Aurora:
Let's kick this meeting off. Good morning. Greetings. My name is Aurora Cutler. I
am the communications lead for [inaudible 00:00:09] Operations. Welcome to
December's Peer Learning webinar. This marks the first webinar of the fiscal
year. We have changed the schedule of these webinars from once a month to
once every two months. The next webinar will occur on February 5th.
We do have an amazing line up of speakers today. It seems like some of us have
had problems getting in, but hopefully everyone, all of the speakers are out
there at least on the phone. I will be doing the slides so just say next slide, or I'll
try to keep up with your pace.
So, let's just kick it off with Anna. I'd like to introduce you to our director of
[inaudible 00:00:49] Operations, Anna [inaudible 00:00:51]. Thank you for joining
Anna.
Anna:
Sure. Thanks Aurora. Okay. So tell me what slide you have up. Is it the first one?
With the bike?
Aurora:
Yes, I have a picture of you in front of me.
Anna:
Oh, okay. Great. Well, I'm excited just to give everyone an update here on what
has happened, amazing work that's happened and transpired over the last few
months. Go ahead and hit the next slide Aurora.
So, we've been able to actually shift to a nationwide collective. This is pretty
momentous because it's going to help us as an agency as a whole grow to the
next generation of Sustainable Operations. We had a lot of amazing input across
the entire agency into building our agreement to develop a nationwide
collective, and it was really important that we do this in a way that we kept the
inspiration and our field base innovation that has been our trademark of success,
but that we match it with this appropriate, engaged top-down focus on policy
direction and comprehensive performance.
In mid-September we had an 11-page agency wide agreement that got signed by
every single member of the National Leadership Council. This includes every
region, every research station, the northeastern area and also the Washington
office. All of you are parts of the region that we're able to do this and be at this
stage now with our Sustainable Operations work.
You've helped the agency understand that [inaudible 00:02:30] is part of our
value system. It's a response to our climate-change work and it's something
that's really inspiring and can be driven from the field. One thing you'll note is
that we've been using the world nationwide, not national because they have
very different meanings. It may seem a little bit like semantics, but this isn't
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meant to be a complete top-down direction oriented effort. Again, it's to keep us
all engaged, all sharing our stories and not duplicating efforts. Go ahead to the
next slide Aurora.
So, what the heck is in this agreement? I gave you the web site on the last slide.
You can look it up and see it yourself, but again the agreement is only 11 pages.
Two of those pages are full of our National Leadership Council signatures and
what it does is it sets a vision towards net zero across all of our foot print areas.
It's what we aspire to. We've outlined an organizational framework for how we
achieve agency-wide engagement. We've developed the roles and
responsibilities for all of the units signing the agreement. We've identified a
nationwide board and a steering committee that's going to be a sub set of that
board to help with the day-to-day implementation of Sustainable Operations.
We have some partner participation through the Department of Energy, EPA,
soon to come GSA. The agreement also summarizes what the financial and
staffing resources are going to be that are contributed from every one of the
signing units. I kind of think about it as a well bio oiled machine. This picture here
is actually a picture of USDA's composting equipment. I was trying to find a fun
photo to talk about the agreement. Go ahead with the next slide Aurora.
This is one of the figures that's listed in the agreement, and you don't have to
read all of the details on this, but what's important to note is that we really have
tried to create a horizontal approach instead of a hierarchical approach for our
sustainability effort. It's more about creating a system that enables us all to do
sustainability from wherever we sit versus standing up a whole other stove pipe
staff.
Our nationwide agreement takes a lot of the resources we're already investing in
Sustainable Operations. We've reorganized them a bit to create greater
efficiencies and we're going to add a little bit more farming to the pot, which is a
strategic investment for how do we go forward as an agency so we can really
achieve some of those costs and consumption reductions. You'll see that this
actually helps us think about that system everywhere from where to we help the
unit level engagement happen, can we continue to trial and pilot some things,
figure out what we might need for larger-scale policy or implementation, have
the core staff, the board and our coordinator group really serve as that linkage
point between the unit engagement and our nationwide engagement so that we
truly can move to a place where we have some policies that we implement
because we're the Forest Service, and we ought to be saving resources and
funding.
It's an integrated, connected system is what we've attempted to stand up under
this agreement. It's also a work in progress. So, we're going to use 2014 as a way
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to transition into our structure and see how that functions for us as we go
forward. Aurora, go ahead with the next slide.
I said structure, but what I really should be saying is network. We're really not
standing up another totally stovepipe staff, and there's five kind of key bodies of
folks that are part of this organizational framework, and I'm sure all of you are
going to be able to see yourself in this somewhere. The idea is that we continue
to work more like a network than just this traditional top-down organization.
There are lots of other arrows that I could draw on this diagram to show where
these interconnections exist, but the important part for us today is that we're
working hard to establish these connections that facilitate conversation and
accountability around our Sustainable Operations activities.
We're kind of moving from this fun, scrappiness, everyone do kind of their own
thing as our thoughts, into a much more continuing that innovation but adding in
the piece that really helps us achieve better agency wide performance and
participation. Our agreement supports this rearranging of the resources that
we're already investing, and it's going to help us operate more efficiently than
we have. I really see a collective, our new nationwide collective as an enabler.
These five components ... There's going to be a core programmatic staff and
we're going to dock in with the Washington office [biz opps 00:07:51] group, at
least that's the plan right now, and that core staff will work really closely with its
coordinators that are going to exist at each region station area and the
Washington office. In a way those folks are in the matrix organization because
we really need to have what's not working, what is working come from the
bottom up.
The board is going to be made up of 23 different bodies, mostly at the deputy
regional forester level and some key Washington office directors, and out of that
board there will be six main positions that are the steering committee that are
going to deal more with the day-to-day connections with the core staff and that
programmatic piece of the work. The key is that core staff and RSAs, we're not
going to be the ones that are responsible for implementing all of sustainability
because every person that sits in the agency has a component of something that
they can do both individually or because of the staff they sit in.
