A couple of years ago, selecting the best utility management software for your college or university was a relatively complex process. You – or your predecessor – probably went through a six-steps:
- Problem identification: “We need to do something.”
- Solution exploration: “What’s out there to solve our problem?”
- Requirements building: “What exactly do we need the purchase to do?”
- Supplier selection: “Does this do what we want it to do?”
- Validation: “We think we know the right answer, but we need to be sure.”
- Consensus creation: “We need to get everyone on board.”
Today, it’s a whole new ball game. For example, when your campus reopens for the Fall 2021 semester, will it be:
- Fully reopen with all students on campus?
- Hybrid or partially open with some students on campus?
- Fully remote/online with few students on campus?
And what will the in-person/hybrid/remote situation look like in the Spring 2022 semester?
In other words, you still need to do something, but the problem that you are now trying to solve has fundamentally changed.
Meanwhile, the utility management solutions available today have changed, too. This means you’ll get an entirely different answer now than the one you – or your predecessor – got a couple of years ago when the question was asked: “What’s out there to solve our problem?”
Oh, and the requirements for utility management systems have also changed. What exactly do you need them to do now? Well, the short answer is: A long list of utility management software features that you – or your predecessor – didn’t consider a few years ago.
And, all this will change the supplier selection process, as well. For example, you will now want to consider utility management software companies that not only develop and sell software solutions, but also provide professional services and support to their customers directly.
As for validation, you – or your predecessor – may have relied on a global research and advisory company for information and advice before adopting your existing utility management software. But, now you have your own experience and expertise and know its strengths and weaknesses without having to look at someone else’s charts or magic quadrants.
Finally, building consensus may still be as challenging as it ever was. But, there may be new members in the group of six to 10 decision makers on your campus that need to sign-off on any complex solution.
In short, it’s time to ask: What is the best utility management software for the new normal?
AssetWorks’ utility management solution
Since you’re reading this post on the AssetWorks blog, you won’t be shocked, shocked to find that AssetWorks provides a utility management solution. But, what makes it the best utility management software for the new normal is its remarkable blend of energy management and feature-rich business intelligence with AssetWorks’ single, fully integrated package.
Now, you already know that utility bill line-item details are difficult to collect and analyze, and with both multi-vendor and home-grown energy management solutions, it can be cumbersome to manage your campus’ entire utility ecosystem. But, you may be surprised to discover that AssetWorks’ utility management solution can provide you with:
- Up to 5% savings.
- Return on investment in as little as 12 months.
- 13% reduction in energy consumption.
How does it do that?
Their solution includes AiM Energy Management, which leverages a unique feature set that enables organizations to identify energy inefficiencies and squeeze greater savings from their current energy management program by blending energy management and feature-rich business intelligence in a single, fully-integrated package.
Plus, AssetWorks not only develops and sells the ReADY, AiM and Go software solutions, they also provide professional services and support directly to their customers. With a vested interest in customer success, they partner with you in providing strategic services to meet business goals, implementation services to deploy the software and ensure adoption, custom solutions for interfacing and automation, as well as technical and support services to keep it all running smoothly.
This helps you run a smarter campus with integrated software, which features automatic accuracy checks and configurable data validation.
It also helps you limit costs by accurately tracking distribution and logically replicating the most complex environments.
Finally, it helps you make better decisions and gain insight with spending and usage analysis dashboards.
What will be the best solution for the new new normal?
Now, you may not be considering this today, but a few years from now you will be proud as punch to look back and discover that AssetWorks’ utility management software is designed to work together seamlessly with the rest of their Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS).
In addition to facility management, AssetWork’s IWMS provides:
- Real estate and property management, which enables a Director of Facilities to oversee every aspect of his or her portfolio, including real estate database management, lease management and tracking, property management, accounting, and budgeting.
- Space management, which provides accurate data to pinpoint the total cost of owned and leased space across your college or university.
- Operations and maintenance (O&M), which can help your higher education institution to reduce inventory carrying costs, improve asset availability, limit equipment downtime, and reduce facilities maintenance costs campus-wide.
- Capital planning and project management (CPPM), which helps your college or university increase fiscal controls and improve financial accountability for capital projects, reduce their risk profile through improved regulatory compliance, and streamline capital planning and management processes to reduce CAPEX and improve rates of return from capital investments.
- Assessment and needs analysis, which integrates with operations and maintenance as well as capital planning and project management capabilities. This enables you to store both asset lifecycle and deficiency data in the same platform for increased quality of information and more credible data. No more half accurate snapshots — get the full picture for a stronger multi-year plan.
This means that AssetWorks not only provides the best utility management software for the new normal, it also provides the unmatched level of agility and flexibility that your college or university will need for the new new normal. Who knows, you may have been promoted to director of facilities by then and will be in a position to benefit from the foresight of your earlier decision.
What should you do next? Well, I’d advise you to contact a member of the higher education team at AssetWorks. They average over 15 years of experience in higher education and facilities management. That means they understand how to help you make smarter, data-driven decisions about building better campuses that empower students and faculty, support legacies, and impact futures.
About Greg Jarboe
Greg Jarboe is the president and co-founder of SEO-PR, which has provided services to the University of the Pacific, the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University, and Dickinson College. Greg has been an instructor in several Rutgers Business School Mini-MBA programs.
In addition, Greg is the author of YouTube and Video Marketing and the co-author with Katie Paine of the Communications Measurement eBook for Higher Education. Before co-founding SEO-PR in 2003, Greg was VP of Marketing for WebCT, where he helped to triple the company’s installed base from 700 institutions in 36 countries to 2,172 institutions in 75 countries.
