Intelligent Building Energy Management Systems
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What’s on this page?
- The changing energy landscape
- What are non-commodity costs?
- Proactive steps you can take in the face of rising energy costs
- Potential challenges you may be facing
- Gain valuable insights and better control
- Where to start?
- We can support you with a range of services
- Our energy management platform will have a positive impact across your business
- Why choose Smarter Business?
- Control your utilities costs
In this guide, we explain how intelligent building energy management systems can help you do smarter business.
The changing energy landscape
Historically-speaking, the primary energy challenge faced by businesses was rising wholesale gas and electricity cost due to soaring oil prices. These days, the situation has changed. Today, non-commodity costs (NCCs) are increasing rapidly, so mitigating these costs through intelligent building energy management systems is just as important as buying at the right time.
What are non-commodity costs?
Non-commodity costs consist of distribution, transmission and other regulated charges that are paid on top of the wholesale energy prices. NCCs form a significant portion of your energy bill.
Non-commodity costs are soaring
Did you know?
Non-commodity costs for electricity will have risen by 100% in 2025 compared to 2015 levels. In 2015, non-commodity costs made up on 40% of a business electricity bill. By 2025, non-commodity costs are expected to make up 60% of electricity bills. This means that a £750,000 bill in 2010 is predicted to rise to a £1.2 million bill in 2020.
Proactive steps you can take in the face of rising energy costs
The only way to mitigate non-commodity costs (over which you have little, if any, control) is to control the controllables by using less energy. So, where do you start?
Data insights
To identify potential energy efficiencies and energy wasters, you need an accurate depiction of how much energy you’re using, and when you’re using it. Once you have sight of the data, you need a tool to interpret it so you can to take necessary action to combat rising non-commodity charges. Intelligent building energy management systems can make this happen!
Potential challenges you may be facing
Our intelligent building energy management systems tackle many of the problems your business may be encountering:
Are you…
- struggling to cut carbon, energy and overall operating costs?
- lacking accurate water and energy consumption data for your sites?
- finding it difficult to access your own data?
- lacking access to real-time data and controls?
- lacking the skills to analyse data and turn it into insight and actionable savings?
- spending more time reacting to issues than proactively managing your sites?
- compiling excel spreadsheets because your systems don’t deliver the reporting you need?
- feeling tied to your legacy systems due to cost and interruption concerns?
- feeling under pressure to keep up with the technology that’s transforming your industry?
Gain valuable insights and better control
Intelligent building management energy systems can bring together disparate systems in your building, providing you with clear, current energy data that details where, when, and how you use your energy.
Combined with an intelligent energy strategy, these cutting-edge intelligent building energy management systems improve efficiencies and reduce wastage, leading to lower running costs.
“Smarter Business helped us with electricity, as well as gas. They have provided an excellent service with regards to consolidating our contract end dates which were all unaligned. Smarter Business managed to save us a significant amount of money by placing us on a 5-year fully fixed contract. The main benefit of this type of contract is that your prices are locked in for five years and are unaffected by inevitable price increases. This process has saved us a significant amount of time and effort.
Through Smarter Business and their effective energy contract alignment, we could make a £250, 000 saving straight away by switching with them. Subsequently, they have been extremely helpful – Anyone would have struggled to achieve these savings without them. Their communication was brilliant and it was done effortlessly. It was just so easy. As a business, it saved us valuable time.”
– Ryan Mason, Supercity Finance Director
Where to start?
We can help you identify how you’re using energy and how you can improve the ways you use energy. To do this, we take a 360 view of your business, with 360 degrees of benefits for medium and large businesses.
- Gain knowledge of your business, operation times and energy goals.
- We will conduct an audit to assess if you are getting the best energy prices and to recommend how to reduce costs.
- Volatile energy prices mean that securing the best contract can be more dependent on timing than on negotiation. Smarter Business will monitor the energy market and contact you when the time is right to enter into a new contract.
- Our reverse auction (with up to 35 energy suppliers) creates a bidding war and drives down your costs.
- Create energy targets; get real-time alerts and monthly reporting on your half hourly data through Dataview – our proprietary energy cost and consumption reporting platform.
- On an annual basis, we will evaluate our recommendations to ensure that they have generated cost savings for your business.
We can support you with a range of services
Along with intelligent building energy management systems, we can also support your business with:
Metering Solutions
We’ll install your new metering solutions effortlessly and cost-effectively – for electricity, gas and water.
Sophisticated Data Analysis & Reporting
Our reports to help you budget and plan ahead. We deliver valuable insights with our expertise and powerful analysis tools.
Water
Comparing the water market and switching suppliers can result in significant savings. In the deregulated water market, it’s well worth shopping around for cheaper water rates.
Invoice Validation
We believe that the entire energy supply chain needs to be interrogated for accuracy to ensure each charge has been correctly allocated. By checking your invoices against contract rates, validating meter charges, analysing standing charges, and conducting ongoing monthly validation, we’ll guarantee that your business only pays what it is contracted to pay.
