Corporate Sustainability: Driving ESG With IoT Data
Managing a building has gotten much harder than simply keeping the heat on and the roof dry. Corporate sustainability has grown from a buzzword into a daily task that facilities teams and owners can't get away from. It can feel tough to keep up with this trend, but real-time data and Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology can save you a lot of headaches.
Keep reading to get a better picture of how corporate sustainability strategies have evolved to include automation and real-time reporting so you can keep hitting your building sustainability goals.
The Modern Evolution of Corporate Sustainability Strategies
Green goals used to be a bare minimum target for compliance. But with time, organizations have realized that customers and partners care about your environmental impact, not just your products and income. Companies with more robust corporate sustainability approaches today have an edge against competitors who don't put as much attention towards them.
This realization has led to the creation of the triple bottom line — an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) framework that sets three broad goals for your company, which we can sum up as the three Ps:
Profit: Measuring your revenue and making sure your business is economically viable
People: Measuring your social responsibility, like fair labor practices and safe working conditions
Planet: Measuring your impact on the environment
Digital infrastructure helps enable this work, using a network of sensors to track your systems so you can understand your impact. A central dashboard then aggregates their readings and spits out live ESG reporting — real numbers you can track to see if your sustainable building methods are helping. With the right technology, you can accurately assess and improve your sustainable building measures over time. Plus, you get to put out positive public reports that investors and customers can't get enough of.
Closing the Data Gap With Real-Time Building Intelligence
Many teams still rely on manual audits, which take a long time to run, so at best they happen once a quarter. This creates a massive data gap. By the time you read the report, the information is already out of date. Real-time monitoring changes the game, letting you look at your systems as they run.
Attune's smart sensors take advantage of an IoT-based platform to give you operational visibility into every floor and mechanical room. This insight helps you detect any problem as soon as it happens so you can react before it has a significant impact on your bottom line.
There are some issues you can catch earlier with continuous visibility, such as:
Energy spikes: Spot a pump that runs too long or a light left on in a gym.
Water anomalies: Catch a silent leak in a wall before it ruins the floor.
Indoor air quality levels: Check carbon dioxide and dust levels to keep the air fresh and safe.
Equipment status: Detect when a fan motor is starting to fail.
Resource efficiency: Measure the amount of power you're saving each week.
This technology empowers building engineers, taking the guesswork out of their jobs so they can focus on actually fixing problems instead of searching for where the issues may be. It saves time and money, and keeps the building safe for the people working inside.
Streamlining ESG Reporting With Automated Documentation
Reporting for ESG can be a nightmare. It usually involves a lot of paper and a lot of time spent hunting down different information, like old power and utility bills. With automation, you can set up sensors that gather the data for you and report it immediately in a central dashboard that documents the entire history of your ESG performance metrics.
This makes ESG reporting much faster and more accurate. When an auditor or corporate real estate (CRE) owner asks for proof, you can be ready with a clean record of every sensor reading on all the data the stakeholders ask for.
This transparency in turn helps improve your brand reputation. If anyone's curious about how well your building is running and what you're spending on to hit your green goals, you can give them detailed insight. You can blow them away with the energy savings your optimizations have delivered, building trust and positioning you as a leader in your field.
Turning Sustainability Risks Into Operational Efficiency Wins
The three elements of corporate sustainability — the environmental, social, and economic parts of a business — are all linked in the business of buildings. Efficient systems use less fuel, offer better comfort to your employees, and cut your bills.
So treating sustainability risks helps you on all three fronts. Moreover, these risks come from operational inefficiencies that can quickly run up a high bill. For example, if your building uses too much power on your heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system, that both impacts your sustainability and gives you a higher bill at the end of each month.
The typical reactive approach would be to realize that your energy bills have spiked and then scour through your monthly reports to hunt down where these increases have come from. Then, you pay for an overhaul of your building's HVAC system, which can take days to weeks, and hope your bills over the next few months balance out the spike.
In contrast, if you take a data-driven approach, you can optimize your HVAC performance and sustainability upfront. Smart sensors make sure your HVAC isn't running more than necessary or in rooms that are rarely in use. If there are any potential issues, like a malfunctioning unit, a notification on your dashboard lets you know immediately, so you can act before it gets worse. This saves you money and helps you achieve your sustainability goals.
Building a Smarter Future With Data-Driven ESG Frameworks
The future for ESG is data-driven. An IoT-based system is crucial to staying in control of your assets. Attune's unique customizable solution helps you bridge the gap between your current systems and your new goals, arming you with real-time insights that help you protect your people and your bottom line. Our platform can also generate detailed sustainability reports for CRE owners that give you full insight into their building's operations. Schedule a demo with us to discover how much more sustainable your business can become.
