Performance Enhancement & Organizational Efficiency: Tips for Making your Business Run Leaner and Better

Increasing IT efficiency purely to reduce the operational costs is acceptable, if an organization's only goal is to enhance profits. Business success, however, is rarely based purely on profit margins. Companies must continually seek out new customers and new revenue streams through innovation in products and services. One of the most important ways to develop and deliver innovative new offerings is through utilizing diverse information assets. These include:

Leveraging email, collaboration tools, and Web sites to communicate and conduct business with customers and business partners

Collecting, storing, and analyzing more information about products, customers, and transactions

Digitizing records, design documents, videos, and other types of unstructured data to boost efficiency, offer new services, and comply with evolving government regulations

From a commercial property management perspective, energy savings is critical to protect and improve a building's bottom line, and to ensure returns for the energy-intensive winter months. Here's some ways to cut energy costs and develop a strategy for general conservation.

• Measure and track energy performance.
• Turn off lights when not in use or when natural daylight can be used.
• Set back the thermostat in the evenings and other times when a building is unoccupied.
• Educate tenants and employees about how their behaviors affect energy use.
• Improve operations and maintenance practices by regularly checking and maintaining equipment to ensure it is functioning efficiently.
• Optimize start-up time, power-down time, and equipment sequencing.
• Revise janitorial practices to reduce the hours that lights are turned on each day.
• Use ENERGY STAR Target Finder to integrate efficiency goals into the design of new properties.
• Engage in energy audits and retro commissioning to identify areas of inefficiency.
• Install energy-efficient lighting systems, ENERGY STAR qualified compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), light-emitting diode (LED) exit signs, and occupancy sensors where feasible.
• Install window films and add insulation or reflective roof coating to reduce energy consumption.
• Purchase energy-efficient products like ENERGY STAR qualified office and commercial food service equipment.
• Retrofit, upgrade, or install new heating and cooling equipment to meet reduced loads and take advantage of efficient technologies.
• Use a performance contract to guarantee energy savings from upgrades made.
• Work with an energy services provider to manage and improve performance.

Here are some more resources that can help you achieve higher degrees of efficiencies across several other critical vistas of your business:

Energy Efficiency

www.ebestpractices.com

http://www.archibus.com/index.cfm/pages.press_release/template_id/1096/section/Press%20Room/path/1.6.112/menuid/61

Management & Organizational Best Practices

hightech.lbl.gov/DCTraining/best-practices-general.html

Organizational Planning

http://www.technicallymarketing.com/index.php/2012/05/29/best-practices-for-operational-efficiency/

http://www.orgplus.com/solutions/organizational-best-practices.htm

Also in This Issue

• Five Ways to Prepare for the New Year
• Determining Your Technology ROI
• Calculate Your Managed Backup ROI
• Avoid Data Loss--and Revenue Loss--with Managed Backup
• Leverage Lightpath Security for Your Business
• Customer Spotlight: Engineered Security Systems (ESS)
• Family-Friendly Tri-State Winter Activities