Birmingham Children's Hospital
Founded in 1862 Birmingham Children’s Hospital employs 2,500 people who serve an area with a population of 5.3 million in the West Midlands and treats nearly 250,000 children each year. It is the only children’s hospital in the United Kingdom to offer both an Emergency Department and the full range of specialist, ‘tertiary’ clinical services and has a world renowned intensive care unit, paediatric clinical research facility and burns unit.
The Challenge
With more 5,000 PCs across the business and with almost the same number of requirements, fi nding a manageable solution was always going to be a major challenge. PCs were allocated towards (rather than individuals) and other used for research and in laboratories and surgeries. The concept of ensuring PC’s are not being fully powered when not needed was welcomed by all but the ‘how’ was an area of conflict and difficulty.
The team at Birmingham Children’s Hospital recognised the benefits that PowerStudio™ could offer. They decided to take advantage of Certero’s free 30 day evaluation in order to capture current usage and deployed the power saving policies and collated new usage information. By comparing both sets of information it was easy to see the saving being made. Not only did this provide the confi dence in the ability of PowerStudio™ but also provided the evidence needed to justify such a solution.
Certero PowerStudio™ solution provided us with:
- Central implementation and Training in one day
- A system that had the ability to be centrally administrated
- Automatic policies that flex with user’s usage and the organisations
- The ability to put in place a window to wake up a PC and then
- Power down to accommodate maintenance scheduling
- No disruption to user productivity due to intelligent software that knows when a PC is in use
- The ability to accommodate different behaviours by different departments.
- Comprehensive reporting to monitor and measure the benefits of the savings providing an opportunity to engage and encourage individuals to reduce carbon emissions and energy.
What Birmingham Children's Hospital said:
James Patterson, IT – “What we got with PowerStudio™ was smooth implementation without impact on the existing system. There was no noticeable rise in the calls to help desk during the implementation stage, the flexibility of the software meant that personal preferences were quickly identified and met and with some slight changes in policy in some areas was all it took to get everyone working happily.”
Chris Buckley, Capital Projects Manager responsible for energy efficiency, said: “I had only just taken up my post and was not aware of the installation, that must be a great testament to how seamless the implementation was. The ROI and the energy savings is phenomenal and it certainly helps to take us towards meeting the NHS target of becoming England’s leading low carbon organisations by 2015. We’ve already saved 167 tons of CO2, the equivalent of 43 return flights from London to New York – without impacting on the workload that really is encouraging for everyone.”
Jasmin Turner, Internal Communications Manager, Birmingham Children’s, said; “We believe that those working here care about their impact on the environment but they need to understand how they can help. “PowerStudio™ software provides us with an opportunity to provide our people with feedback on the benefi ts of their individual actions.”