Being tasked with driving down a council’s energy consumption, cutting carbon emissions and, ultimately, reducing its annual spend, is no mean feat.
We caught up with Bill Anderson, Energy Officer at The Moray Council, to find out how he has managed to achieve all of the above.
The Moray Council has a large and diverse estate consisting of 374 sites, including schools, swimming pools, offices, small depots and harbours.
Prior to 2005, the council had no centralised process of recording utility billing data for their estates’ portfolio. Council sites would be responsible for managing their own utility bills, which they would receive in the post.
Sigma Energy Management Software
Bill successfully adopted Sigma Energy Management Software in 2006 and hasn’t looked back since.
“When I joined the council as Energy Officer, it had no energy management system in place. I was handed a box filled with files, dating back three years,”said Bill.
He added:
“I started to look for a Monitoring and Targeting system in June 2005. I looked at a few of the main players and decided that TEAM Sigma suited the way I wanted to work and I liked the way it looked. By early 2006 it was up and running.”
Energy saving over the years
Throughout the years Sigma Energy Management Software has helped identify thousands of pounds worth of savings for The Moray Council.
Swimming pool
“We noticed that we were being charged excessively high for one of our swimming pools, which also had a hydrotherapy pool running alongside, which we don’t own. We were assured that they ran off two separate meters but it transpired that we were paying for both pools, luckily, we managed to claim thousands of pounds back.”
Harbour
“A utility company misread one of the meters at one of our harbours. Our quarterly bill, for that particular site, would usually amount to £200 but we received a bill for £1,000, which TEAM Sigma alerted us to. The invoice had already been paid but we managed to reclaim the money.”
Small Building
“One of our smaller building ended up costing the authority £1,100, despite being unoccupied for 12-months.The care organisation who had locked up and left during the winter months had failed to switch off the electric heaters. We hadn’t received any bills and it was only discovered on a routine visit.”
Benefits of Sigma software
Whilst there’s no denying that Sigma Software has played a significant part in Energy Management for The Moray Council, Bill has also had to spend a lot of time and effort in making it work for him.
“I had to spend hundreds of hours inputting the three year back log of data, whilst checking that everything going in was correct, both manually and electronically. I cannot emphasise enough – that you need to get it right to start with – I can assure you that it will definitely be worth it.”
The greatest benefits of using Sigma software for Bill has been having a “reliable” and “easy accessible” billing system.
“Everything we need to know is right in front of us, if anyone has something to query we can answer them straight away. We also have two of our accounts team set up as users, so they can read information and run reports.”
He added:
“Sigma Software has helped us save hundreds of man hours every month, it’s easy to use and has made our life much easier. Thank you TEAM.”