A trick is going to be again if there is an enabler, a supporter of the network help
link in with other key Washington office staff. For example, we've got a powerdown initiative we're working towards. CIO work really closely with engineering.
We could probably list every single Washington office staff on that box. I just
listed a few key ones that we're focused on right now for this year. Budget and
finance is another one as we move forward towards utility bill clean up, and
traditionally those positions have a good connection or should have a good
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connection out to the field and their RSA counterparts such as the fleet, our
energy managers, green team leads. We can also help connect those folks
through the network as well. Pretty simplified, but I think in a way that helps us
conceptualize what we're moving towards. Go ahead to the next slide Aurora.
You may be sitting out there wondering, "Gosh, how do all of us actually connect
in?" Don't think of this as some giant reorganization for Sustainable Operations.
It's not. It's really just us evolving into the next fun adventure that we're going to
take as an agency. So, there's three things that you can all really do. First of all
we still have our field base teams. That effort is going to continue. That's part of
the core seed work that we've had for Sustainable Operations all along. Here's
the list of teams that we have for this year. They're listed on our [inaudible
00:10:36] site I believe, and we're happy to connect you in with any of you that
have an interest in any of these teams. Just let some of us know and we'll make
sure you link up.
The next slide, Aurora, is a list of how can you connect. Part of growing up or
evolving is that we're going to actually have a point of contact or someone that
has Sustainable Operations as part of their day to day duties so that we do really
organizationally institute a network for [inaudible 00:11:12] because we've not
had that. We've had that in many places but not everywhere so we're not able to
tap into everybody across the whole agency. Here's the list. You can see that
there's quite a few folks that are not yet identified. We're working on that. If
you're sitting on one of those units and you're interested in serving in that role in
some way let me know and I'll be happy to hook you up with your board
member and let's see what we can get going.
These are folks that will be connecting on a regular basis and talking about
what's happening with Sustainable Operations, how do we embed it more in the
organization? Everything from budget direction to pilot projects. Lots of
opportunities to be engaged that way. The last one, go ahead to the next slide
Aurora, is we've got this Power IT Down and utility bill cleanup activities that
we're taking on in 2014. One of the things that's really exciting to me about our
new nationwide collective is that we don't have to just look at implementation in
a few areas that want to do it. We've been able to pilot, example Power IT Down
and utility bill clean up, on many locations. Found out that the cost savings and
the consumption savings were there and then how to we scale up?
Our nationwide collective is giving the opportunity to scale up and in the
agreement the board every year will pick one to two or maybe three corporate
action items, things that we've trialed we know can work and we're going to
figure out how to implement those on an agency wide basis so we can truly take
advantage of that agency wide implementation both in the way of talking about
it [inaudible 00:13:00] the Forest Service is as a whole agency do Power IT Down.
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I think we might be one of the first agencies to actually do that on an agency
wide basis. Secondly, it's going to also allow us to really realize some of those
cost savings and in today's budget situation resources are pretty constrained.
These two activities alone we've got an estimate that they could save the agency
up to six million dollars a year with some things that are fairly simple to do. We'll
be looking at those kinds of criteria as we go forward, what other activities will
we be taking on in future years and those activities are going to arise out of the
work of our work team. Part of the last slide I have, Aurora, I just wanted to
show you the two pages of signatures that we were able to get on our
nationwide agreement. To me this is pretty inspiring. It tells me that Sustainable
Operations, we've arrived in some form. We're being acknowledged as an
important part of the work for the Forest Service by everyone on the National
Leadership Council.
I know a lot of you have been champions for a long time and sometimes it feels
like [inaudible 00:14:14], and we have to ask for permission, for example
sustainable practices. Why can't we just do this? After all, we're a conservation
agency. We may not feel like we have widespread adoption yet, and we have
some work to do in that arena, but this agreement acknowledges that we do all
have Sustainable Operations as a responsibility and that we can spend some
time and resources creating a culture with a sustainable consumption ethic.
This agreement gives us a platform to achieve collective progress like we've
never been able to do it before. I want to thank all of you out there for your part
in helping to make this happen. You are all the ones that are helping to make the
rubber meet the road, per se, on Sustainable Operations and keep up the good
work. I'm really excited about what comes next. If any of you have any ideas
don't hesitate to reach out and share them because that's part of what's made
Sustainable Operations be able to achieve all of these signatures that you see on
the slide in front of you. Take some time to celebrate and then take some time
to figure out what your dream team action list is going to be for next fiscal year.
With that Aurora, I don't know if I'm taking questions now or we're going to save
them until the end of the presentation.
Aurora:
Yes. You know, let's take questions now. If anyone has a question for Anna
please send a note to presenters to submit a written question or press *1 on the
phone to ask a question verbally. Okay are there any questions out there
Melanie?
Melanie:
I'm not seeing any questions at this time.
Aurora:
Okay, well thank you. Anna, thank you so much for your leadership role in
developing Sustainable Operations and everything that you do. With that we're
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going to start. Let me introduce Megan Oswolt. She is the Region I systems
coordinator out of Missoula, Montana, and today she's going to speak about
national Power IT Down.
Megan:
Thanks Aurora. Good morning, or afternoon everyone depending on where
you’re at today. I do want to take a moment and introduce or at least let
everybody know that Laura Polansky has been the co-lead for the national Power
IT Down effort and she's the Region V Sustainable Operations and climate
change coordinator, and she's not able to join us today but we could not have
gotten this far without her and she helped develop this presentation.
For the duration of my presentation I will refer to Power IT Down as PID. We can
go ahead and go to the next slide, Aurora. National PID is collaboratively
implemented by CIO and Sustainable Operations and as Anna said earlier PID is
an Fy14 corporate priority action item for Sustainable Operations. This low-cost
initiative strongly encourages employees to power down their electronic devices
and IT peripherals and national PID actually expanded from a limited pilot in
region V and the Washington office. During the region V pilot they were able to
save about $3500 and 21,000 kilowatt hours. This drew the interest of an
executive potential project team report in which nationwide implementation of
Power IT Down was proposed. This EPT team figured out that powering down
one computer could save approximately $60 a year.
