Advertise on podcast: InTouch with ENTOUCH

Real talk, real leadership, and the women redefining multi-site facilities management. The facilities management podcast built for everyone who runs FM behind the scenes — and the people pulling the next generation forward. Presented by ENTOUCH, Legendary Ladies is part podcast, part playbook, part rallying cry for the future of FM.

In this episode of InTouch with ENTOUCH, our host Michelle Dawn Mooney takes us on a deep dive into how ENTOUCH's AI and ML advancements are revolutionizing the energy management landscape. Simone Samms, Vice President of Product Management at ENTOUCH, joins us to shed light on how their innovative solutions are transforming the role of facility managers, making day-to-day operation more manageable and efficient.

Convenience stores (or C Stores) remain a vital necessity for many consumers. In today’s world, convenience stores are designed to be open everyday at all hours, and they are also expected to have all types of items a shopper might need. But with 24/7 operations throughout the year, this means convenient locations are using up a lot of energy. In turn, that means higher bills and costs to keep them running. Per DSO Electric, over 75 percent of that energy alone is just used for the lighting and refrigeration needs of the store. The rise of the convenience store has skyrocketed with the increase of cars on the road, and this likely won’t change. More cars equals more gas stations, and gas stations are usually accompanied with a convenience store. And that means more energy is being used. How can convenience stores manage to be energy-efficient while still meeting customer demands? On “ENTOUCH” podcast, Tyler Kern interviewed ENTOUCH’s CEO, Jon Bolen and the company’s EVP of Sales and Marketing, Todd Brinegar on what exactly owners of C stores can do to save costs and energy. “The evolution to a C store today is a restaurant, it's a grocery store, it is migrated so much past just walk-in coles that you can get a full sit down meal at a lot of convenience stores today,” said Brinegar. “The marketplace is demanding that convenience stores begin to adapt. The idea of sustainability and energy-savings is really permeating everything we do and everything we buy,” said Bolen.

If networks weren’t vulnerable to breaches, intrusions, viruses, and cyber-attacks, they wouldn’t need to be secure. Robust network security is a must for proper energy management solutions to be effective. Frank Menocal, CTO of ENTOUCH, spoke about the importance of network security for energy management systems and how IT departments can safeguard their networks. Menocal said cybersecurity requires constant vigilance, especially for those preparing to bring a new system online into an existing enterprise network. “The most important thing is to have a level of confidence in the vendor and the products you’re bringing in, that they’ve gone thorough and sound security review process. Because the last thing you want to do for all good intentions of bringing in a great system brings a trojan horse into your organization that opens up vulnerabilities.” Security measures from energy management service providers like ENTOUCH start with edge equipment that resides within the organization. “That’s the single most vulnerable point of any organization once you bring it into your network,” Menocal said. “We make sure our devices are not allowing any traffic destined for them that they don’t expect. So, the first thing we do is, we don’t allow any connections to be established on our devices.” All network traffic gets diverted to the cloud, not the devices. Another layer of protection Menocal said was critical is to ensure anything downloaded to the devices is digitally signed and secured. “All of it must be done through a secured communication channel that is only allowed to communicate with our cloud. There are multiple levels of security, both at a network level and at the application level, and also authentication. We authenticate any communications on that device. So, you’ve got three different levels of security.”

If networks weren’t vulnerable to breaches, intrusions, viruses, and cyber-attacks, they wouldn’t need to be secure. Robust network security is a must for proper energy management solutions to be effective. Frank Menocal, CTO of ENTOUCH, spoke about the importance of network security for energy management systems and how IT departments can safeguard their networks. Menocal said cybersecurity requires constant vigilance, especially for those preparing to bring a new system online into an existing enterprise network. “The most important thing is to have a level of confidence in the vendor and the products you’re bringing in, that they’ve gone thorough and sound security review process. Because the last thing you want to do for all good intentions of bringing in a great system brings a trojan horse into your organization that opens up vulnerabilities.” Security measures from energy management service providers like ENTOUCH start with edge equipment that resides within the organization. “That’s the single most vulnerable point of any organization once you bring it into your network,” Menocal said. “We make sure our devices are not allowing any traffic destined for them that they don’t expect. So, the first thing we do is, we don’t allow any connections to be established on our devices.” All network traffic gets diverted to the cloud, not the devices. Another layer of protection Menocal said was critical is to ensure anything downloaded to the devices is digitally signed and secured. “All of it must be done through a secured communication channel that is only allowed to communicate with our cloud. There are multiple levels of security, both at a network level and at the application level, and also authentication. We authenticate any communications on that device. So, you’ve got three different levels of security.”

Maximizing ROI is the goal for every organization, but what is the cost associated with inaction? That’s the question Tyler Kern posed to Jon Bolen, CEO of ENTOUCH. Bolen said that over time, the cost of inaction and inertia begins piling up. Those are areas well studied in terms of the environment and social justice, and the costs associated with nonaction are calculated. But Bolen says it’s something that too often gets overlooked in the commercial space. “The cost of inaction is the economic impact to your business by not investing.” When an organization recognizes a cost-savings solution and is ready to implement it, bureaucratic inertia, which stalls such an opportunity, also delays the savings. Bolen sighted one example of a customer prepared to enact an ENTOUCH solution that would pay for itself in less than a year and provide yearly cost savings of thousands of dollars, only to have the deal hung up over seven months. In that time, the customer lost additional savings potential. “In the time they spent navigating their own decision process, they left enough money on the table to have paid for the implementation of the entire project. But instead, they continued to spend that money on energy.”

ESG entered the mainstream of business conversation 15 years ago. Today, companies know the importance of achieving environmental, social, and governance goals for their stakeholders. ENTOUCH’s Todd Brinegar, EVP of sales and marketing, and Melissa Parsons, director of marketing, shared their insights on ESG and six key performance indicators (KPIs) to effectively track ESG strategy. When ESG strategies are deployed correctly, Parsons said the amount of greenhouse gas emission reductions businesses see is incredible, not to mention the energy reduction and bottom-line savings. With these savings, companies can invest in other opportunities to strengthen additional operational goals.

In this episode of InTouch with ENTOUCH, host Tyler Kern spoke with James Walton, ENTOUCH Founder and VP of Product and Commercialization at ENTOUCH, and Dana Guernsey, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Voltus, about the increasing need for energy consumption transparency. The three dive right into a lively discussion about the past, present, and future of energy solutions beginning with a discussion of the DER (distributed energy resources) solutions Voltus presently offers compared to familiar legacy solutions. "First, it's helpful to understand the market itself is different. There's an enormous shift in market needs with macro accelerators such as the ongoing rapid transition to renewables. You've got massive electrification of key sectors and growth of electric vehicles, climate change, and more frequent climate disasters are creating a real sense of urgency around grid resiliency," explained Guernsey.