Information Systems and Service Design (Fall 2011) UC Berkeley, School of Information

1  Overview:

This document outlines the business requirements for a tool/system that will enable Marriott property leaders to plan, program, publish and analyze the energy and water consumption of their property.

2  Existing Tools/Processes:

Currently, Marriott property leaders have to fill-out multiple energy-related surveys annually-- the Energy Action Plan, the Energy & Environment Property Survey, Energy Star's Portfolio Manager and LEED certification checklists. Another significant annual survey is in the process of being added for Green Hotel Global emission tracking purposes. The current workflow is a drain on resources, requiring significant manual input. In addition there is data redundancy in the various requests and we would like to streamline the process for our properties into one system. 

3  Current Pains/Needs:

• Unscalable solution.
• Requires significant manual input and copy and paste to get to end goals; high resource costs.
• Too single threaded; only one person at a time can edit survey data else run the risk of overwriting people’s work.
• Primary users (Property Leaders) are using separate surveys to keep data in sync (all have overlapping data).
• Lots of room for error due to manual input across separate surveys; causing inaccurate data entry.

4  High Level System Goals

Develop a centralized database concept for Marriott's annual Energy & Environment Survey with an intuitive user interface and triggered events that helps prompt property leaders to meet their energy and water use reduction goals and automatically feeds survey data into partner websites.

Provide the Marriott property leaders a tool that:

• Decreases redundancy, and manual inputting of data by aggregating surveys into a unified interface. 
• Automatically feeds data into partner sites (Energy Star's Portfolio Manager, Green Hotels Global, Green Seal, Green Key, etc).
• Generates property Energy & Environment Action Plans directly from information collected. 
• Connects properties with opportunities in their region-- by consolidating data from other properties' surveys.
• Pulls data from Energy and Water Performance Reports so that properties can see how they are progressing along the path to reaching their energy and water reduction goals.