At risk of stating the obvious, utilities are not widgets. You don’t raise a purchase order for a Gigawatt Hour of electricity. Suppliers price on the accuracy of your data and pass risk back in restrictive terms and higher prices. Yet buyers struggle to deliver a 100% data set.
The Challenge
For most organizations, spend, usage and emissions data reside in many places. Pieces of the picture may reside in the accounting system, the BMS/EMS, or on someone’s office spreadsheet. Worse, key data sits on the consultant’s – Hard to Access – database. Consequently, every exercise – whether it’s a spending review, budget exercise, tender, NGERs audit or routine reporting – becomes a discrete project, duplicating effort and costing precious management time.
Often, the sheer pain of gathering the data reinforces an “event” mentality towards the category: negotiate a contract and forget about it until it is just about to expire. Worse, the “problem” gets outsourced to a consultant who now holds all the cards. Data then deteriorates as much as 30% over the contract cycle creating uncontrolled costs and a future data “clean-up” headache.
Turning Good Data into a Strategic Asset
Many organizations “get” that data is key to effectively managing the energy category. Constantly refreshed, site-based data means that you can respond quickly to market opportunities, whilst maintaining control of your budget, reporting and spend.
Yet all too often, the same organizations see investment in good data as heavily front-loaded in cost and internal resources, with only a long term pay-off. But it does not have to be that way – and technology is the key to changing the business case.
Mobile your Information to Leverage the In-House Capability
Our experience with organizations throughout the globe is often the same – a simple sign-off, backed by automation enables the Bid’s platform to squeeze the data-gathering exercise from months into days.
With 24/7 access through a single interface, the value can be realized immediately: complete billing history and contract repository, spend and usage benchmarked across the portfolio and to the market, accurate site-based budget forecasts, identification of overbilling, uncontrolled usage or inappropriate pricing elements, all contribute to immediate payback. Management focuses on value-adding, rather than transactional activities. At the same, the organization is now in the driving seat to renegotiate contracts quickly on the back of short-term market opportunities.
Best practice is a journey, not a destination. If you don’t feel you are there yet, we should talk.
