Epsom and St Helier
Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust provides a range of medical services to approximately
420,000 people living across southwest London and northeast Surrey. The Trust employs around 4,800 staff across its hospitals and is supported by over 440 volunteers and operates a total of over 2,200 PCs in support of the organisation.
The Challenge
With more 2,200 PCs across the organisation, finding a manageable solution was always going to be a major challenge. Some PCs are allocated to wards (rather than individuals), with others being used for research, in laboratories, and for support functions such as admin and finance. The concept of ensuring PCs are not being fully powered when not needed was welcomed by all, but the ‘how’ was an area of debate.
The solution would need to be able to:
- Engage with individuals to encourage them to switch-off the
- PC without making their daily tasks more difficult or frustrating
- Provide the human resources and information services teams with the ability to monitor and measure benefits – and thus engage with staff and volunteers in the organisation to get buy-in
- Keep the cost of installation as low as possible without the need to incur the time and cost of IT engineers to make it happen.
- Avoid interrupting PC maintenance and upgrades and
- Patching working (carried out-of-core hours) that required PCs to be switched on
- Meet the needs of the business and organisational policies, accommodating different work patterns and behaviour with no negative impact on productivity.
The Solution
The team at Epsom and St Helier carried out a small trial to assess functionality of the PowerStudio™. By setting a base line of power consumption without the product they were able to assess the savings to be realised using PowerStudio™ even without using an aggressive power saving policy.
Certero’s helpful approach during the trials allowed the team to build a successful business case to obtain the necessary funds for the installation. Payback was estimated at around six months although this could have been improved had a more aggressive policy been implemented. Being an NHS Trust, incorporating three main hospitals, the whole process had to work with the clinicians to come up with a workable policy that would not impact on their provision of clinical care. The simplicity of changing the policies on the fly using PowerStudio was a massive help in successfully achieving the necessary balance of functionality and power saving with minimal fuss.
- Reduction in the number of PCs being left on overnight from 50% to 19% (Most of the 19% are due to PCs having an ‘Always On’ policy)
- Average electricity cost of a PC reduced from $117 to $76, saving $41 pa
- Carbon footprint reduction per PC – 318kg to 207kg pa based on 1,500 PCs that’s a saving of 167 tons of CO2 pa, that equates to:
- 69 average cars being taken off the road (based on 10,000 miles pa)
- 43 return flights from London to New York
- 10 million kettles being boiled
What Epsom and St Helier said:
Malcolm Flier, Head of Support Services in the IS team at Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust, said; “PowerStudio™ was easy to use and was competitively priced. “As an NHS Trust we are always looking for ways to save on revenue spend. Power consumption saving on desktop equipment was fairly easy with the right type of product. We had implemented localised saving on the desktops using the standard Microsoft tool set and during trials found we could save even more by using a specialised tool.
“Certero are a very easy company to work with and the speed with which they were willing to assist with problems was impressive. They have a great customer service ethos.”