EnergyCAP Blog

“Productivity Unleashed” was the theme of last month’s Catalyst Training for Savings Conference, and EnergyCAP, Inc. CEO Steve Heinz closed the conference with a keynote titled “10 Tips to Unleash Your Productivity.”  We shared tips 6–10 in our April 19th blog, and now the suspense is over. The top five tips are presented below.

“A new year, a new me.” It’s a phrase I’ve heard numerous times over the past three weeks, and I witness vigorous attempts to live up to the cliché every January when I walk into my local fitness facility. Of course, by February, the traffic has gotten back to “normal.” But unlike most of those “resolutioners” at my gym, EnergyCAP’s corporate commitment to a 2017 makeover is a promise you can take to the bank. In today’s blog, I’d like to share some events that will become exciting reality in the next 12 months. But first, you can “rest” assured that product leadership and customer intimacy remain EnergyCAP hallmarks, and we’re not going to change that in 2017. We’re going to stick with what we do best: Continuing product innovation Expanding and enhancing our service offerings Adding and training customer-focused personnel Delivering a value-packed annual training conference Specifically, here is what you can look forward to in 2017.

Webster’s dictionary defines stewardship as, “the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care.” As an adoptive parent, I can understand stewardship. Bringing a child who once belonged to different parents into your home is an act of stewardship. In fact, before the adoption is finalized and before you become the legal parent of the child, you’re called the child’s “steward.” You’ve been entrusted to care for a person which is not yet your own.

Our readers may remember a June blog where we shared a story about two of our EnergyCAP software developers who competed in a local golf charity event and ended up winning an all-expense-paid trip to Pebble Beach, California, to compete in the largest amateur golf tournament in the world. Today, we’ll tell you the end of that story. We’ll also share about next Tuesday's webinar—the latest in our Energy Leader Webinar series. You won't want to miss it!

Today's blog is company news with a surprising twist. Our regular readers may recall a recent blog on automated testing by EnergyCAP's Jared Matthews. Jared had an interesting experience on the golf course with co-worker Terry Yoder last week, and we'd like to tell you about it. On Tuesday, June 7, EnergyCAP, Inc. chipped in half the registration fee to send a group of eight golfers to the local Audi quattro Cup tournament, held at the Toftrees Golf Resort & Conference Center in State College, Pennsylvania. Jared and Terry thought they were just golfing to help out with a local charity event. Read on to discover what they received as a result of their participation!

Today’s blog reveals feedback from our post-Catalyst conference survey. Every year after our annual Catalyst Training for Savings conference, we provide an opportunity for attendees to share perspectives on their Catalyst experience. Congratulations to EnergyCAP client Lou Castelli for winning the survey Amazon Gift Card drawing!

Today is day three at Catalyst, EnergyCAP’s annual Training for Savings conference, and we thought we’d blog some of the pictorial highlights to give you an idea of the experience that we are providing this week in State College, Pennsylvania.

Jared Matthews is Software Quality Assurance Engineer at EnergyCAP. As EnergyCAP, Inc. has taken its software products online, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have assumed increasing importance in our product development and quality assurance testing. This blog is about EnergyCAP’s API development, and exciting changes in our quality assurance processes that are making our online software versions more robust and useful for our growing client base.

If he was still alive, Steve Jobs would probably have grinned at last year’s news that YouTube moved from Flash to HTML5 as its primary technology for delivering videos. Click here for a great article about YouTube’s four-year transition. And here’s the 2010 Steve Jobs letter that some say sealed the fate of Flash as a primary web development platform. But what does this have to do with energy management?

Does utility bill data entry burden you? It’s been more than a year now since we began promoting our Bill CAPture service here at EnergyCAP to provide efficient and relatively inexpensive ways for our customers to process their utility billing data. The support and interest we received up front from many long-time users of our energy management software gave us assurance that we were on the right track, and a long-term state government contract will be helping us to build out this robust program even more.

It’s usually nice to get those letters that start off with “I’m pleased to inform you …” It’s sort of the opposite of the “Dear John” letter. Sure, sometimes someone is just trying to sell you something, but often the news is genuinely good, and that was the case last month when we received our notification from Energy Manager Today that EnergyCAP, Inc. had won a Product of the Year award for our EnergyCAP energy management software. This wasn't the first national award we claimed this year, but the third. So in some ways, it was icing on the cake—a great way to cap a calendar year of progress and innovation. This most recent award has delighted me for three reasons:

We’ve been blogging recently about personnel and departments here at EnergyCAP, and today we’d like to introduce you to our illustrious Sales team. Nationally, EnergyCAP sales are handled by five staff members who all work out of our company headquarters in State College, PA. They are responsible for pursuing marketing leads, attending trade shows, making contacts with prospect organizations, generating and processing RFI/RFP documents, and generally making the sales process as convenient, pleasant, and effective as possible for our valued prospects and clients. I think you will enjoy meeting them!

Small but mighty, the EnergyCAP finance department wields the power of the purse with precision and purpose. Today’s blog introduces our two-member Finance team. 

In any field, including energy management, there can be real power and opportunity in new beginnings. I took a trip to Wilmington, Delaware, last Saturday to hold my first grandson for the very first time. We saw him in the hospital on day two of his adventure outside the womb, and I have to say that the experience was very special and delightful for me. I’m not sure what he thought of the experience, because he wasn’t talking any language I could understand. In fact, he wasn’t communicating much at all, but that didn’t change my very positive attitude. And my daughter and son-in-law were obviously in a similar frame of mind.

