Thoughts

5 min read

GRESB Results 2017: How SIERA Delivered Immense Efficiencies

Thoughts

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    EVORA

The GRESB Results 2017 are out and the EVORA team is eagerly reviewing the scorecards and reports to see how our participating clients fared. Early indications are that the news is generally excellent. EVORA will have a presence at the results event in London next week, so we look forward to joining the other attendees to get GRESB’s view on the overall direction of travel.

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As one of the members of EVORA’s GRESB delivery team, I’ve been reflecting on the journey we took over the summer months to get to this point.

From a numbers perspective, it’s interesting to me that the effort to collate, validate and aggregate many and often disparate data points gets distilled down to a handful of scores across the main GRESB Aspects. The process of data gathering is a necessary function and can take a lot of time, but it’s important that participants and their delivery partners allow for time to understand the materiality of the data in each of the Aspects in relation to their business strategies. However, this is easier said than done when delivery times can often get compressed near the submission deadline. So it’s even more important that there are tools that drive efficiency in the data gathering and validation process so that we can take a step back from the detail to understand what the data is showing us.

[clickToTweet tweet=”@GRESB #data gathering can take a huge amount of time. The good news is that much of it can be automated with #SIERA.” quote=”GRESB data gathering can take a huge amount of time. The good news is that much of it can be automated.”]

For us as a delivery team, our system SIERA was vital in being able to provide the efficiencies we needed to be able to manage the sheer quantum of data that we were handling. The number of GRESB submissions that we were directly involved with delivering increased from last year by 57% to 36 in 2017. As many will appreciate, the sharp end of the data processing often relates to asset level data as this is more granular, so usually more assets means more data. To put this into context, in these direct submissions, we saw an 84% increase to just shy of 1000 assets collectively that without SIERA we would likely have found far more time consuming to manage.

New to SIERA? This video explains the software in less than 2 minutes.

SIERA is one of the systems that is helping with the shift away from manual entry to more automated transfer of data to the GRESB portal. Our Managing Director, Chris Bennett, wrote previously on how a more seamless transfer of data is welcome but it’s important we have visual clarity of the data being submitted. I’d like to explain a little more how SIERA helped provide both visual clarity but also massive efficiencies.

First of all, we had replicated GRESB’s Asset Level interface in SIERA so we could automate the transfer of not just the Performance Indicators but also a key set of qualitative asset level question responses and building characteristics. This meant that when we were happy with the data we could simply upload the SIERA template directly into the GRESB Portal and populate the Portfolio data, thus entirely removing the need to manually enter data into the GRESB Asset Spreadsheet.

This integration is only possible because SIERA’s database structure is fully aligned to GRESB’s data requirements. Even GHG calculations and waste volumes by disposal route are automatically calculated, which further reduces the chance of human error.

[clickToTweet tweet=”EVORA’s @sierasoftware significantly reduces the risks of human error when it comes to @GRESB’s #data requirements.” quote=”SIERA software significantly reduces the risks of human error when it comes to GRESB’s data requirements.”]

In 2017 we took SIERA beyond the Asset level interface to drive further efficiencies by automatically calculating the responses to a number of percentage coverage-related questions. Again, this was only possible due to SIERA’s ability to hold broad range of data types. For example, SIERA can store and profile EPC data for any EU region which meant that SIERA could automate the response to Q31, saving vast amounts of time using what would otherwise likely be spreadsheets. SIERA also replicated question RC 5.1 utilising the property characteristic information SIERA holds, which helped to align responses to the Performance Indicators.

The examples that I have highlighted in this post demonstrate how SIERA helped to save countless hours of data input which we typically estimated to be around a 70% time saving. EVORA is continuing to expand the question responses SIERA can auto-calculate and survey Aspects that can be more efficiently answered, so we look forward to being able to support on even more GRESB submissions in 2018.


Questions? Come and meet us at the GRESB Results 2017 Launch event in London on 13th September. To book a demonstration of SIERA, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

 


GRESB Premier PartnerAs a GRESB Real Estate Premier Partner, we are perfectly positioned to provide GRESB support. View our official Premier Partner profile.

We can work with you to complete the submission and understand your scoring, as well as develop a sustainability plan that will improve your future GRESB performance and align with your organisation’s key environmental objectives.