# Daily Sentinel Trend Report: Generate daily energy consumption reports for your monitored sites in the Wattics dashboard

Keep a closer eye on your daily site activity with our new automated reporting functionality
Written by Amy Ryan
Updated over a week ago

As working days become increasingly busy, it can be challenging for many businesses to stay on top of what their site(s) are consuming and to have real insight into whether their energy usage is in line with expectation. Businesses can be left with an uncomfortable surprise at the end of the month, or indeed miss the opportunity for savings. Wattics has released a reporting tool that builds on the existing 'Sentinel Report' definition: our new 'Daily Sentinel Report'.

You're now able to receive daily consumption reports that notify you as to whether your monitored facilities have fallen out of line with historical characteristic usage - be it electricity, gas, water, or another metric.

*Please note that you require admin access in order to be able to generate these reports and 'Report definitions' must be enabled in your dashboard.

**Non-Admins can be granted access to the Reports definitions feature; however, the reports will only be visible to them and cannot be associated with another user

Table of contents

1. Where do I find the new report in the Wattics dashboard?

2. What new features does the report contain?

3. Daily Sentinel Report

4. Use Case

1. Where do I find the new report in the Wattics dashboard?

In order to locate the report, navigate to the 'Admin' tab to access the administration area, and click on the reports icon. Then hit the reports icon as shown in the image below to bring up 'Report definitions':

Once you have accessed the reports tool, you can begin putting together your daily reports by clicking on 'New report definition'.

2. What new features does this report contain?

The new report allows for several new settings:

i. Frequency, where you can now select a 'daily' frequency for transmission from the dropdown menu. The new report will appear in the list of report definitions, as soon as you have selected 'daily frequency', as seen below:

ii. Transmission time, where you can set the time a daily report is to be sent:

iii. You can create a Preview of your report by clicking here:

Finally, if you are satisfied with the outputs of your reports, you can select who you would like to receive them before hitting 'Save'.

Now let's take a look at what this report looks like in more detail:

3. Daily Sentinel Report

The 'Daily Sentinel Report' shows all meters linked to a site and reflects a consumption pattern over the course of the day against an expected range of values. This range of values is based on what the system has learned to expect to see based on historical performance for any given day based on the frequency of incoming data.

In this report you will see whether actual consumption shown by the black line below, is sitting within the expected range indicated by the green band. The 'Daily Sentinel Report' is a convenient way to receive information on your daily performance. You can look more critically at instances of excessive consumption, allowing you to investigate activity in order to drive operational improvements.

Please see several examples of outputs below:

4. Use Case - 'Alpha Hotel' Hotel Chain

Let's imagine we are a hotel - ‘Alpha Hotel’, with multiple locations spread nationally. Each site consists of the same number of rooms and floors, operates 24 hours a day, houses one restaurant and a bar, and all fixtures and fittings are designed to the same specification.

Our 'Daily Sentinel Report' gives insight into characteristic usage for a particular meter, so going beyond merely daily consumption thresholds to consider what expected usage is at a specific time for a data point. With this information a hotel manager is able to precisely target activities and behaviours that are occurring on site:

- What did the team working the night shift on Monday do differently to the team the previous Monday to cause usage outside of typical range - despite hotel occupancy being at a similar level?

- Why were there energy spikes over the second weekend of the month when front of house staff arrived for their morning shifts but not on the others?

- Why did the Conference Area see elevated consumption beyond expected band range in a room of set capacity on the second Tuesday of the month compared to the other Tuesdays?

- Why did the Bar record significantly below average consumption last Saturday compared to the one before- was lower footfall an influence?

- Why is the Landlord Area falling out of the historically established range since last week?

- After a change to the housekeeping team on Wednesday mornings, are there differences in their standard practice to account for the energy spikes that are now regularly appearing?

Through this report, a hotel manager is able to see on a daily basis how meters are performing in each section of their hotel enabling them to home their investigations into their operations. By utilising this approach, the hotel manager is efficiently able to interrogate unusual consumption and target energy savings to bring site usage in line with an established historically learned bandwidth - resulting not only in cost benefits but a reduction in carbon footprint.

Further, this granular visibility of site performance allows for continuity in terms of monitoring. It is understood how a site should be performing, so notwithstanding changes to staff - or management, from month to month, it is possible to maintain a reliable and enduring KPI. An incoming team knows what typical performance looks like within the hotel, and any significant deviation would suggest that operations need investigation.

At a national level, a hotel manager has insight into how efficiently hotels are performing across the portfolio. This offers the potential to rank sites, identify best performers and to share concepts of best practice with hotels that are perhaps not performing as well as others.

This is just one example of how the new ‘Daily Sentinel Report’ can be implemented for your organisation or your clients' buildings, facilities, stores or hotels that you manage.

For further support and clarifications on the Daily Sentinel Report feature, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team:

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