Care Group

Working under an NDA, we were approached by a National Care Group who wanted to improve their energy efficiency and reduce costs.

Energy was a significant overhead to the group with a combined spend in excess of £3m per annum, and greater understanding was required to facilitate ambitious growth plans for the organisation.

When approaching SeeMore Energy, the Care Group was procuring directly for supply contracts on a site-by-site basis, which involved more than 250 separate contracts to cover their full portfolio of Electricity, Gas & Water meters.

They had multiple suppliers and varying contract end dates, which meant a significant amount of administrative control was needed to stay on top of the energy markets all year round.

This became more challenging as market volatility increased and they sought to work with an Energy Consultant who could streamline their procurement process and provide additional value in the form of budget reporting, consumption monitoring and invoice validation.

Current Position:

• Staggered Supplier Relationships
• Varying Contract End Dates
• Lack of Market Knowledge
• No visibility on usage
• Uncertainty on future budgets

Goals:

• A single contract for all meters with the same supplier
• Regular visibility of consumption at sites to drive behaviour change
• Monthly invoice validation to provide peace of mind
• Improve annual energy budgeting
  

Having initially created a ‘Portfolio Overview’ document which listed all Electricity, Gas and Water meters within the group, we sought to establish the end date of all current contracts and planned a group procurement exercise.

The remit was to consider the potential of aligning all supplies into a Group contract that would open the potential of a Flexible Energy Contract. This would help remove some of the margins often included within Fixed Energy Contracts, and would enable the Group to benefit from a more strategic approach, with SeeMore Energy purchasing their energy via regular market interactions, rather than one single transaction. 

The process involved approaching the whole market to discuss the basket proposition, which enabled multiple entrants to be contacted under different legal entities, removing the need to have a single entity responsible for the whole Group.

This helped overcome credit concerns as the risk was spread and following detailed conversations, the Group was able to secure a contract without the need for any credit mitigation.

Once the recommended supplier was approved, we sought to create bridging contracts to ensure none of the meters moved onto higher variable rates whilst awaiting the start of the Flex contract.

This was managed efficiently and helped create budgetary certainty for the Group whilst a longer-term Flex strategy was agreed.

Alongside the procurement, we provided a Dashboard which allowed them to view specific site analysis and compare similar sized care homes in league tables based on usage and costs.

Based on the Procurement exercise, SeeMore Energy helped secured a 20% annual saving based on the previous years costs. This attributed to over £600k in Year One.

Further savings totalling in excess of £1m are forecast by the conclusion of the 4 year contract.

The invoice validation exercise identified inaccuracies with the VAT charges are more than 20 Care Homes. This led to a VAT rebate which achieved a further £50k return for the Grouup.

On-going invoice validation has achieved the desired peace of mind and following an extension of their payment terms to 28 days, the Group now only make payments on invoices once they’ve been validated and approved by SeeMore Energy.