Sigma Spotlight – our 2019 highlights

Throughout 2019 we delivered a number of new software solutions to meet the evolving needs of our customers and industry.

The launch of our Tenant Billing solution and advanced Data Monitoring and Estate Management tools signaled a step-change in the evolution of the system.

To coincide with the first software update of the year, we thought we’d celebrate some of the key enhancements from our 2019 roadmap.

Simple and efficient tenant billing

Among the earlier releases of 2019, we broadened our software portfolio with the launch of our next generation Sigma Tenant Billing solution. The application enables organisations to accurately and efficiently apportion utility costs between tenants, cost centres or departments delivering transparent accountable billing.

The flexible and reliable solution seamlessly integrates with existing energy management systems, delivering effective measurement and sophisticated bill calculation. Users have the added advantage of integrating the data into their accounting system through the Accounts Link interface, speeding-up the billing process.

Throughout the development of the software, we worked closely with our customers to understand the challenges of tenant billing. This collaboration led to the inclusion of the enhanced functionality the system offers, including dashboard reporting, support of multiple commodities, flexible charging methodologies, scalable implementation and much more. Find out how Sigma Tenant Billing can help your organisation.

Automated EDI bill processing

In a move to reduce the manual process of loading EDI bills, we created new capability that automatically imports the bills into Sigma from an email inbox or FTP server.

EDI bills can be set to import outside of working hours ensuring they will be ready for review and processing the next morning, saving users valuable time and resource.

With a suite of configuration options, users have full control over the automation schedule to fit around their operational processes.

Enhanced Regression and Cumulative Sum (CuSum) tools

Monitoring and Targeting (M&T) enables organisations to simply and continually measure, understand and optimise their energy consumption, using data to show trends and anomalies in their usage data. It helps organisations identify signs of avoidable waste and make operational and cost saving efficiencies, as well as achieve increased resource efficiency, improved budgeting and reduce carbon emissions.

Regression analysis and CuSum are in depth techniques that can be used to monitor and target energy usage providing insight into the relationship between two data sets. By understanding how the data sets interact, organisations can determine their expected performance.

This process can help users to see deviations in their consumption performance over time, including periods of degradation or improvement, providing insight to support them in identifying and resolving problems.

Sigma’s new dynamic and interactive CuSUM tools simplify the regression analysis process, supporting the ability to model the relationship between different factors over configurable periods of time. The variable data sets can then be plotted against the consumption, reducing the need to manually and slowly piece data together in spreadsheets.

For more information on using the our Regression and CuSum tools, take a look at our Sigma Spotlight M&T blog.

Data monitoring

An optimised energy management service relies on a foundation of good quality data. For us, data is at the heart of everything we do and the beginning to efficient monitoring and targeting. High quality data is the key to compliance, streamlined budgeting and meeting carbon reduction targets.

Our data monitoring tool’s development is underpinned by our four pillars of data quality, that ensures data’s;

  • Accuracy; so data correctly reflects what is being measured and its expected behaviour
  • Completeness; all expected data is present and without gaps
  • Consistency; data values conform to a required format that agree with each other
  • Timeliness; data is available to support full of energy management duties on time.

The new tools help users to proactively identify data anomalies, and manage and resolve errors in data sets efficiently through either automated or manual processes, supporting them in achieving a robust data base. Find out more about Sigma’s Data Monitoring tools.

Estate management

This enhancement assembles data logically and intuitively in Sigma, helping users to see key information relating to the structure of their entire site, providing advanced energy estate visibility.

To help users see key information relating to the structure of their entire site, we made key enhancements to Sigma so data is assembled more logically and intuitively.

These changes came in the form of brand-new data screens that provide:

  • Interactive filtering on data sets helping to expose key pieces of estate information
  • Clearer visibility of time-bound relationships to help you see how energy assets evolve
  • Simplified navigation to reduce clicks and providing faster insight to key information
  • Capability to amend estate information easily and quickly.

Enhanced energy estate insights are presented through:

  • A site summary screen giving a complete and single view of the site and its assets, including key financial and consumption information
  • A complete display of relationships between the different assets and how they evolve over time (e.g. billing accounts that are inked to supplier contracts and meters)
  • Accounts and bill summary page that keeps a record of each billing account and a summary of important information relating to bill dates, total bill values (cost and consumption), missing bill days and supplier recovery queries
  • And a meters summary page, that displays a record of all meters along with the ability to access a quick view of the recent consumption data/profile over time.

Want to know more? Understand how Sigma’s Estate Management tools can enhance your Monitoring and Targeting strategy.

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