Frequently Asked Questions

1. How much will a fully integrated BENCHMATA III, BENCHMATA II, or BENCHMATA I system cost?
   • The cost of BENCHMATA automated benchmarking systems vary depending upon the data mining and programmable utility data interface for BENCHMATA III, II, or I. Please fill out the inquiry form, and our engineer will contact you. It should take 2 to 3 weeks to bring your utility or organization up to speed as a fully-integrated automated benchmarking system data provider in Energy Star.
2. Who will figure out the data from utilities systems for the automatic feed into the BENCHMATA system?
   • Our engineers know exactly how to configure the data, and are experts in data mining from utilities systems, provided the access to the data warehouses. We assure you complete confidentiality and professionalism in our approach.
3. Our systems have both Legacy and Modern RDBMS. Where would BENCHMATA reside?
   • Our BENCHMATA database would be standalone on a modern RDBMS system, your legacy data would be programmed to be brought into this system. BENCHMATA could reside on a Windows based system or other Microsoft operating system machines. We can provide an Oracle database server for your integration.
4. How will the breaks in data be handled in BENCHMATA?
   • If your data feed has breaks of a few days, it can be programmed to fill in the gaps. If the gap is more than a few days, BENCHMATA advises exactly what steps should be taken by the customer to fix their data. If you want to have consistent start dates and end dates (such as the beginning or ending of the month), we offer a solution in BENCHMATA to use that facility to fix the data before sending it to Energy Star.
5. Can we define our own building types?
   • Yes, you can define your own building types, along with 2 other definable types. Based on these, you can search the buildings which fall under these categories, and generate group reports and print them in PDF , Excel and page layout formats.
6. What space types are provided? BENCHMATA systems provide these space types, covered as of Energy Star Portfolio Manager's latest release and by May 1, 2009. This is subject to change, but newer versions of BENCHMATA front end GUI can sustain changes in Energy Star space types.
   • Parking
   • Hospital (Acute Care or Child)
   • Hotel/Motel
   • Medical Office
   • Retail
   • Office
   • Bank/Financial Institution
   • Courthouse
   • Swimming Pool
   • Computer Data Center
   • Residence Hall/Dormitory
   • K-12 School
   • Supermarket/Grocery
   • Warehouse
   • Other
   • Multi Family Housing Units
   • Waste Water Treatment Plant
7. What timeframe is required to bring a utility on line and fully-automated for data uploads and downloads with portfolio manager?
   • It can take 2 to 3 weeks / or more using BENCHMATA to configure your system to be fully functional if you are a large utility or ESP. For smaller municipalities or organizations that do not have data readily available and will use the BENCHMATA user interface, that time period would ideally be one week, including the training. There is no charge for training, and we provide user manuals as needed for a small group or program managers. For a larger audience, extra charges may be quoted to cover this training.
8. We already have a billing company helping us to upload our billing data. What benefit does BENCHMATA provide?
   • BENCHMATA gives the capability to program scheduled uploads and downloads and change or move meters from one building to another, and transmit to Energy Star portfolio manager without getting your buildings out of sync.
   • We provide Google mapping capability as a visual aspect of the system which is currently not provided by any other company. You can plot your buildings, see scores obtained, print reports, and be at the top of your Benchmarking needs for your Energy Star certificates and labels. The capabilities provided by scores of billing companies are mostly one-way, from their user interface to Energy Star. For the capturing of scores and the display back to the users, most companies have their own calculations and formulas configured to give you a false score which might be different than the Energy Star score for your building.
9. Why BENCHMATA?
   • The system is specifically designed to help large and small utility companies and local and state governments to benchmark and monitor their customers' buildings at a much faster pace once it is fully integrated. Many states have legislation in place to tackle energy benchmarking, and are looking towards utility companies for 12 months of energy usage data. Most of the time, requests for data is manually handled and very tedious for querying and inserting it manually into Energy Star portfolio manager. We have the first commercially available solution. We will help you comply with requirements and help you create specific instructions, so that your customers' needs of Energy labels and greenhouse gas emission controls are handled at a faster pace.
   • The market of benchmarking of energy data is relatively small, but is continuing to expand. The vast majority of businesses with successful benchmarking data integration strategies are those that have the financial resources to frequently update and redesign their systems. They continue to expand their energy data strategies with organizations like the EPA's Energy Star. Such utilities, universities, city and state governments hire and/or retain "information systems" employees to develop, support, and maintain these systems, or alternatively purchase services from multiple parties, integrate these services, and gather or purchase information on their benchmarking strategies. By contrast, BENCHMATA clients are organizations that want to be able to quickly build, manage, and maintain a system to transfer bulk data upload to EPA's Energy Star portfolio manager. They benchmark data maintenance solutions without incurring substantial costs, by relying upon additional employees or multiple vendors, at the same time providing comparison reports and various energy data usage reports including advance reports from Energy Star and inbuilt reports based on the locally housed database. We provide a complete solution and engineering model to transfer usage and cost data to the EPA's servers within the set security protocols and using the schemas provided. BENCHMATA markets its products to small and large organizations that want total, one-stop solutions to benchmarking data upload strategy and reports of energy usage. Business-to-Business Segment -- According to the preliminary estimates, Benchmarking data uploads will be a key component of the energy conservation and monitoring of benchmarked energy data, for the set goals to achieve the desired reduction in energy consumption for a given set of years. This business will keep on growing as other utilities across the continental United States will require to upgrade their systems to handle the executive legislations and orders to benchmark the energy data for a set period so that the energy consumption and green house gases are reduced by a given set percentage on per state-to-state model in the United States.
10. What kind of Software is used in Automation?
    • BECNHMATA uses JAVA services provided by Energy Star configurable via BENCHMATA to communicate with Energy Star's servers. Oracle database is used as the back end. Sybase PowerBuilder IDE is used for the front end and parsing of complex XML routines. Windows batch files programs are also specifically designed for and recommended by Energy Star.
11. What hardware will our systems need?
    • Our engineers will specifically check your data needs and if needed place BENCHMATA on an already available system in your organization or provide Oracle servers to handle this.

Please contact BENCHMATA with any other questions, and we would be glad to respond to them as soon as possible.