Mar 14, 2024
Introduction
At Backpack we are constantly expanding the capabilities of our platform and delivering improved user experiences throughout our interface. For those new to Backpack, we make digitization of your buildings easy and affordable — something that many building owners and operators feel is cost prohibitive or too disruptive. Our team of seasoned industry experts in partnership with a distributed labor force walk through the front door of your building to conduct onsite data collection and verification for continuous capture and maintenance in our innovative platform, thereby digitizing your building and providing you unprecedented data visibility, share-ability, and accuracy without the headache.
Read on to learn more about the latest platform enhancements that we recently released to further streamline EnergyStar management and improve your overall user experience with Backpack.
Transparent & Easy Energy Star Management
As the demand for ongoing Energy Star scoring supported by verified data escalates, the challenges associated with manual collection become increasingly onerous. Apart from being a burden, manual data collection poses risks of inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and year after year this painful exercise consumes a significant amount of time. It can also demand significant expenses on consultants who may be hired to aid in this tedious process. Backpack, however, handles your Energy Star continuously and provides a permanent solution for these problems with our new suite of features and improvements:
-
Automated Utility Sync is new and improved, getting you results faster than before. New bills are automatically synced to Energy Star Portfolio Manager.
-
Digitized Stacking Plan aligns the way operators run their buildings to Energy Star inputs, Backpack will process your stacking plans on your behalf, allowing you to focus on how you run your building.
-
Tracking Property Use Details are management details made easy by integrating them into your digitized stacking plan, removing the pain of tracking details such as hours of operation, people, and workstations manually.
-
Automated Rule Engine automates the Energy Star submission process so, you can ensure that all necessary rules and requirements are being met without the risk of human error. This not only saves time and resources but also provides peace of mind knowing that your Energy Star scores are reliable and consistent across all properties in your portfolio. With Backpack, you can confidently track and improve energy efficiency performance while streamlining the submission process for maximum efficiency.
One of the many benefits of digitizing your buildings with Backpack is that you are relieved of needing to repeat the hard work of managing Energy Star each year. Backpack automatically collects a complete and accurate dataset for your building, and its integration with Energy Star Portfolio Manager allows for the seamless propagation of data from Backpack directly to Energy Star, removing the need for any manual uploads or data entry in Energy Star Portfolio Manager for your buildings.
View of Property Use Details Page
View of Stacking Plan Page
Revamped Utilities Page
We've revamped our Utilities page to prioritize the aspects that matter most to you, making it simpler than ever to transfer your data to its intended destination.
The main utility bill table is now more intuitive, displaying invoices by invoice date. This feature facilitates comprehension of cost and consumption data at both the bill and meter levels simultaneously. Additionally, the new meter management design offers a lightweight and easy-to-use interface for maintaining control and understanding of meter data in Backpack and its correlation with Energy Star data. With automated Energy Star connections, Backpack becomes your central meter management hub, ensuring data synchronization across platforms. Furthermore, the improved graphical interface elevates our typical quick-view analysis by segmenting typically unwieldy raw data into normalized-exact monthly buckets. This enables comparisons between varying month lengths, such as the 28 days in February (29 this year!) and the 31 days in March, fostering more equitable and consistent monthly and annual comparisons and reporting.
Digitization is what makes all of this possible. Through this ingestion of utilities data into Backpack’s integrated ecosystem, you can synchronize data across platforms and take advantage of these various types of reports offering fixed window snapshots, trended metrics, and period over period comparisons. Without digitization, this effort demands a tremendous amount of manual effort to collect, organize, hygiene, and transform utilities data to generate reports and perform analysis. Backpack does the heavy lifting on the data management side, and offers pre-built reporting views to simplify your analysis.
Conclusion
At Backpack, we're enthusiastic about receiving feedback from both current and potential customers regarding additional features they'd like to see integrated or enhanced in future Backpack releases.
Stay tuned for future updates related to our latest or upcoming releases. If you have a special request or would like to talk to a Backpack team member about how to get started with Backpack, we would love to hear from you: Contact Us