Pushkar Kulkarni from Total Utilities completed the site review and NABERSNZ Assessment of Watercare House. Here he provides additional commentary to the original published case study, highlighting the specific benefits of a NABERSNZ tenancy rating. "A NABERSNZ tenancy rating is an ideal tool for tenants as it shows them how their day to day operations impact their energy performance. It can also determine how well they manage energy and identify the opportunities that may exist to improve energy performance. In an increasingly competitive market place and businesses look for a point of...
Read more

Cost reduction in the energy market through procurement has been relatively easy in the last few years. Flat national demand, solid hydro storage, increased retailer competition and participation in the ASX market has led to competitive commercial contracts that have allowed many customers to save money without changing what they are doing. While an immediate impact, it is not sustainable. Fixed price contracts are typically only 2-3 years in length and only relate to +/- 65% of a total bill, changes in transmission and distribution pricing is passed through at cost by the retailers and...
Read more

Telecommunications services are a commodity and this has driven the price of services, especially consumer mobile and fixed broadband, to levels that were only a dream a few years ago. Here is some context. My 13-year-old son gets more for his $10 per month prepay mobile plan today than I got for my $35 plus handset post-paid plan in the late 1990’s. At that time text messages were 20c each and only available from Vodafone. My home fibre broadband connection, without a phone attached, costs $95 per month and gives me 103Mbs/sec throughput at quiet times and at the worst times I still...
Read more

This is the third and final article on Communities of Practice (COPs), a model designed to help align business strategy with the evolving knowledge and experience of your people, while still taking advantage of the efficiencies that can be gained through more formal organisational structures and processes. I can now safely say, after many years of practice -- complete with a few painful cock-ups along the way -- that the workplace model, Communities of Practice (COPs), does work. Making Communities of Practice work doesn't happen on its own, but with the right groundwork in place and...
Read more

In 2013, Zespri, one of the world’s leading horticultural companies, and the recognised category leader in kiwifruit, was facing many significant challenges. The Psa virus which attacked their main gold kiwifruit crop, had the potential to devastate the company and its grower shareholders. In addition, they were facing significant capital outlays associated with their existing ICT systems and the need to upgrade their computer hardware. Zespri had to ask questions like, "Could the new variety of crop, Sun Gold, be more robust and become another bestseller?", or, "Would our outputs...
Read more

Last month I introduced Communities of Practice, a model designed to help align business strategy with the evolving knowledge and experience of its people, while still taking advantage of the efficiencies that can be gained through more formal organisations and processes. There are three elements that make up a Community of Practice. These are Domain, Community and Practice. Domain The common ground that inspires members to join, drives their learning activities and gives purpose and meaning to their activities. Let’s take a simple example. Yours is a plumbing and gas fitting...
Read more

What is Power Factor and why is it Important? Power Factor is an electrical term that is the measurement of how efficient energy consuming equipment translate that energy into a useful output. It is measured by the ratio (>0 and <1) between apparent power (kVA) and real power (kW), where apparent power is the amount of energy required to deliver a required output. Power Factor should be as close to 1 as possible (above 0.95) so that apparent power and real power are nearly the same. This means that nearly all the energy consumed is translated into a useful output. An analogy of this...
Read more

A colleague from one of New Zealand’s emerging winners in the software development market tells me that, despite its success, he is concerned about whether he is utilising the very expensive specialists in his business to best effect. He bemoaned: “It seems the bigger we get, the more time wastage we create. “Our best people are already frustrated at the inefficiencies and are headed to the door. “It’s hard enough finding top people without losing the best of the best to our competitors. We pay well. We have a great environment in our offices and our customers are blue...
Read more

The boundaries between physical, digital and biological worlds are breaking down — giving way to a new world of computer based business known as cyber-physical systems. These cyber-physical systems are characterized by the merging of physical, digital, and biological realms in profound ways. Artificial intelligence (AI) serves as the primary catalyst of this transformation. Klaus Schwab, Chairman and Founder of the World Economic Forum wrote: We are at the beginning of a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope and...
Read more

Investment in energy monitoring has traditionally been dominated by lengthy CAPEX discussions and the technical specifications of proposed monitoring infrastructure which means spending more cash to find out where cost savings might be made. Little thought was ever given to the data output and associated software --most competing products delivered similar back end services and data displays which required users to export data to CSV format before being able to really interrogate it. That's changing with Panoramic Power smart sensors available now in New Zealand, through Total...
Read more