We have about 43,000 computers in our agency, and when you multiply that $60
a year savings by 43,000 computers we're looking at $2.5 million per year in
annual cost savings. I want to emphasize here that this is really a recurring
annual cost savings especially as our energy rates continue to rise. Those savings
could potentially increase as we're avoiding the cost of having to keep those
computers on overnight. Next slide please.
The EPT team that developed the national PID plan analyzed various options,
methods and alternatives to implementing nationwide PID and Sustainable
Operations and CIO reviewed the team's suggestions and then made the
decision to implement PID across the agency in a four-phase approach. We
chose the phased approach because this really helps us mitigate any obstacles
and risks that we haven't previously identified. It just provides us with time to
address any issues that we weren't previously aware of.
On this slide I've tried to show our four-phased approach, and I will walk us
through this. Phase I of PID will begin this December in our regional offices,
stations and our [inaudible 00:19:24] covered facilities. For those of you that
don't know what an [inaudible 00:19:28] covered facility is, these are our
facilities that constitute 75% of our agencies facilities energy use. During phase I
we're asking employees located in one of these facilities to power down their
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electronics and IT peripherals on the weekends only. That's phase I of PID. In
phase II we will continue with weekend only Power IT Down. We're going to
expand our impacted facility to high performance buildings and the remaining
supervisors' offices.
Phase II is expected to launch in the spring of FY 14. That will be this coming
spring. In phase III we're going to begin to transition to every day Power IT Down
and expand to all of our interested units and green teams. We're looking at
implementing phase III between FY 14 and FY 15. Lastly, we're going to move
into phase IV, and this is where we intend to have all of our units participating,
all of our employees powering down their electronic devices and IT peripherals
unless there's a business requirement to leave them on, and we're looking at
doing this every day across the agency by phase IV. We're hoping that phase IV
launches in FY 15. That's an overview of the implementation approach for PID.
Can we go to the next slide Aurora?
Now, what I want to spend the rest of this presentation discussing phase I of PID.
What we've done is we have divided the launch of phase I into a soft and a hard
launch, and the soft launch is set to begin this weekend. During the soft launch
we've identified a point of contact for each of our phase I facilities and we are
asking that during the soft launch period they begin sharing information about
Power IT Down with all the employees in their facility and then gathering the
baseline data. Really the goal of the soft launch here is to provide a transition
period for all of our phase one facilities to begin implementing weekend only
Power IT Down.
The second piece of our phase I launch is the hard launch. This launch will begin
the weekend of January 10th, and by this date we expect all phase I facilities to
be powering down their devices and IT peripherals each weekend. That soft
launch period begins this weekend and it will extend for a few weeks to allow for
that transition, and then we'll begin the hard launch. How does a unit
participate? How does an employee participate in this? We're simply asking that
employees shut down their computers and there peripherals prior to leaving for
the weekend. By peripherals, this includes fax machines, printers, monitors. If
you charge your cell phone unplug the chargers. All of those kinds of things. Next
slide please.
Part of participation is shutting down all of these items. The second part of
participation for each phase I facility is reporting. So, each phase I point of
contact is responsible for collecting energy consumption and cost per kilowatt
hour data for their facility and the reason for this is we need to have some way
to measure and gather what this initiative is saving across the agency. By having
each point of contact gather kilowatt hour and cost savings we're going to be
able to determine how successful PID is, what our total cost savings are and
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what our total energy savings are. As part of Power IT Down reporting, CIO and
Sustainable Operations realize that all facilities and points of contact do not have
access to meters. Some buildings will have direct access to an advanced or
standard meter and some facilities there's not going to be access to actually go
read the meter.
We've developed two types of PID reporting. One for those that have access to a
standard or advanced meter and that's our meter report and then a second
report for those that don't have access and that's our non-metered report. Now,
what I'd like to do is share the reporting page and reporting share point page for
Power IT Down just to give everybody a brief introduction to what that page
looks like. Hopefully everybody can see our page here. What we've done is we've
tried to make it very easy for a point of contact to report for their facility. We
have developed a how to report guide, and this guide does provide a step by
step instruction for both types of the reports. Both reports are accessible on this
page and what we've done is we've suggested that while each point of contact
will gather information every weekend for Power IT Down, they only need to
report or submit that information every two weeks. We've advised that people
might want to sync this reporting up with their paycheck schedule just to make it
easier to remember.
The other thing that we've done on this site is try to provide a very quick list for
points of contact so that they know what information they need to gather before
they submit the report. We also have provided a link to some meter reading
instructions and over the next few days we'll provide a link to more information
on advanced meters and how to read or interpret that data, and we'll also
provide some more instructions on meter reading from some of the larger utility
providers in the nation. So, this is where we're hoping to have everybody report
for Power IT Down and this site actually expands and provides more information
. There's a Frequently Asked Questions section where we're updating almost
daily at this point questions and comments that we've received and the
responses for those questions and comments.
We're trying to make this very easy to implement. So, Aurora, can we go to my
last slide, please? Hopefully, I've provided everybody with a nice overview of the
Power IT Down initiative. If you have any questions or comments that we're not
able to address today please feel free to e-mail our national PID inbox, and I do
want to point out that the address on the slide is actually incorrect. It should be
national_pid@ms.ss.fed.us. This is something that we found out just a few days
ago and these slides had already been created. The last thing I do want to bring
to everyone's attention is if you're really excited about this and your unit wants
to start now and you're not listed as one of the phase I facilities, we're
encouraging to go ahead and participate. If you'd like to participate if you'll email your facility name the [inaudible 00:27:06] ID number and then a point of
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contact e-mail address we will go ahead and insert that information into the
reporting guide and we ask that you participate by not only having employees
power down their peripherals but also by reporting the results. That helps us
maintain accurate information for the Power IT Down effort.
Then, just remember to shut down your computer and your IT peripherals before
you leave for the holidays. So, Aurora, do we want to do questions now or ...