Energy Management Software
Our unique software solution integrates your critical energy systems with a single, remotely -managed platform. This means you can manage your buildings in real time, saving time, money, and hassle.
We monitor energy markets and contracts up to two years in advance so that we can negotiate your energy contracts when the timing is right!
“Smarter Business engaged with us to understand our business and energy requirements, enabling a contract to be structured which provides ongoing savings,” said. “They re-tendered with other suppliers that better suited our needs. They also validated our invoices on a monthly basis and, to date, they have found errors in billing amounting to £34,000, which they managed to claim back for us.
They are in regular contact with us through face-to-face meetings and Tim provides a complete corporate energy procurement service for us which involves monitoring the market and purchasing gas on a daily basis as well as cost forecasting for each financial year. Smarter Business provides a transparent process when they complete the tendering, break down all the costs, and provide forecasts. They are very good at keeping us up-to-date and they provide constant updates on what they expect our costs to be.”
– James Lincoln, Essex County Laundry Managing Director
Our energy management platform will have a positive impact across your business
From Facilities Directors to Energy Directors, all your key personnel can access all the key information about their sites on a single screen, allowing them to make instantaneous changes to multiple sites at the touch of a button.
Finance & Procurement Directors
- Simplify and cut costs
Facilities/Property Directors
- Gain total visibility and control of your systems and sites in a single platform.
Managing Directors & CEOs
- Cut operational costs.
- Streamline and boost customer experience.
- Run a more profitable business.
Finance Director/CFO
- Make your buildings cheaper to run.
Procurement Directors
- Buildings that require fewer supplier support partners and ongoing license fees.
- Benefit from a more efficient and sustainable building portfolio.
IT Directors
- Actionable insights to better manage your server room environment.
- Multiple systems and data accessible via a single platform.
“About 3 – 4 % of our total outlay is spent on electricity. When I first joined the team three years ago, we were spending around £30,000 on electricity in the production area of the winery. I had heard positive things about Smarter Business and so asked if they could review our expenditure. It was great to be able to hand over all the hard work to somebody else.
We had seven meters here with differing renewal dates, and we simply didn’t have the time or resources to do that in-house. Having our old bills analysed by an expert was really useful. As a result of working with Smarter Business, we switched to quite a small supplier that was not even on our radar at the time. The resulting switch beat the renewal quote with our existing supplier by a very healthy 20%, saving us several thousand pounds.To keep electricity costs competitive we will continue to utilise the switching service when our current contract approaches renewal date. However, it is not something we will have to worry about, as we know that Smarter Business will review the market for us. It’s a simple and free process that saves us time and money – what’s not to like?”
– Bruce Green, Finance Director at Hattingley Valley Wines
Why choose Smarter Business?
We’re the perfect partners for forward-thinking businesses that are ready to do business better with intelligent building energy management systems.
We are the energy experts
We’ve helped thousands of clients improve their buildings’ efficiency, cut costs, and reduce wastage.
We’re on your side
We are totally independent when it comes to choosing suppliers. Our quoting service is fast and easy, with a whole-of-market price comparison. Through our tailored advice, it’s our mission to match each of our customers with the best possible contract for their needs. We can also help secure better rates with your current supplier.
We are customer-orientated
A Net Promoter Score above +40 is considered world-class. Our score of +77 highlights the strong relationships we have with our clients. > We were the first broker to achieve TGP’s Platinum accreditation for compliance. This accolade affirms that we sell in an ethical and compliant way. The targets are set at a demanding level, which means a broker needs to show a real ongoing commitment to compliance excellence to meet them. > We are independently rated as ‘Excellent’ on TrustPilot.
Our cutting-edge technology
We support our consultants and, in turn, our customers, with cutting-edge cloud-based technology and intelligent building energy management systems.
- Our custom-built pricing engine compares whole -of-market prices and provides an instant, unbiased quote.
- We use industry-leading software to monitor the energy market closely and call you when you may be able to lock in a better deal on their gas or electricity.
- Through our energy analysis software, we set up cost and consumption reports which analyse usage based on set parameters and provides the opportunity to save costs, budget accordingly and identify hours and days of peak usage.
- We set triggers that alert you when your energy consumption profile changes, ensuring consistent and optimal energy efficiency and identifying any potential waste.
- We provide a seamless cloud-based platform for managing your portfolios, procurement and invoicing, giving the control back to you.
- Our platform allows you to see a breakdown of all commercial energy costs and future contracts on a daily basis, empowering you to take advantage of favourable market conditions. It is the only platform to allow all supplier participants to view each other’s bids. This provides much greater competition and results in the best price outcome aligned to your needs.
Control your utilities costs
Smarter Business provides intelligent building energy management systems that will manage and minimise all of your energy and water costs.
We can positively influence both supply and demand.
SUPPLY
- Better energy deals
- Smart, fixed and flexible procurement contracts
- Energy bill validation
- Our technology will help you buy better
DEMAND
- Actionable insights into your utilities usage
- Strategic energy management suited to your business needs
- Our technology will help you buy better cut consumption and shift energy usage and take advantage of new revenue streams.