Sustainable Advantage consultants have worked with one of the UK’s largest Facility Management service organisations to support them with their utilities purchasing strategy with the strategic objective of reducing their cost base and where possible sourcing renewable “green” energy.

Our client provides flexible and professional property solutions made up of numerous business streams globally. They employ over 43,500 staff delivering services ranging from office cleaning, catering and landscaping to pest control, security and facility services management.

Sustainable Advantage was engaged to:

1. Review their utility usage and procurement strategy
2. Drastically increase the proportion of green energy used
3. Reduce costs across its 9 core properties forming the basis of their UK carbon footprint
4. Reduce excess billing charges from their utility companies
5. Reduced administration in dealing with multiple suppliers and feed into Sustainable Performance, Sustainable Advantage’s CSR reporting tool
6. Install sub-metering within key properties to ascertain how energy is used and to eliminate inefficiency

Our work involved developing a robust energy procurement strategy and carbon management plan owned by their internal CSR team supported by Sustainable Advantage, with clear cost reduction targets.

Engagement:

We engaged with all levels within the client:

• Board Level – our senior consultants, worked with board level sponsors to ensure that the programme was aligned to the strategic vision for CSR and was correctly positioned within the business.

• National Level – we designed a systematic process that was highly interactive with each site so that we could understand each site’s current procurement strategy.  We undertook analysis of each site to understand the unit prices, contract start and finish dates, utilities supplier and usage at each location.

• CSR team – we worked closely with the appropriate managers to help them develop and produce the utilities procurement strategy in partnership with representatives of all relevant parts of the organisation.

Key Achievements:

• A clear utilities procurement strategy
• Reduction in cost per site as follows:
       - £10,224.80 =  4.6 %  improvement at site 1 (based on 2 year deal)
       - £5060.79 = 43.89 % improvement at site 2 (based on 1 year deal)
       - £3873.48 = 48.18 % improvement at site 3 (based on 1 year deal)
       - £1574.59 = 18.17 % improvement at site 4 (based on 1 year deal)
• 100% Green energy procured for their largest site representing 65% of their  overall electricity energy used including their managed sites ( 1,794,136 kWh)
• A reduction in the rate of Authorised Supply Capacity (ASC) at largest site from £1.35 per kVa/month to £0.67 per kVa/month.
       - This equates to £4,872.24 for 24 months as opposed to  £14,580.00 from the original supplier for 24 months
• Smart meter’s fitted at no cost to the business at smaller sites (Saving £300-£400 per site)
• The ability to get direct feed into the “Sustainable Performance” CSR reporting tool
       - Saving valuable resource in time
       - Which will automatically generate them their carbon footprint

Client Comment:

Our organisation is committed to our Corporate Responsibility programme and passionate about reducing our effects on climate change by reducing our environmental impacts.  Our utilities procurement exercise is one strategic priority that supports our CR environmental objectives.  We are delighted that we have demonstrated that 65% of our energy provision is now green and comes from renewable sources.  In addition we have saved costs across our portfolio against a backdrop of rising prices. We have also removed hidden costs in resource and administration as our new contracts afford us the opportunity to feed the utilities directly into our “Sustainable Performance” CSR reporting tool which in turn generates our carbon footprint automatically.

We would like to thank the Sustainable Advantage team for their support and commitment towards this project and the excellent result in helping us achieve our objectives.