Aurora:
Yes. So, again, if you have a question and you want to submit it by writing please
send a note to presenter or press *1 on your phone to ask a question verbally. I
do, it looks like, have a question from Kelly Ricard. It says, "This year I did send
out reminders for PID as listed. However, I did not do reporting. I wonder how to
do this in a GSA ran government building."
Megan:
Yeah, that's actually a great question. I know in the GSA facility that I'm located
in I was able to work with the GSA person located in the building to get the
meter reports for each weekend and other GSA facilities I've heard that's not the
case and those individuals are going to use the non-metered reporting. The way
that we have that set up you'll need to go around and count the computers in
the building and then we have a form that you can use and do a quick survey of
who participated for each weekend. More detailed instructions for that, Kelly,
are located in that How To Report Guide. You can also feel free to reach out to
me via e-mail or over the phone and I would be happy to go into more detail
about that. Thanks for the great question.
Anna:
There's also, Megan, a verbal question in the queue. I think the person [inaudible
00:29:05].
Jane:
Okay, yeah. This is Jane Powers from the Department of Energy. I wasn't able to
get on to the webinar so can you repeat the e-mail address that we can get into
to get some more information about this? I'm also assuming that the slides will
be available somewhere.
Megan:
Yes, so I'll go ahead and repeat the e-mail address first.
Jane:
Okay.
Megan:
That address is all lowercase. It's national_pid@ms.ss.fed.us. These webinar
sessions are recorded. I know that they are posted on our internal web site.
However, if you e-mail me I will make sure to provide you with a copy of the
presentation.
Jane:
All right, and then I had one other question. When you talk about shutting down
all your electronics and the peripherals. Here at DOE we try not to shut them
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down because they do a lot of work on our computers overnight on the
weekends and stuff. We really can't shut them. We just log off. We can't shut
them down. Is that what you mean? I mean really turn everything off?
Megan:
Yeah, we do actually mean to turn everything off. We've been working quite
closely with CIO on this. What CIO did during the first pilot in region V, they
worked with region V and identified that major software pushes causes a
problem when they are pushed over the weekend and so CIO now makes major
software pushes during the week and that's why we're starting with weekend
only Power IT Down. The other thing that CIO did is they're now using a different
way or a different device to push software and that allows the user to actually
schedule when that software push occurs as long as they schedule the software
push prior to the due date for that push then their scheduled time will be
honored. Otherwise it will automatically push.
We've done quite a bit of background work with CIO to work through some of
those technical issues. I would be happy to discuss that with you in more detail.
Jane:
Okay, thank you very much.
Megan:
Yeah.
Aurora:
Okay, Megan I think that's all the questions that we have. Thank you for your
presentation. I'm looking forward to seeing the results. Actually [crosstalk
00:32:00].
Megan:
Me too.
Aurora:
We do have a question in the queue. I'm sorry. I think you've been unmuted. Can
you ask your question please?
Speaker 6:
Yes, I had a couple of questions. One is I assume this is just shutting down, this
doesn't refer to actually disconnecting power to reduce vampire electricity use.
Is that correct?
Megan:
Correct, yes. At this point we're not asking people to unplug their computers;
however, you can unplug your cellphone charger and things like that. There's
some items in the works from CIO that require your computer to stay plugged in.
Speaker 6:
Okay. My second question is as part of our green team efforts we've been
encouraging for several years now for people to shut down their computers.
When we do this measurement right now we're not going to get a complete
estimate of how much energy is actually being saved because we're already
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23
saving some from our maximum usage. I just wanted to be sure that you were
aware of that type of thing.
Megan:
Yeah, we are aware. I'm glad you brought that up. We're aware of that, and
we're also aware that especially over the holidays quite a few individuals are
going to be out of the office and so the numbers are going to be slightly skewed
there and things like that. Our goal is to report with as much as accuracy as we
can the results from those Power IT Down weekends and to be very up front
about where some discrepancies may lie. I appreciate your comment.
Speaker 6:
Okay.
Aurora:
Okay, it looks like there are no more questions at this time. Again, thank you for
your presentation. Now we're going to move into Rego Omerigic in the White
River. If you can unmute your line by pressing *1 that'd be great.
Rego:
Hello.
Aurora:
Hi Rego.
Rego:
Hi How are you?
Aurora:
Good I'm glad you've joined us. Rego is the fleet manager on the White River
National Forest in Glenwood Springs, Colorado and he is here to present about
some awesome projects and progressive projects he's been working on. Thanks
for joining.
Rego:
Hey, thanks for having me. Actually, you can go to slide 20 which is the draft No
Idle Policy.
Aurora:
We're there Rego.
Rego:
Okay, this policy is in draft form right now. It's been finalized at our level, but
there are many different levels that we have to go through in the Forest Service
to make this an actual policy. There was some verbiage in the driver handbook
about no idling, but it was a very basic kind of ... It wasn't a policy. It was more of
a recommendation. We wanted something with more teeth into it that could
really be enforced if we thought it needed to. The first bullet there you'll notice
some times. The times table has really changed. We started out with two
minutes, went up to I think seven minutes and we kind of finalized and settled
on a five-minute idle time for vehicles. If you want to go to the next slide.
There is provisions in there for exemptions. A lot of the class V and larger trucks
are operated in a lot of the fleets in Forest are diesel powered. Most of them
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23
have air brakes and some of them may take a substantial amount of time to
reach a normal operating temperature and to build the 100 pounds of air
pressure so their air brakes can release and they'll be in safe working condition.
That was built in there. It was also built in there for law enforcement and fire
and some equipment used in the construction industry. We're trying to make
this policy to where people that are contracted to do work for the Forest Service
can also follow this same policy if they're doing work for us. You can go to the
next slide.
Actually, does anyone have any questions on the No Idle Policy?
Aurora:
If you have a question please press *1 on your phone or send a note to the
presenter.
Rego:
The No Idle Policy is relatively done as far as we're going to take it. It's just going
to go through the normal steps through the government now. It's going to the
union as we speak and then after that it's going to go to the council office in
Albuquerque and they will probably change some verbiage in it, and then we'll
get a final No Idle Policy and get it pushed through in a policy. Then a little bit
more paperwork so we can have this policy added to all the correct places like
the new driver/operator manuals, anything coming out of a national print office
that this pertains to it's going to have to be added in certain sections. It's just a
lot of legwork but the policy is basically done.
