It’s been a busy time for Ecova! We’ve celebrated many milestones as we continue to become the leader in total energy and sustainability management for our clients.

We recently provided an integration update on our acquisition of Prenova, and we wanted to be sure to share an update on the integration efforts from our acquisition of LPB Energy Management. As a reminder, we acquired Dallas, Texas-based LPB Energy Management in February 2012, which expanded our geographic reach and increased our client base to nearly 700 commercial clients, while enhancing our expertise in utility expense management and energy procurement.

At the time of the LPB acquisition, we immediately began working to identify best practices in products, processes, and operations from both companies. Our initial work is complete, and we are moving ahead with system improvements that we believe will benefit our clients. Highlights of our system updates include:

Expense and Data Management

It’s essential that we offer the most comprehensive and up-to-date products. Our team has identified areas for opportunity, and as a result, we are transitioning to a single Expense and Data Management platform. The enhanced system will provide clients with additional vendor payment options and a more detailed level of data for reporting on costs, usage, and demand, as well as a deeper level of utility billing analysis to identify cost savings opportunities and billing anomalies. 

Energy Supply Management

We continue to invest in our Energy Supply Management (ESM) and procurement services. Our team is looking at consolidating our existing systems in order to build the market’s best reporting platform, which will improve hedge data management, workflow, budget support, market information, and user dashboards. Clients should see improvements in the availability of supply market intelligence, online contract management, and reporting consistency before the end of 2012.

We are excited about our product enhancements and building on the good work of LPB Energy Management. As we continue our integration and product development efforts, we will provide additional updates on timing and on what these changes mean for our clients.

We’re still staring down a tough economic environment which continues to cause budget restraints for many businesses, while new technology and business demands have been growing exponentially. Add these factors to the increase in mergers and acquisitions, as well as regulatory changes, and it becomes clear that it’s time for a telecommunications audit.

Follow these guidelines to identify unused or unnecessary telecom services to help control your telecommunications spend and leverage opportunities:

TELECOM INVENTORY ASSESSMENT

It’s difficult to identify areas of opportunities if you don’t know what you have. Maintain a detailed inventory of all telecom services to validate invoice charges. Managing from telecom billing data alone will not provide the granularity needed to succeed; building inventories down to the individual Universal Service Order Code (USOC) from Customer Service Records (CSRs) is the only way to determine exactly what services you have and where they are located.

VALIDATE LINE PURPOSES

As business needs and technology change, so do the needs for lines and trunks. Conduct a telecom line inventory at least once every couple of years to determine if you are paying for something you don’t need or just aren’t using anymore (e.g. analog lines). When the use of modems for access or back up services migrates to Internet Protocol (IP) based services, lines can be abandoned or reused for non-approved applications.

ESTABLISH TELECOM PROCESS STANDARDS

Implementing a centralized system for ordering across your organization will ensure standards are met and inventory gets updated. The same is true for payment processing to ensure that invoice charges are correct and are paid on time to prevent potential service interruptions.

KNOW YOUR TRUNKS

Review your primary trunk groups on an annualized basis. We’re relying more on other forms of communications, such as email, instant messaging, and mobile devices while in the office, so it’s important to monitor your traffic volume to ensure you are not paying for more trunks than you need.

TELECOM BUDGET ALLOCATION

Allocate costs as far down the organization as possible to ensure charges are assessed to the budget owner to help identify additional opportunities for savings.

To learn more about telecom cost savings opportunities watch our educational 30-minute webinar below, "Are you Paying for Unused Services?" from our Dial in the Savings webinar series.

In early April, I had the opportunity to represent Ecova at the Staples 12th Annual Strategic Energy Summit. It was the first time the Strategic Energy Summit joined forces with Staples customers, store associates, and vendor partners to discuss the company’s sustainability and energy strategy today and beyond; no small feat for this global company with offices ranging in size from 4,000 to 30,000 square feet and facilities reaching up to 1 million square feet.

The importance of examining the entire ‘supply chain’ from raw materials to manufacturing, distribution, consumer and end of life, was a common theme throughout the day, and reminded all of us that everything is connected and that even small, incremental changes can have positive environmental impact.
The day-long Strategic Energy Summit produced a lively discussion and looked closely at topics such as trends in utility size and infrastructure, both from a regulated and unregulated perspective, tax credits and incentives, and the need to invest in renewable energy. Although divergent views were present, everyone agreed that our challenges represent opportunities for long-term sustainability.

Time was also given to the importance of benchmarking and measurement, which provided an opportunity to share case studies and examples of sustainability ‘successes’ from Strategic Energy Summit participants. We heard from Kohl’s, who uses ENERGY STAR^®’s Portfolio Manager to track and manage its energy consumption across locations to inform an overall energy efficiency program, which includes LEED certification and solar installs for some of their buildings.

