceDirect. So, we use the count of work orders per student as a good, high-level indicator of how well the online work order system is implemented.

However, when it comes to schools’ leveraging the power of their data, looking at the number of labor hours is a better indicator of where your resources are being spent than a simple count of work orders. Staffing models across different industries are almost always based on FTE’s hours per year. This same logic can be applied to our clients when they are required to justify resources.

When thinking about how to measure productivity, consider the type of work being performed by each employee. Let’s say Employee A is assigned a work order to replace cabinets. The job takes 34 hours to complete. Employee B was assigned 10 work orders, but for smaller, unrelated jobs. Employee B completes those 10 work orders in 32 hours. Is Employee A less productive? No, of course not. Time worked has to be taken into consideration when comparing the two employees’ productivity.

Let’s look at another example involving justification of resources. Looking at the chart below, one might infer that Painting crew could be cut back because the amount of requests is low compared to other Crafts.

However, when we drill down to look at the Actual Hours spent on Painting, we can see that inferring the Painting crew has not been busy would be a mistake.

Most maintenance leaders would know if a craft’s work order count is low, there is likely a good reason for it. However, in this day and age, intuitive or anecdotal evidence is not enough to persuade decision makers. You need good empirical data so you and others can make knowledgeable decisions.

Luckily, you have the best data collection tool set in the market at your fingertips, and an award winning support team ready to help. To get started generating reports for your organization, contact SchoolDude’s legendary Client Service Center or check out our new SuccessOps web page.