Some of the other things on the slide you're seeing now are things we hope to
get done in fiscal year 2014. Some of them are carried over from 2013. We have
a small team. A lot of us on this team are fleet managers. The work season, like
everybody else we're really busy and then in the winter time we do a lot of work
on sustainable opps and we're kind of gearing up to get some of these things
that you're looking at done now. One of them that I wanted to talk about was
identifying fuel sites for alternative fueled vehicles. We're hoping that it
integrates really well with the new credit cards that the Forest Service is going
to. They're going to Right Express and Right Express, we believe, will have a lot
better reporting than U.S. Bank did.
With the Department of Energy we can go into what we call a dashboard system
and actually find missed opportunities. If someone filled up with regular
unleaded when there was an E85 station across the street or even within that
station, this tool will let us view that. We can educate all the forests and users
where all the alternative fuel sites are and hopefully get everybody to utilize
them.
We do have a team working on the tire pressure education tool and it's just an
awareness program. We're hoping to come up with a bunch of goodies for that
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that we can send out to other forests that will include some awareness, some
tire pressure gages, some placards and stickers for all the vehicles. Working with
[inaudible 00:40:54], and if you look at the very bottom bullet those two kind of
tie together on what we're doing. Their two separate programs, but they're
going to be tied very close. Then, one of the last things I want to talk about is we
have an organization here on our forest, actually two of them. One of them is
Clear; the other is Clean Cities and they're actually coalitions that are involved
with a lot of private industry and a lot of local governments.
We're trying to get a representative from every forest to at least get involved
with Clean Cities or Clear in one way or another. They're a really good resource.
They have really taken a lot of work that we do on the Eco Fleet and Driver's
Team and do a lot of the leg work for us. The time that they spend to get us to
where we need to accomplish our tasks is really invaluable. We want to get the
word out, get other people in forest to at least join them or get to know them so
if they do need options or help it's always available to them. I think that's all I
have unless anybody has any questions.
Aurora:
Okay Rego we have one comment and one question as of right now, and again if
you'd like to ask a question please press *1 on your phone to ask it verbally or
you can send a note to presenters. The comment is on your heavy duty vehicle
idle limitation, any vehicle with air brakes can reach full operating pressure
within four minutes and the majority of all new heavy duty vehicles come
programmed with a ten-minute idle limiter.
Rego:
Right. Correct. Along with this No Idle Policy, we're going to throw out a tool kit
to help people achieve these goals. We just didn't want to force a policy on
everyone without having a way to meet the policy. So, in that tool kit that is one
of the things, most heavy equipment and I think anything over a class V truck
now you can program the computer to shut the truck down anywhere from four
to ten to 15, 20 minutes. That's in our tool kit to educate people on having their
equipment adjusted down to the five-minute idle time.
Aurora:
Okay and we do have one question Rego. What is an E85 vehicle and how many
units have these vehicles right now?
Rego:
Well, believe it or not I think almost every forest and I could be wrong, almost
every forest has a few E85 vehicles. They are capable of burning E85 fuel and
once again this will also be in the tool kit. It's going to show you how to identify
an E85 vehicle by the actual VIN number, the color of the fuel cap. Of course you
don't want to run E85 in a non-compatible E85 vehicle, but we want to identify
all the E85 vehicles and again put a placard or sticker in the vehicle so the
operator knows that it's capable of running on E85 or regular unleaded.
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Aurora:
Okay, we do have one more question. If you live in a colder area what would be
the temperature you would have to shut down your vehicle's motor?
Rego:
Well, you know we had the perfect example of that this morning. There's about a
foot of snow here in Glenwood and had a lot of vehicles that we had to start and
move so we could do some plowing and snow removal and you know we don't
want to ... We think five minutes is plenty enough time to get the interior cabin
warm enough for occupants and warm enough to keep the windows defrosted.
That's where this time frame really moved around a lot and we've finally settled
on the five minute time frame. We don't think that you'll have to let it idle more
than five minutes. Now, if it's really cold outside and it's within that one hour
period of course there is a safety factor, and of course we want people to be safe
and if it's okay to turn the car back on to heat the cabin if you're going to be
spending time in that vehicle.
Aurora:
We have another comment. Thank you Gary [inaudible 00:46:26]. Another tool
that can be utilized to monitor progress and limiting idle times is accessing the
onboard computer, which records idle time over the life of the vehicle.
Rego:
That is true. Most OBD compatible vehicles now do have an idle timer. A lot of
people don't know about it, and it's not widely used other than in the emergency
and law enforcement agencies. A lot of police cars that are in real urban areas in
the city have low miles on them. They could be five years old and have really low
miles on them but what fleet managers will do, they'll use an hour meter and
plug into the computer and read how many hours the engine has on it rather
than miles and these things will just have thousands and thousands of hours
because of all the idle time. Yeah, that is an option that's available in most newer
vehicles. Also good to ...
Aurora:
Thank you.
Rego:
If you're going to buy a vehicle, good to know. Check the hours as well as the
miles.
Aurora:
Absolutely. We also have a verbal question out there. Please ask your question
now.
Speaker 8:
Yes, I was wondering, you mentioned a tool kit, how you're planning to
distribute that. Is it going to be a list of web sites or are you actually going to
send something out?
Rego:
Well, it's going to be both. We want to send something out if it's possible to
every unit and we also are going to try and get either links or a web site
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developed that people can go to that will have all the information that they
need.
Speaker 8:
Okay, thank you.
Aurora:
Okay, thank you Rego. If there are no other questions we'll move on. Actually,
we have one more question, sorry. The answer to your question Felicia is coming
from Becky Hutchins. It says we have over 3000 E85 capable vehicles in our fleet.
That's awesome. Thank you. All right, at this point we will move on to Stacey
Litwin. Stacey Litwin is out of the Rocky Mountain Research Station. She is a
procurement technician and [inaudible 00:49:05] communications team
member.
