Database Audit Service

Good quality data is crucial for your business’ understanding of energy usage and to support you in the management of your compliance, streamlined budgeting, and surpassing carbon reduction targets. It also provides complete portfolio transparency in the mission to drive down consumption.

For many organisations who are investing in energy efficiency, ensuring your energy data is good quality is the foundation of a successful energy management strategy, making it easier to understand, manage and forecast your data.

To facilitate the most accurate monitoring, targeting and reporting of energy and consumption, quality data needs to be:

• Accurate: Data correctly reflects what is being measured and its expected behaviour

• Complete: All expected data is present and without gaps

• Consistent: Data conforms to a required format that agree with each other

• Timely: Data is available to support the fulfilment of energy management duties on time

We call them our four pillars of data management, and we use these principles to underpin our Database Audit service.

What is a Database Audit?

Our Database Audit service is available to our Sigma software customers to help them achieve their energy targets. The aim of the service is to support you in ensuring your database is complete, consistent and accurate.

As part of the service, we will run over 60 individual checks on your Sigma database, to identify any instances where data may be set up incorrectly, or where it may be missing from the system. You’ll then receive a comprehensive report summarising the checks, findings, and any identified issues, along with recommended actions to resolve the anomalies found in your data.

Every customer’s energy estate is unique and complex in its own way. Our Database Audit can provide a methodical and structured review of your database to ascertain the quality of the data and any areas that need work.

Who can benefit from a Database Audit?

If you have been using Sigma for a period of time and would like to make sure your data is set up correctly to help you gain a clearer understanding of its accuracy, then our Database Audit service will benefit you.

What are the key opportunities?

• Identify anomalies in your data
  By identifying anomalies, you can gain an understanding of what needs to be fixed and can take action to resolve issues

• Deliver on your carbon emissions and sustainability targets
  With accurate and consistent carbon reporting data, inform your energy and sustainability strategy, and achieve your organisation’s environmental goals

• Robust and accurate reporting
  Good quality data gives you the ability to produce reliable reports and forecasting, helping you to reduce costs on energy bills and provide you with confidence in the data you are working with

• Implement new data collection and process controls
  Supported by our Customer Success team, use insights gained to improve your processes for collecting and managing your data to ensure a clean and accurate database

• Avoid compliance penalties for inaccurate data
  A clean and complete database means you can be assured that you are submitting accurate data for compliance reporting, avoiding penalties for the submission of incorrect data

• Clean, complete, consistent, and accurate data
  By adhering to the four pillars of data quality, you’ll achieve a foundation of good data management, so you can have the confidence in your energy database to support your decision making

How TEAM can help?

Getting the structure of your energy estate right is crucial to understanding how and where energy is being used, tracking and reporting it correctly and being able to target areas for improvement. Our Database Audit service will run a series of checks over your data to look for any issues and anomalies across your:

• Core Estate Structure Setup
  Checking that the core estate items such as Site, Site Groups, Meters, and Supply Points are configured correctly and conform to best practice

• Accounts and Billing
  Ensuring that the bills entered are valid and highlight any potential discrepancies, for example, active accounts not associated to contracts, active accounts in closed sites, and multiple bills entered for the same period

• Supply Points and Configuration
  Validating that the relationships between billing accounts, meters and contracts are accurate and valid and setup where there are active accounts

• Potentially Invalid Effective Periods
  Checking that effective date periods across different items are not overlapping or duplicated leading to potential under or over reporting

• Missing Data
  Verifying that active Meters or Accounts and others, are receiving data as expected, to highlight where data may be overdue or missing

Our comprehensive suite of database checks are used by our expert Bureau department, so you can be assured that these checks are trialled and tested by our own team.

We are experts in data and energy management, and we understand the complexity of energy estates and how important good quality data is when working towards targets, projecting for the future, and reducing overheads. Following your Database Healthcheck, our team of expert energy analysts can then work in partnership you to resolve these issues through Sigma estate re-configuration and setup.

We can then support you in cleansing and understanding the data you have available in Sigma, and equip you with the tools and good quality data needed to achieve your energy management targets.

For more information speak to your Key Account Manager, or get in touch with a member of our Customer Success team on our website or on 01908 690 018.