Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Chris Carter, CEO of Approyo (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like this is a use case that is something you could do for many other verticals because this includes energy costs savings, for example, which most companies with facilities tend to need.

Chris Carter: That is correct. We have been able to take that specific use case and move it to other industries. We have been working with manufacturing plants and hotel chains to see how they could bring forth a bit more to the bottom line. It has moved very nicely into other areas, and it can scale into those other industries very cleanly and easily.

SM: What data sets are you feeding into your solution to be able to optimize the energy cost for facilities at these different companies?

CC: We look at a lot of different components with under-average facility cost. What are their energy costs? What are their quarterly costs? What are their patients’ days in a hospital? What are they leveraging in regards to their staff? How many rooms are in use, and how many are not in use? Where are they putting  patients within the hospital itself`? If you have a floor plan, you might have one wing that has only one patient compared to another wing that is almost full and you decided to put that one patient here, but there is no rhyme or reason. Putting the rhyme or reason to where you are putting patients, how you are bringing them into the facility, how you are running specific areas within that hospital, etc.

All those have little weighted factors that can be used, and you can then understand how you can take some of the patient-per-day cost associated with that, as well as for the hospital itself – understanding your facility’s cost and to lower that cost. Then you can see why there are spikes compared to other periods. Take linens, for example. Maybe you have specific days where linens are being done or deliveries are being taken care of. Little things like that can give you insights, and that data can be really useful in determining how you can change a little piece of your business for the better.

SM: That tells me that you do have specific heuristics as far as hospitals are concerned. So, it is not just energy optimization for facilities but energy optimization for hospitals which have special heuristics. You see to understand those heuristics. It looks like you have expertise on hospital energy optimization at this point.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Chris Carter, CEO of Approyo
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