Stacey:
I am presenting today on how we introduce games to engage people into
sustainable operations. We kind of collaborated with the Tongass National
Forest here at the Rocky Mountain Research Station and then region V also did
their own version of the game as well. I want to talk about games in general.
Gamification is the concept of applying game design thinking to non-game
applications to make them more fun and engaging. I don't know how many
people for the holidays participated in games with their family and friends, but I
know that I did. I'm a big gamer. In fact I've been walking around with six decks
in my purse for the last several months because we always are playing games
whenever we have some time. Gamification, it's not a game but it's a concept.
It's a term that was coined back in 2012 and it's serious business. There's a
marketing research firm called N2 Research. It's predicting that the market for
gamification solutions is going to grow by 11 times in the next four years.
Fortune 500 companies are also increasingly adopting gamification strategies.
It's one of the most important trends in technology for several industry experts
and it can be applied to anything to create fun and engaging experiences. So,
what it does is it converts users into players and players create actions because
people like to compete. We're competitive by nature as a society. We like
competitions and we like receiving rewards for being successful. If you look at
people who are playing Farmtown on Facebook, millions of people every day
they get fake money and fake points for plowing crops online. So we somehow
incorporated a game process. It actually came about based off the Western
Collective before they went to a nationwide effort they created a top ten actions
that you could incorporate on your forest or in your station or whatever, and
they were very simple things like maybe turning off your computer or turning off
your lights, simple tasks that anybody can do that works for the forest service or
for any agency for that matter.
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It's a really simple process that we tried to incorporate. You can go to the next
slide Aurora. Here's an example of what Tongass's green team put on their web
site as well as they put some marketing behind this to try to engage people in
their forest as part of an Earth Day game to try do reduce their environmental
footprint on their forest. So, they used Google Forms and it was a survey that
people took. It was a six-week contest so people filled out the survey every
week. It's about five minutes to fill out the survey and then the scores are tallied
on the back end by participants on green teams. Between the three of us the
Tongass National Forest, the Rocky Mountain Research Station and region V over
500 people participated in some version of this sustainability game. It's kind of
important to acknowledge that when you're using a game-like strategy to
engage people it's important that ... When people are talking about it on
conference calls and engaging each other in a competitive way it's actually a fun
environment and it create a buzz on your forest or your region or wherever
you're working.
There were competitive notes in newsletters. We at the Rocky Mountain
Research Station as well as I know they did up at region V as well. They kind of
compete back and forth talking back and forth or putting information out there
in the newsletters or whatever form of communication you have to try to get
people involved and to realize oh you're in second place. You're trying to
challenge those people. It creates a fun way to engage staff. We gave out
awards. We gave out micro grant funding. On the Tongass they gave out $500
and then our RMRS also gave out $300 to fund micro grants at the locations who
won. The next slide.
This is what it looked like. This was the region V, this was their survey format
that they used. You can see from the tasks, we break it down by the six foot print
areas because ... Each foot print area had specific tasks under it. Like used the
carpooling initiative for example gave you 250 points. You receive points after
each of the weekly tasks and it should be designed so that the user can easily
navigate in the game. Survey software is good because it's easy to understand
for most users whereas if you tried to use a spreadsheet or something like that
users might not think it's as easy to understand or to see. We tried that two
years ago and we received a lot of negative feedback about it, and the survey
was definitely an improvement on that.
It takes five minutes of people's time and for six weeks. The survey educates
users to recognize some sustainable initiatives that they may not have otherwise
thought about. Some of the things in here are ideas that people could try to
incorporate. Not everybody thinks of all these different things, and putting it all
into one format where people can read all those things they might change some
of their behavior that they're doing at their location. The next slide, Aurora.
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This is an example of what RMRS used. We put this information out on a
biweekly basis and it shows where people rank compared to one another. For
RMRS's competition we gave out awards for two separate categories. The one on
the left is we went by the total points that people got. The people that were
participating in more tasks then they ranked higher. So, right here Ogden was
getting more points per person and that was one of the awards. The other award
was for staff participation as a whole. If people were getting the people involved,
maybe not doing all the tasks that in some other locations that they would be
doing but just getting the people involved to have team participation was the
other side of the award that you would receive with us.
These slides were created using an Excel spreadsheet from Google Forms and
then we'll bring that over into another Excel spreadsheet that had all the
formulas into it so that it would draw this information out. What happened, the
Tongass and the Rocky Mountain Research Station, we hosted the contest at the
same time. Region V did it a little bit later. If you'll go to the next slide, Aurora.
Region V actually took the survey software within Google Forms and they put the
point values in for each of the tasks. They actually used just the Google Form
software and it pulled all the information over to what this looks like and if
anybody is familiar with Google Forms there's a lot of different reports that you
can pull from the back side of it once people input their data so that you can look
at what the results are in different ways, and this is one of the examples of what
automatically populates.
Realizing this, this would change the way that we would go about doing it next
year as well because the results are much easier to calculate because Google
Forms does it for you in the software. It's a free program. It's similar to Survey
Monkey, and Survey Monkey also, well up to a certain amount of people ... Both
products allow you to fill in information and then pull reports. It's quite a few
entries before you hit the cap and actually have to pay for the software. The next
slide.
Game ideas are really easy. On all three of these locations we all were ... It was
participants from the green teams. On the Tongass Michelle Parker and Michelle
Putt. They were involved in their green game and then Jennifer Bachan and
David Hall and Carrie Cobb also helped participate in RMRS version. Dana Walsh
as well as Laura Polansky were heading up the region V game. There were a lot
of people involved and green teams are an easy source of people who are
interested in trying to do something like this.
You also want to define what you want to achieve. You might just need an idea
of what kind of game to create. Maybe you're trying to get greenhouse gas
savings for your climate change score card. You could create a game around that.
You could also create a game around the Power IT Down if you're one of the
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locations who is first initiating that. A game idea would work well to try to get
people engaged so that they get a reward and in exchange they are competing
against another location [inaudible 00:59:40] competed labs versus labs and
other locations competed forest versus forest. An example of someone that was
really successful recently with a game is the award of the 2013 green glove
presidential award for green innovation.