Great news! We’ve totally redesigned EnergyCAP.com to better serve our website visitors. While there are many things I like—no love—about our new website, I'll highlight my seven favorite things:

The EnergyCAP team is up by four this summer, thanks to the addition of two new full-time staff members and two temporary summer employees. We’d like to introduce them, and share their expertise and responsibilities in today’s blog.

Make new friends, but keep the old, One is silver, and the other, gold. The Girl Scout campfire song is old, but the sentiment is current, especially in business: It’s wonderful to find a new customer, but even better to keep your existing customers so happy that they keep coming back for more. At EnergyCAP, our Customer Service team has the challenge of doing exactly that. In today’s blog, we unmask the EnergyCAP Customer Service department.

About 120 EnergyCAP users from North America recently gathered for the Catalyst Training Conference for hands-on training, networking with other users, one-on-one meetings with staff, new feature demos, and fun social events. In case you missed it, here are some highlights, including the Catalyst Spoof video:

They're the geekiest of the geeks. Superheroes of cyberspace, they're known for a techno-speak vocabulary that is just short of incantation. They mysteriously appear and disappear from secure server rooms like Clark Kent from a telephone booth, keeping odd hours to perform their computer network miracles at times when the demand for bandwidth is lowest. They're the Operations team (Ops) at EnergyCAP. Today’s blog unmasks their valuable activity on behalf of our staff and our clients.  

May I share some good news with you? EnergyCAP is officially an Environmental Leader! We were notified by Environmental Leader (EL) magazine that EnergyCAP software was selected as an Environmental Leader Product of the Year. The EL Product & Project Awards recognize excellence in environmental and sustainability management. According to EL Program Director Jennifer Hermes, the third year of this annual awards program drew more entries than ever, and competition was steep. So how did we win?

An email marketing company called Aweber studied millions of email subject lines and discovered the most successful subject line ever. This email subject line delivered stellar results—an average email open rate of 90%! That means 9 out of 10 people who received an email with that subject line opened it. Those of us in the email marketing industry know an open rate of 90% is almost unheard of, since average email open rates are more like 23%. So what is the most successful email subject line ever?

EnergyCAP, Inc. is based on Christian business principles, and we have a company chaplain. In addition to leading our marketing department, I stepped into the chaplain position in 2015. Today’s blog comes from me as the company chaplain. You know, life’s unpredictable. You don’t know what’s going to happen. I didn’t know that when I was 21, I would suffer with depression and be hospitalized. And a few years later, after our daughter was born, I didn’t know that we would deal with infertility – the doctors would say we couldn’t have any more children. That led us to adopt our two boys. I didn’t know how parenting two traumatized boys who had never known a father would be. And I didn’t know that at 36, I would get a blood clot in my lung, which would challenge any concept that I was really in control of my life. Yeah, life has been pretty unpredictable. But do you know what was constant in those dark, uncertain times?

As the confetti settles from New Year celebrations and party hats are put away, we'd like to offer a top ten blog countdown. In 2014, we published 89 blog posts. Which posts were most popular? Let's find out as we count down the top blog posts of 2014.

Here's good news for 2015—EnergyCAP is hiring! We’re looking to fill two important positions on our Implementation Solutions team. This department works with clients to implement EnergyCAP at their organization. EnergyCAP users are great candidates because they’re familiar with the software and have gone through the implementation process already. While we’re not looking to steal talent from anyone, we realize that sometimes a better fit with a different organization benefits all the parties involved. We also realize that our blog network is part of a much larger network, so please forward this information to friends or colleagues who might be interested! Here are the two job openings:

In the past, we've reached out to a handful of customers with limited labor resources who were struggling to stay ahead of the utility bill data that was pouring into their offices—in the form of paper utility bills or diverse file formats. That energy information had to find its way into the EnergyCAP database, and they needed help from someone with expertise dealing with energy data to help ensure data integrity throughout the process.

In these days of Ask Google and Siri, it’s frustrating for many energy managers to be so reliant upon data delivered up via snail mail and served on sheets of paper in small print. And then there’s the onerous task of data entry—matching up all the tracked items with the correct field in your spreadsheet or database. Surely there must be a better way!

We all know about four-letter words. We learned a couple of them when we were young, but when we tried them out in conversation, we discovered they were non-starters, especially with mom. My parents had ways of ensuring that an important lesson was learned—some words are dirty and some words are clean. A number of times, the dirty words seemed to have four letters. But not always. And as I grew older, they grew harder to classify. Today’s blog is about a fourteen-letter word which, if we’re honest, can fall on either end of the clean/dirty continuum, depending on the manner in which the word is used, who is using it, and for what purpose.

Our three-day annual Catalyst training conference provided a glimpse into the future for clients using the online version of EnergyCAP. Some of our training resources are now available online, whether you attended or not. Catalyst, which concluded May 1, offered attendees three training tracks, good food, networking opportunities, and individual consultations with EnergyCAP project managers and technical support personnel. This year, the emphasis was hands-on training using Version 3.2, which is scheduled for a phased release this quarter. The new version will include a totally new chargebacks module offering an intuitive graphical interface for visualizing and customizing complex chargeback account-meter relationships. Here's why people came to Catalyst:

EnergyCAP got some good news this month. We've been selected by the ENERGY STAR program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to receive our fourth Partner of the Year award in four years. It's also our second Sustained Excellence recognition. And we are in pretty good company—other corporations that made the cut include Boeing, J.C. Penney, and General Motors. So what did our small software company do to stand in the midst of these corporate giants? You can look on the ENERGY STAR website for the "official" list of accomplishments, but I don't think that really answers the question. Here's my take on how Sustained Excellence happens at EnergyCAP.