SAS® OnDemand for Education: Sustainability Management
Track, manage and communicate sustainable performance through the Web
Benefits
- Standardize reporting on sustainability management frameworks such as AASHE STARS.
- Capture a single source of trusted sustainability institutional knowledge.
- Know your institution's energy footprint.
- Simplify data collection and management.
- Know which metrics are related and which initiatives will have the greatest effect.
Features
- On-demand access to sustainability tracking and reporting.
- Aggregate, measure and evaluate emissions for Scope 1, 2 and 3 activities.
- AASHE STARS, Campus Action Plan and Sustainability Strategy Reporting.
- Business intelligence with integrated advanced analytics.
- Data integration.
Duke University is using SAS to automate data collection and reporting efforts for the university's GHG inventory and AASHE STARS assessment, and to analyze building energy use and carbon calculation for the campus community.
How SAS® Is Different
Because the solution is hosted by SAS, higher education institutions can take advantage of robust SAS data management and analytics to forecast carbon usage, energy usage and costs of sustainability, without the IT overhead:
- By using SAS' hosted solution, institutions don't need to purchase expensive hardware and hire the staff to support it. SAS takes over the bulk of data cleansing, consolidation, analysis and reporting activities, leaving the institution to focus its time on improving sustainability efforts.
- SAS' holistic solution can access siloed sustainability data and provide visual reports and analysis to multiple users, including the sustainability director, the sustainability team, energy and facilities managers, and institutional researchers.
- SAS offers robust capabilities for standardizing and customizing Web reports for a wide range of audiences. With configurable prebuilt reports, the flexibility to easily publish the results of analyses saves precious time and resources in communicating with stakeholders, and a flexible BI platform quickly runs reports on today's data or allows the user to generate custom data views.
- SAS' sustainability solution packages the power of SAS Analytics in an easy-to-use, point-and-click environment. With SAS Analytics, you can take a visionary approach to advanced analysis to quickly determine the performance measures that really matter.
- SAS offers optional integration with a workflow rules engine, so you can route reports and data submissions for approval prior to integrating with the sustainability database.
Benefits
- Standardize reporting on sustainability management frameworks such as AASHE STARS.
Create your own set of performance indicators, or follow externally published standard frameworks such as AASHE STARS or the SEI College Sustainability Report Card. Underlying performance management technology makes it easy to create hierarchical relationships, roll-ups, formula-driven metrics and specialized visualization techniques.
- Capture a single source of trusted sustainability institutional knowledge.
By establishing a platform that is broad enough to handle multiple constituents' demands, yet nimble enough to respond quickly, institutions can efficiently perform optimal analysis and reporting. For internal problem investigation, users can navigate easily through hierarchical dashboards or reports and quickly focus on hidden anomalies through flags and alerts. Users share knowledge and collaborate by using notes and discussion threads.
- Know your institution's energy footprint.
Through greenhouse gas emissions modeling, SAS structures data at the most detailed level available (meter or asset) so that it can be rolled up into departments, campus or operating units to understand and analyze actual energy consumption and carbon footprint of an institution. Transparent accounting for energy and emissions provides an audit trail with the source of emissions factors used in the calculations.
- Simplify data collection and management.
With this hosted solution, data is sent to SAS to be extracted, transformed and loaded into the system. SAS receives virtually any format of data and schedules the gathering of that data to fit your needs. Through a simple Web interface, you also can manually enter data for AASHE STARS or sustainability-related metrics and show prior period results to help flag anomalies.
- Know which metrics are related and which initiatives will have the greatest effect.
Reporting on historical numbers is only half the story. With SAS embedded analytics, you can understand relationships between metrics, run time series forecasts and perform simple what-if scenarios. In return, you will gain invaluable insights into the future and defendable statistics to support your strategy and commitments.
Features
- On-demand access to sustainability tracking and reporting.
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- Significant savings through quick deployment, low overhead, and minimal hardware and staffing requirements.
- Rapid deployment through prebuilt templates for Climate Action Plans, AASHE STARS and emissions inventory reports.
- Aggregate, measure and evaluate emissions for Scope 1, 2 and 3 activities.
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- Multidimensional modeling and analysis of carbon footprint and related environmental program assets.
- Prebuilt Web-based emissions reports for greenhouse gas reporting.
- Default standard reports with the ability to edit or create new reports.
- AASHE STARS, Campus Action Plan and Sustainability Strategy Reporting.
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- Web interface to design or select sustainability KPIs and generate custom reports.
- Drill-down capability to investigate problems or link to supporting reports and spreadsheets.
- User-customizable alerts and user subscription to alerts based on thresholds.
- Business intelligence with integrated advanced analytics.
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- Interactive dashboards, collaboration and alerts.
- Values, colors, range icons and descriptive text illustrate sustainability strategy.
- Forecasting, statistical correlation procedures and predictive analytics.
- Sustainability portal with access to default templates of sustainability reports, emissions reports, AASHE STARS reports and sustainability metrics and/or strategies.
- Comprehensive ad hoc analysis and self-service OLAP reporting.
- Web portals allow sharing of insights across the institution.
- Data integration.
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- Web interface for manual data collection of AASHE STARS and/or Climate Action Plans.
- Data management to integrate disparate data.
- Data warehousing or data mart capability.
- Defined process for sending data to SAS and receiving data from SAS.
Demos
Screenshots
Easy-to-use reports provide both tabular and graphical reporting as well as conditional highlighting to help identify problem areas.
The AASHE STARS dashboards provide a quick view of performance in the three categories of AASHE.
The AASHE STARS reports show more detailed drill-down reporting on AASHE STARS performance.
The broad range of data visualization choices provides powerful understanding of energy and emissions performance in a multidimensional view of the institution.
System Requirements
Client environment
Windows (x86-32):
- Windows XP Professional
- Windows 2000 Professional
- Windows NT
- Windows 7
Web browser:
- A Web browser with cookies and JavaScript enabled
Server environment
- None
Required/optional software
- A Web browser with cookies and JavaScript enabled
Other
- Energy, transportation, water, waste and other data can be sent to SAS via an FTP load
- A template of required data for emissions modeling will be sent to the customer to be completed
- Preferred file formats: SAS data file, SQL, Excel, CSV or TXT
Ready to learn more?
Call us at 1-800-727-0025 (US and Canada) or request more information.