The Department of Health and Human Services created a freezer challenge
competition where professionals across their agency they were given two
months to deploy an innovative strategy to improve storage practices for lab
freezers. The results of their challenge ... They're saving more than $127,000 per
year in operating costs and energy consumption is equal to 36 family homes.
They received an award for that. Basically, they challenged their agency to say
look we have a lot of freezers that are constantly using energy, what do we need
to do? [inaudible 01:00:33] for that problem and they're saving thousands of
dollars as a result.
Gamification can really create a cost savings in ways that are very effective to
meet agency needs particularly since resources are limited. You want to use
some kind of format to gather the information. Some people have created
games on sustainability that are bingo games. We used a survey. There's all kinds
of different ways that you can create a game to engage people in some efforts
for whatever you're trying to do. You could do it for safety if you wanted to,
particularly for us sustainable opps is of interest. You want to market your game
idea. We showed a couple of slides about some of the information that was
being presented to people.
We reported our results, all three of the groups did. Region V they presented
results as the cost savings of what their gamification was and then ours and
Tongass also did greenhouse gas savings. Another big one is to encourage
everybody to participate. The best results that we seen came from staffs with
leadership support. For the Rocky Mountain Research Station the Flagstaff lab
did exceptionally well, but part of that was due to their program manager, Bill
Block, who actively was engaged. He's engaged in the Flagstaff green team, but
he's also actively engaged in the efforts and they had 60% participation at the
Flagstaff lab as a result which is huge when you're thinking about getting all your
people to do something in particular. Next slide, Aurora.
These are just the resources for each of the different forest region and the
station. A lot of the information is out there on the web for what each of us did.
So, if you want to go and look at the survey online to get an idea of what all the
questions were and how it all worked out [inaudible 01:02:51]. That's all I have
for this presentation, if anybody has any questions.
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Aurora:
Again, the lines are open for questions. Press *1 or send a note to the presenter.
Thank you Stacey. I really enjoyed the gamification that put in the newsletter. It
was really fun. I appreciate it. All right. So the final presentation is from Elizabeth
Yohe and myself even though I think I'm just the editor in chief. This is Elizabeth
and Rachelle Myer's project. Right now I will hand it over to Liz Yohe.
Elizabeth:
Great, thanks Aurora. Actually Aurora was helpful in making sure we stayed on
task. We just have a little bit about ourselves. I won't read through that, but I am
the design architect in region II but I also do have an MBA so that's partially why
I got involved in the return on investment component. Rachelle is currently back
in Australia getting her PhD so that's [inaudible 01:04:02]. All right, next.
The real purpose of this webinar is to kind of bring some quantifiable tools to
help with decision making. A lot of times we know what the right thing is or we
think what the right thing is but a lot of the decision makers or the [inaudible
01:04:23] officers may want the pros and cons, but they also want a quantitative
analysis with it to help support it. Sometimes the bottom line is what drives a
decision whether it's right or wrong. That's really what started this one.
All right, next. There are a bunch of different assessment methods out there and
what Rachelle and I pulled together was about five of them. Return on
investment or ROI as it may often be referred to, a payback period, a
comparative analysis, life cycle costing, opportunity trade and tradeoff. Actually
I'm going to be presenting three case studies, the return on investment,
comparative analysis and life cycle costing. Okay.
Really the return on investment it's a calculation. It's a performance tool to
measure the efficiency of an investment. You can look at it and say it makes
sense to invest in it or our dollars were valuably spent on that investment. I will
caution you, this is one of the ... To do a true return on investment calculation
often times we have half or three quarters of the data but we don't have the rest
of it to run it. Sometimes we have to kind of figure out what it is if we really want
to try and run the numbers. Next.
Really, the return on investment is the gain from the investment minus the cost
of the investment divided by the cost of the investment. When you look at that
that sometimes is a little hard to sometimes understand what that means. I
believe our next slide as we move into it actually is the first case study I think.
Yes, perfect. Okay. This is a case study that I'm sure most people that have been
involved in sustainable opps for any period of time plus anybody new to
sustainable opps has probably seen was the first utility bill cleanup that Lori
Jeager did when she was on the San Juan National Forest. I took a different step
at it and took the numbers that she had generated, the cost savings from that
first year which was almost $32,000 and then I asked Lori, I said, "How much
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time do you think it took for you to look up each invoice, each bill, contact utility
bill or contact your [inaudible 01:07:08] coordinator, etc.?" She estimated it was
just shy of eight days.
I looked up a daily rate for what a facility engineer would be and calculated the
cost of those eight days. That's where the return on investment on this for the
on the ground forest effort shows an almost an 10% return on investment, which
is pretty good. What this doesn't take into account is any of the effort form the
[inaudible 01:07:36] coordinator or other things that may have been involved in
it. It's not a perfect calculation, but it gives you an idea like if you needed to kind
of say we really think this is a good idea. Here's the pros and cons and we expect
we could generate a 10% return on investment or a 5% return on it. That's one
way you can help the decision makers make the decision to invest either the
budget or the time and effort.
The one challenge I know with the utility bill cleanup that we all have is that it
comes out of the CTO9 fund so we [inaudible 01:08:16] our energy bill but we
don't really see it on the ground. A calculation like this could kind of help make
those decisions to put that effort in. You could also take this as a projection tool
too where you say okay we think it's going to take ten days to do this and we
project we're going to save this much and we project this is going to be our
return on investment and that also can be a helpful tool to make decisions. Okay.
The next is payback period. Basically, it's how long it takes for you to get your
investment back. On this one we didn't have a really sexy example so we are just
giving you the definition of it. We do have a calculation. If you had a project cost
that was $100,000 and expected to return $20,000 annually it's five years. The
one thing is that it doesn't take in the time value of money so if it's over five
years it's just calculating it at a set cost of the money versus adding inflation into
that. It doesn't take any benefits that occur after the payback period. Things like
this you kind of have to pick which is your best assessment method for the data
and what you're trying to do. As you kind of work with these you'll start finding
out the whole art of finance. It's not a science, it's an art. Okay, next.
