Balfour Beatty WorkPlace cuts carbon by 143 tonnes with 1E

Services provider aims to save £20,000 a year by switching PCs off

Global engineering and construction services provider, Balfour Beatty WorkPlace (BBW), has implemented IT solution provider 1E's NightWatchman Enterprise product in a bid to reduce energy waste and decrease carbon emissions - the company has said this will save it £20,000 a year.

The services provider expects to decrease carbon emissions by 143 tonnes in its first year of using the solution as part of a company-wide sustainability strategy.

The solution is able to tell when PCs are left on out of normal working hours and has found that this is true for 41 per cent of BBW's PCs.

It works by plugging into Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager, which allows BBW to deploy an agent that is installed on all its desktops and laptops. This can then communicate back to a central hub where the data on power consumption can be monitored and analysed.

The data received will then enable BBW to turn a machine off. It can also turn a machine back on for patching, with its built-in Wake-on-LAN component. A base-line data analysis can then be formulated on the power consumption of BBW's whole PC estate.

Alex Playford, IT project manager at Balfour Beatty, explained that the solution was implemented four months ago and that it is now possible for them to forecast exactly how much it will save them.

He explained that the fact that the solution is run centrally is key to its success: "If we were to go to every one of our sites and record the amount of energy spent and how to combat this, it would have cost us a lot of time and money," he said

The implementation and staff training both took a week to complete across all sites.

Playford explained that he chose 1E because the NightWatchman Enterprise solution was recommended by Microsoft and because the company had a good client list.