Business Requirement Statement Web- based Platform for the Energy Certificate tool ‐

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About this document

Background/ Understanding:

About Energy Certificates Energy Certificate is a tool developed by DHL internally to measure the energy efficiency of a warehouse operation by normalising the energy consumption against a set of ‘benchmark’ data. Currently the implementation process is as follow:- ‐ Customer fills up a questionnaire built on Excel. Completed questionnaires are then passed to DHL team for further processing. DHL uses a proprietary backend engine to compute the necessary benchmark statistics, and creates an ‘Energy Certificate’ (EC), which is a PDF document capturing the key information about the energy efficiency for the building. In particular, the EC shows an index for each warehouse. This index is a key output from the backend engine. Typically customers uses the index to compare different sites hence identify sites to focus on for improvement. While this process has worked well, we see various opportunities to improve the tool - from ‐the engagement process to the analytics portion. The primary objective of the project is thus to enhance the current ‘Energy Certificate’. There are several aspects of improvement that we would like to see:

1. To make the process more streamlined. This is to be achieved by creating a Web- ‐based version of the Energy Certificate, with intuitive input and output interfaces

2. To enhance the reporting and analysis part of the tool by providing more analysis options with intuitive visual reporting

3. To build what- if analysis function to give users option to test different energy ‐efficiency improvement levers to see which ones are more effective

The purpose of this document is to create a common understanding on the scope for the design and development of a Web- based platform for the Energy Certificate tool‐

Business Requirement Statement Web- based Platform for the Energy Certificate tool ‐

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Proposed Solution

Timeline

Other remarks

About the Project The objective of the project is to build the Energy Certificate Online (ECO) platform which comprises of the following functionalities: (

1. User input interface a. This could be a questionnaire- based input to capture operations data for a ‐

warehouse, including size of warehouse, type of warehouse, temperature setting, heating/cooling data, lighting data, as well as energy consumption data, etc

b. The forms generated should be dynamical as the types of warehouse would determine the different data required. The input interface could be different for different data type as well

2. Backend engine calculation a. The model* uses a ‘benchmark’ warehouse as a model, computes the

benchmark energy consumption using the operations data captured in the user interface. The engine needs to pull external data (i.e outside of user- ‐specific data) in order calculate benchmark energy consumption

b. There should be an admin function which allows changes for various parameters used in the model to be updated

3. Reporting and analytics a. Results from the calculation from the backend are to be presented in a

visually intuitive manner, and provide more analysis dimensions (beyond a single index)

b. Data should be stored in a database to facilitate historical analysis c. To build a what- if analysis function – where users could test out different ‐

levers and see their impact on the efficiency indicators Remarks: *The model and the calculation methods will be provided by GTL

The project is proposed for term 1 of the academic year 2014/15. However preliminary work is expected to start in mid June.

The project comes under GTL, a DHL- SMU collaboration, where all IP related issues are ‐covered under the umbrella master agreement between DHL and SMU. The detailed scope document will be available when the team is confirmed. Meanwhile any questions should be directed to gtl@smu.edu.sg)