Okay, this is a really interesting one that Rachelle had. This is the Fraser
experimental forest recycling program, and it really was a good example of a
comparative cost analysis. It was a micro grant proposal in 2011, and the
proposal really had a lot about the alternative that they were transporting
recyclables once a month to Denver and one person's time, a whole day driving
there and back in a government vehicle. It kind of really talked about safety and
things like that and the alternative was that Fraser had just started a new
recycling program that had a monthly fee.
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The one thing that I think might have strengthened their case was this analysis
with the numbers added to it. Basically, they come up that the alternatives were
continue transporting to Denver, no recycling at all or go to the curb side option.
With the comparative analysis and the information from the micro grant I pulled
out and said okay. I took a guess one again at a manager's daily rate, mileage
from Denver to Fraser. I believe she actually had the mileage in there. Then said
all right a lot of the costs are kind of sunk costs of what she was proposing
because her salary was not going to change whether she drove to Denver or not.
She was driving a government vehicle so it wasn't like she had to rent a car or
drive her personal vehicle and then ask for mileage reimbursement.
A lot of it just meant things like that was a day she didn't get to do her normal
duties. it was additional wear and tear on the government vehicle. It was
additional gas that we purchased. From that I picked out a daily rate. I projected
what it would be, the mileage at the GSA current rate. I looked up what the gas
was currently in Fraser and found out it's about $375 per trip and she did it five
trips a season. It's just under $2000 for a season if you looked at the numbers
that way. The no recycling option, obviously it saves money because you're not
doing anything, but is that the right thing to do? Then curb side, the curb site
was $50 a month for 12 months so you say okay well if you sign up it's a total of
$600. That compared to what they were currently doing by driving it to Denver
saved them $1200, which if we go to the next slide we start looking at the
intangible pieces of that that go along with that $1200 of savings.
One of the biggest hazards to everyone is driving and being on the road. We're
not putting one of our employees on the road in a potential safety issue and
accidents. The manager is able to focus on her duties versus taking one day a
month to go do recycling which probably could add stress for driving or stress for
meeting deadlines because she had a day out every month. It could conflict with
her mission and duties. The no recycling, we looked at it and said all right how
much would be going into the landfill if you just threw it in your trash can and it
got taken out. Approximately 500 square feet into a landfill and also we have to
kind of think about as stewards of the land is that the best way to be showing
our leadership and our sustainability.
Then the curb side option, minimal time to probably collect it and put it out on
the curb and it allows the staff to really focus on their Forest Service mission and
duties. Supports local community business and it does show environmental
sustainability leadership and provides a good model showing that we are trying
to recycle and care for our environment. All right.
Then another one is life cycle costing. What this really looks at is your initial first
costs, maintenance cost, and a lot of times since I'm in the facilities realm a lot of
times we look at our energy costs. One thing is you do have to have a baseline to
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base it off of, your alternative, so you can compare it. Some of the costs that are
already incurred are deemed sunk costs, are excluded from the analysis. All right,
next.
So, in this case study I have from Todd Michael our mechanical electrical
engineer here in region II, but he does go nationwide because we don't have
many of the mechanical electrical engineers in the Forest Service. In this,
basically, it is replacing a domestic hot water heater. The basic is a 50-gallon hot
water electric heater with 60% efficiency. Still in good condition. He analyzed six
different options, stay with the existing, do electric instantaneous type hot water
heater, solar hot water heater with electric backup, natural gas, natural gas
instantaneous and solar hot water heater with natural gas fired backup. All right,
next.
Here is just kind of a summary chart from his analysis. His analysis was actually
probably like ten pages long or six pages, and he describes each option,
describes the investments, the utility costs, etc. The very first one you'll see is
our baseline. We have a first cost. Our first one has no first cost because it exists,
but we can project the electric usage costs, the maintenance costs and
replacement because as we all know these things don't have an infinite life.
Then you can compare that to the other alternatives. At the very bottom is the
total life cycle cost. So, this is the electric option and then the next slide shows
the natural gas options. When you look at that bottom line, if we go to the next
slide, the total recommends that you go to existing electric storage heater to be
replaced with natural gas because the life cycle cost is less than keeping the
existing one. It is something where you do have some up-front costs to achieve
this recommendation, but looking at the long-term and utility costs and
maintenance you'll spend less long term.
That is another challenge with this. Sometimes, like this example will show you
the best option is to replace the equipment that you may not currently have
funds in hand to be able to do that. These are also tools to help you understand
how to look for funding or how to use your funding. In the facilities world we use
these kind of analyses all the time in terms of equipment, building materials,
roofing, etc., so that we can kind of decide how we work within our up-front
costs to give the best long-term facility to help with low maintenance and the
best environments we can work in. All right, next.
Basically, it's really kind of deciding what is the appropriate method for your
situation and what data you need or what data you have to be able to run the
analysis. Then, also analyzing it between the quantitative piece as well as the
intangible pro and con piece to it to help you either make a good decision or give
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the decision maker, line officers appropriate information for them to be able to
make a good decision. All right. Any questions? I went through really fast.
Aurora:
If you have a question press *1 on your phone or send a note to the presenters. I
do have a comment here. It says if you have to put in a chimney, gas line, etc.,
then it's usually not cost effective, but if you are remodeling then it's a good
time.
Elizabeth:
Right, and a lot of those pieces when we are ... That example was kind of one
piece of equipment, but you're right you have to take all of those into account,
and I believe that example was for an office so we probably didn't have that
issue.
Aurora:
All right. There are no other questions at this time. This does conclude today's
webinar. We have future upcoming learning opportunities. On February 5th we'll
be looking at sustainability leadership. Then the schedule for FY 14 is coming
soon. If you guys have any further questions please ask them now. This has been
recorded and will be made available for you and anyone else that would like to
view this webinar.
Thank you so much for attending today and thank you presenters. It was a great,
diverse group of discussions. I really appreciate your time and have a great, safe
day.
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