INDUSTRY SOLUTIONS
Business services for the way you work.
Start with buying guidance shaped around your industry’s operations, people and priorities.
Restaurant energy, internet and phone
A restaurant is among the most energy-intensive kinds of commercial building per square foot in the United States, and its bill is dominated by cooking and refrigeration rather than by heating or lighting. That shapes everything a food-service operator buys: the demand peak, the ventilation controls, the gas contract, and the internet circuit the card terminals depend on.
Read the guide ↗Dental practice energy, internet and phones
A dental practice's electric bill is decided by a handful of short, coincident equipment cycles, and its largest technology risk is a network that cannot carry imaging or a vendor that never signed a business associate agreement. This page covers what drives the peak, how much uplink cloud imaging actually needs, which HIPAA duties pass to suppliers, and what to assemble before asking for quotes.
Read the guide ↗Energy, networks & IT for manufacturers
Manufacturing is the sector where electricity is a production input rather than overhead. EIA's 2018 survey puts machine drive at just over half of manufacturing electricity, while process heating dominates total energy because most of that heat is burned fuel. What the plant's schedule, its motor load and its demand peak do to a contract decides far more than its floor area.
Read the guide ↗Energy and network uptime for medical offices
A medical practice has already been told to plan for downtime: the HIPAA Security Rule requires a documented contingency plan, and the network is what makes that plan executable. What decides the bill and the risk is the kind of clinical building, the essential electrical system it is required to have, the cold chain it must keep, and the vendor agreements it must hold.
Read the guide ↗Hotel energy and guest Wi-Fi: what to size
A hotel buys energy for a building that is never empty and connectivity for guests who judge it the way they judge their office. Lodging buildings are unusually energy-dense — EIA's survey puts them at 9 per cent of commercial energy use on 7 per cent of commercial floorspace — and the guest Wi-Fi question is a capacity problem, not a speed problem.
Read the guide ↗Warehouse connectivity, automation and energy
A warehouse is a factory for moving things, and every move is tracked by a device that needs a network. Scanners, tablets, voice-picking headsets, cameras, sensors and dispatch systems all fail together when connectivity does, so uptime matters more than raw bandwidth. On the energy side the building is unusual: it is one of the least intense categories in commercial real estate until refrigeration, charging or automation adds a concentrated load.
Read the guide ↗Retail stores: energy, payments and networks
A retail store buys three things at once and rarely treats them as one decision: the electricity that runs lighting and refrigeration, the network the registers and cameras ride on, and the phone and data services that connect the site to the chain. EIA's Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey shows why the energy side is larger than a sales-floor footprint suggests, and the payment rules explain why the network cannot be one flat shared LAN.
Read the guide ↗Internet, phones & IT for professional offices
A professional office is an unusual buyer: its energy load is small and predictable, while its exposure sits in the hours of client work lost to an outage and in the obligations that follow client data. That asymmetry — low utility spend, high continuity cost — is the reason connectivity and support should be compared against a documented workflow rather than against a competitor's feature list.
Read the guide ↗Franchise systems: energy and IT procurement
A franchise system buys energy and technology unit by unit, but the terms that constrain those buys are set at two levels: the franchise agreement, which can require approved suppliers, and the site, which has its own meter, address and circuit. The Franchise Disclosure Document is where the first is written down, and Item 8 is the one place most buyers ever see what their franchisor earns from the suppliers it mandates.
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