With an increasing focus on efficiency and sustainability in today’s commercial buildings, an effective energy management strategy should be the primary objective for savvy building owners and managers. Smart buildings continue to evolve but for us to extract their full potential, we must also think Smart. This means being pro-active about something as simple as adapting our building through the change in seasons.

Most likely you have a Building Management System (BMS) in your building, but how often do you remember to make the necessary adjustments to reflect significant changes in the weather? Perhaps your building is still on “Summer mode” thanks to the long, hot heatwave and you have not yet considered the seasonal change?

It’s easily forgotten, adjustments are made in a building but then life takes over and we become too busy to monitor it. Before we know it, we are looking at our next energy bill aghast and wondering why there is a sudden increase in running costs and energy consumption?

With Winter around the corner and much cooler temperatures to contend with, it’s critical that we make ongoing adjustments to our buildings to ensure optimum energy efficiency which will ultimately lower running costs too.

However, with a vast range of controls and technologies on the market, it can prove difficult to identify the best method to tackle this. A BMS is a good place to start but to make meaningful changes to energy consumption in a building, the data acquired from the BMS and energy monitoring solution, must be processed and interpreted. This is where an Energy Management System (EMS) comes in and this can make all the difference.

How does an EMS transform your building? Firstly, it provides you with a comprehensive view of your energy consumption, including current and historic trends which you can analyse. A building owner or manager can gain a clear insight of how energy is consumed within a building once they have access to such detailed analysis as this will allow them to discover anomalies, such as underperforming plant or energy wastage issues.

Analytic providers can determine control strategies as a result of the data which has been provided by the EMS and subsequently analysed. These strategies are fed back into the building’s BMS and are integral to unlocking potential energy savings while improving efficiency. Therefore, the role of EMS in a building cannot be underestimated.

If you would like to know more about how an EMS could help your building perform more efficiently and lower overall costs, why not come along to the Smart Buildings Show at the Barbican in London? On Wednesday 7^th November, Matt Gardner from Synapsys Solutions will deliver a CPD-Accredited presentation on ‘The Role of EMS’ at 11.30 am in the CPD Theatre. Alternatively, you can talk to a member of the Synapsys Solutions team on stand G1 or e-mail us us for more information.