Microsoft D87-07316 User Manual

M

anufacturer visualizes electricity
usage and boosts energy savings
with Visio Pro for Office 365

“By making energy usage visible with Microsoft

Visio, we can now plan ahead to save energy

and evaluate cost-reduction options easily.”

—Masashi Kawashima, Manager,

Management Planning Division, SAXA, Inc.

To better reserve energy in a country with limited natural resources,
Japanese manufacturer SAXA used Microsoft Visio Pro for
Office 365 and Microsoft cloud solutions for real-time monitoring of
electricity usage. With contextual energy visualization, SAXA and its
customers are achieving big gains in energy savings and more accurate
energy planning.

SAXA, Inc.

www.saxa.co.jp

1,300 employees

Japan

Manufacturing

Company profile

Headquartered in Japan, SAXA is a leading

manufacturer of information communication

equipment. Its 13 member companies offer

superior hardware and services for office use,

including business phones and networking,

video camera and security systems.

Partner profile

Meister Corporation

www.mster.co.jp

“These data-enhanced

plans drawn in Visio raise
awareness of energy
usage that general reports
of power consumption
cannot match.”

—Uichiro Nozawa,

Executive Director and Division

Director, Meister Corporation

Business needs

Operating in a country with limited natural resources, energy conservation and CO2

reduction are essential to Japanese businesses. Japan’s 2011 earthquake further
increased the need for energy-saving functions and remains a top priority today.

As a leading Japanese manufacturer of information communication equipment and

services for office use, SAXA saw an opportunity to develop an environment

visualization system leveraging the power of the Internet of Things (IoT)—with today’s
advancements in computing platforms, sensors, connectivity and data insights. SAXA
hoped to improve its own energy management and create new customer value by

oering the solution as a service to its business customers.

Solution

Working with Microsoft partner Meister Corporation, SAXA combined its own wireless
LAN-ready sensors, that track temperature, humidity and electricity, with Microsoft Visio

Pro for Oce 365 and Microsoft cloud solutions to create the SAXA M2M Environment

Visualization Solution.

“Energy waste is most often due to human error, such as forgetting to turn o the lights
or unknowingly using excessive air conditioning,” explains Uichiro Nozawa, Executive

Director and Division Director at Meister Corporation. “The principal purpose of the

SAXA M2M Environment Visualization Solution is to notify people on a daily basis when

energy related to their PC, business phone, or other common item is being wasted.”

Cloud scalability across the organization

At the core of the solution is the cloud. With its member companies and development
and manufacturing sites dispersed throughout Japan, SAXA believed an organizational
rollout would need the scale of cloud computing.

SAXA and Meister selected Microsoft Azure for its cloud infrastructure, nding it

easier to implement than other cloud services and allows them to deploy in common
environments using Microsoft Visual Studio.

In real time, more than 50 SAXA wireless LAN sensors (WL100 and WL110) collect office
temperature, humidity, power consumption, and other vital information. That data is
then transmitted via RSS feeds to Microsoft Azure and accumulated in an Azure SQL
database, processing more than 2,500 database calls each day.

Contextual energy visualization

The power of the solution lands in the visualization of the data. The data collected from

sensors is displayed in real time on a facility oor plan created in Microsoft Visio Pro for
Oce 365, using Visio’s rich data graphics.

“We realized that data should be shown in oor plan format to let people know how,

when and where energy is being wasted within a building or equipment layout,”
Nozawa san explains. “These data-enhanced plans drawn in Visio raise awareness of
energy usage that general reports of power consumption cannot match.”

SAXA customers or employees can then monitor energy levels using a Visio-based IoT
dashboard in a browser across devices.