Increasing regulatory measures, the focus on corporate social responsibility and rising energy costs are forcing companies to reassess the impact of environment issues and energy use on their business bottom line.
Measuring carbon emissions and the efforts to reduce them are increasingly becoming an area of focus for many companies.
Enter The Visual Environment. The Visual Environment is a UK-based company founded by Calum Miller and Patrick Hodgson. It invented, designed and developed unique software: video-miles®. It tracks video conferencing activities to help companies measure and track their efforts to reduce their carbon footprint.
Although it is clear that videoconferencing reduces carbon emissions by reducing travel, this benefit has not been measurable. Most videoconferencing users are unable to access Environmental, Financial, Utilization and Performance data and turn it into accurate measurements of their carbon footprint. As a result, existing video conferencing users end up using labor intensive manual efforts to analyze data that at best leads to assumption, inaccuracy, higher cost, lower utilization, frustration, slower decision-making and reduced deployment of video conferencing systems.
The key to The Visual Environment's products and services is the accurate measurement of video conferencing and its translations into measureable reports and dashboards at the click of a mouse. This is what has earned it the trust of partners such as Polycom Inc and customers from all sectors such as finance (a Major American International Bank), legal firms, retail, leisure, manufacturing and petrochemical companies. This is part of a trend of emissions measurement by large corporations, as a precursor to emissions management and trading.
Defining key performance indicators and the setting up of accurate monitoring is the first step towards the establishment of a green business intelligence practice. This is key to the organization's accurate assessment of its green efforts – "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it".
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This is exactly what The Visual Environment does. It sets up a system to pull in all data related to the use of video-miles® and the resulting reduction in miles travelled. Data is brought in using the Company's Fetchit software. Data comes in from all end-points on the network: video conferencing devices, systems deployed at employee's desks and home etc. The Visual Environment uses SiSense's Prism software to create custom reports for each of its customers and partners. SiSense's Prism software was selected for its asset management, ease of use, low total cost of ownership and the quick set up. It required very little training and thus was immediately useful to the Company.
Dashboards show carbon emissions saved, money and time saved by less travel, top performing locations in terms of saving carbon emissions, and the least performing locations. A complex pivot shows which locations communicate with others, collaborating in the video miles savings.
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Once the right KPIs have been defined and measured, the companies using the solution have ongoing control of the operational environment. This not only ensures compliance but also serves as a starting point for future process improvements that will lead to even greater reduction in carbon emissions.