The Strategic Energy Summit illustrates what can happen when diverse stakeholders and industry leaders come together for a day of sharing and collaborating to encourage transparency, innovation, and new ways of thinking for long-term impact on these important issues.

I left the Strategic Energy Summit with a sense of encouragement about the future and feeling great about our partnership with Staples.

A deeper dive into Ecova’s recent Big Data whitepaper reveals that Ecova’s retail clients reduced their electricity consumption by 2,300,000,000 kWh between Q1 2009 and Q3 2011. Sound like a big number? Well, it is. This amount of conservation is equivalent to the carbon emissions from 3.7M barrels of oil and is enough electricity to power just shy of 200,000 US homes for one year.ⁱ

To put this number in a global perspective – consider the following chart.

Per capita electricity consumption varies dramatically across the globe. Whereas 2.3B kWh of electricity would satiate the annual electricity needs of 178,101 Americans, it would go far enough to electrify the lives of 4.0M people living in India.

What are companies doing to keep electric consumption down as retail sales surge in 2012 and beyond? Join Ecova at booth 421 at this week’s PRSM 2012 conference in Anaheim, CA, to learn more about what leading companies are doing to manage their total energy and sustainability impacts.

Sources:
ⁱ http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/calculator.html
ⁱⁱ The World Bank “Electric Power Consumption (kWh per capita).” http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/calculator.html. Viewed on 4/17/12.

Just over four months have passed since Ecova acquired Prenova and we wanted to share with you an update on the status of our integration efforts, what you can expect from our newly combined entity, and how we are working to bring greater value to our clients as we come together. As a reminder, we acquired Prenova in December of 2011 with a goal of solidifying our leadership position in the energy and sustainability market, and expanding our real-time building management and software-as-a-service (SaaS) capabilities.

At the time of the Prenova acquisition, we immediately began working to identify best practices from both companies. Our goal is to focus on the best from across both companies – the products, processes, people, and operations for each service area. Our initial work is complete, and we are moving ahead with changes in each area that we believe will benefit our clients. The updates include:

EMPLOYEE INTEGRATION
Our new Ecova employees have completed their transition to becoming Ecova employees. We have made some changes in our client service organization and staffing to better accommodate the teams’ strengths. These changes are complete and the new teams are working together.

EXPENSE AND DATA MANAGEMENT
Expense and Data Management services are a foundation for many of our offerings. Insight into energy usage and expense data is critical to the ability to deliver actionable insight and value to our clients. Planned service enhancements include:

• We are integrating utility invoice data, from our clients’ bill pay provider, for Prenova clients into Ecova’s platforms. This will allow the advanced analytical tools we have developed to expediently deliver more value from rich data sets. We expect this will improve data quality and allow for future enhancements to reporting capabilities.

• We are consolidating our auditing systems and processes and this work will be complete by the end of the year. The new system will provide the most robust invoice auditing available in the market.

ENERGY SUPPLY MANAGEMENT
Our Energy Supply Management (ESM) and procurement services can provide significant savings opportunities for clients looking to save costs and lower risks.

• We are building a reporting platform which will improve hedge data management, workflow, budget support, market information, and user dashboards.

• We are also making improvements in the availability of supply market intelligence, online contract management, and reporting consistency.

RESPONSE CENTER AND FACILITY OPTIMIZATION
One of the key drivers for the acquisition was Prenova’s leadership in remote monitoring with services such as Responsive Monitoring. A properly designed and executed monitoring program can significantly reduce energy spend, prolong equipment asset life, increase visibility to future cost reduction programs and improve the allocation of a business’s resources.

• We will provide a new, online client value reporting tool. This new tool will deliver greater visibility for call center monitoring activities including alarm tracking, dispatch activity, remote operational support and metrics performance. We expect to have our first release this summer.

• In several areas we are already working with many of our clients to deliver additional capabilities in “beta” format. Later this year we expect to have full versions available for upgrades that will:

1. Improve the work order management database to support enhanced issue tracking and reporting specific to the equipment asset level.
   
   
2. Improve the collection of energy management system data and archiving. This work will improve analytics and reporting and provide better direct asset performance information.
   
   
3. Better integrate systems to support enhanced fault detection and diagnostics of facility data including energy management system and meter-level data.

As we continue our integration and development efforts and move forward with the projects listed above, we will provide you with updates on timing and on what these changes mean. Our goal is to continue to invest in the good work that Prenova started. This doesn’t happen overnight, but we are committed to making an impact for our clients’ business through our efforts.