by Jonathan Gardiner | Dec 2, 2014 | Waste
Earlier this year Tamaki College’s executive officer, Neil McEnteer had no hesitation in handing over the school’s waste contract to Total Utilities for review. Since his first dealings with the utilities experts in 2012, Neil had seen the college benefit from significant savings across electricity, gas and telecoms bills. He remembers being quietly confident of another good result.
“In a sector where budgets are very tight, it is important keep costs to a minimum,” said Neil. “Every dollar we save is a dollar more we can spend on teaching and learning.
“Unless you are proactive, completely up to date with market information and have read all the fine print, it’s difficult to be sure that you’ve secured the best utilities contracts. Working with Total Utilities has shown us just what can be achieved when you bring in the experts.”
In 2012 Total Utilities cut the college spend on electricity by 12% and then by a further 13% through an early renegotiation in 2014. Acting on their advice, Neil moved the college’s gas supply contract to a new retailer in 2012, reducing annual costs by 13%. To complete the trifecta, Total Utilities renegotiated the school’s telecoms contract at the beginning of 2014, resulting in an overall saving of 29%.
“While we were discussing one of the other contract renewals, I asked for advice on our waste spend. Without realising it, we had allowed our contract to automatically roll over for two consecutive three-year terms. Jonathan Gardiner from Total Utilities took one look at the figures and said we could do way better on the price.”
Waste contracts almost always require 90 days’ notice prior to the renewal date if the customer wants to review pricing. If this opportunity passes, the pricing and contract terms automatically roll over for another three years. (more…)
by Jonathan Gardiner | Dec 2, 2014 | Waste
Jonathan Gardiner shares some ways to save money on waste management at your organisation:
How full are your bins?
If bins are regularly being picked up half or two thirds full consider increasing the size of your bin to reduce the number of pick-ups and cut transport and tipping charges.
Are you paying for pick-ups you don’t need?
Going into the long summer holidays, make sure your pick-up regime reflects the drop in the amount of waste generated over the next two months. If your scheduled pick-ups remain unchanged, you’ll most likely be paying for empty bins to be emptied!
What’s in the bin?
Carry out an audit of your waste disposal process on site. Walk through what actually happens on the ground rather than looking at the process you have in place to deal with waste (practice rather than theory). Ask your waste company to supply a breakdown of the bin contents from a typical week and see if it all stacks up. This will give you some insight into whether you can reduce the amount of waste that ends up in the bin.
Keep an eye on price adjustment clauses
Check your contract fine print to see whether your waste company can pass on increased charges at short notice. If they can, make a note to renegotiate the small print at next time your contract comes up for renewal.
Review contract pricing
Make a note of your contract expiry date and count back 90 days. Make sure that you give written notice of your intention to review pricing well in advance of the 90 day cut off if you want to avoid your current pricing being locked in for another three years.
If your pricing hasn’t changed for one or more contract terms, you will almost certainly be able to make savings on waste. Have a look at how Tamaki College cut their waste bill by 44% this year.
If you’d like to see how much you can save, talk to Jonathan Gardiner at Total Utilities. Find out more about the waste services that Jonathan and the team can assist your organisation with.
by Jonathan Gardiner | Oct 24, 2014 | Energy
NZ Hothouse is one of New Zealand’s largest privately-owned commercial growing and logistics operations. With over 300 staff, 20 hectares of glass houses across two sites and pack houses on a further two sites, the cost of gas and electricity to support operations represents a significant cost to the business. Consumption of natural gas well outstrips electricity usage, with gas-heated glass houses (the C0₂ from the burning process is also used to enrich the growing atmosphere), gas used to heat pack houses and LPG gas exchange cylinders fuelling the business forklift fleet.
“We wouldn’t go into an RFP without Total Utilities. Gas is one of our largest expenses and Total Utilities have handled our last four contract negotiations. They’ve managed to deliver significant savings every time,” said Managing Director, Simon Watson.
“This year, acting on their analysts’ advice, we went to market six months early as part of a large buying group. The savings we ended up with amounted to a six-figure sum.”
“We had offers from five or six suppliers. The ones that were attractive up-front often turned out not to be as good as they looked. It’s important to really understand the contract terms and conditions, be aware of the pitfalls and be able to cut through the smoke and mirrors. Total Utilities prepare a report that really compares ‘like with like’. That makes it easy for us to come to the right decision with the confidence that we are getting the best possible deal.”
Find out more about how Jonathan and the team at Total Utilities can help you to save on gas or other utilities.
by chris | Sep 5, 2014 | Energy
Price is not king when it comes to managing utilities and getting the best from your investment. Businesses typically overlook the strong relationship between purchasing prices, consumption and utilisation efficiency. Focusing on cost per unit without analysing the way in which utilities are consumed can result in businesses paying more and getting less value.
Total Utilities provides an end-to-end approach to utility optimisation across electricity, natural gas/LPG, trade waste and ICT. This starts with strategic, proactive purchasing but it doesn’t end there. We focus on key business drivers like controlling cost and consumption – and report back on usage trends, exceptions and changes, provide budgeting advice for the future and remove the need for manual bill-checking. These deliverables should be underpinned by a proactive energy audit of any new premises to ensure that these meet best practise from day one.
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by chris | Sep 1, 2014 | Energy
Electricity price rises are coming from the regulated parts of the industry, writes Chris Hargreaves in the Sunday Star Times 31 August 2014.
Rod Oram’s recent comments in the Sunday Star Times and on National Radio were critical of the current market prices for retail energy and the way in which increased profits were distributed to shareholders by generators and retailers – rather than being used to bring retail pricing down.
While Rod’s comments bear thinking about, his analysis failed to take into account market changes over the past few years – and the considerable impact of key pricing factors such as transmission and distribution charges (both of which are regulated and out of the control of retail providers).
Rod Oram also appears unaware of the significant reductions in energy prices that have benefitted commercial users of electricity in the past. Total Utilities Management Group has seen reductions averaging 20% on recent contracts since the last quarter of 2012 as both generators and retailers have rebalanced their regional and commercial portfolios in response to changes in generation capacity, lower demand and increased regional competition.
Electricity pricing in New Zealand is far from transparent. This leads to uncertainty around how invoiced prices are derived and means that changes to the various cost elements can be difficult to police. This uncertainty can muddy the water when talking about the historical cost of contestable energy prices.
The Electricity Authority recently released a Statistics New Zealand survey covering historical retail residential pricing with figures backed up by the MBIE. (more…)
by DavidSpratt | Aug 25, 2014 | ICT
Having outlined some of the structural issues facing CIO’s and providers of cloud service management processes in my previous blog on managing cloud infrastructure I am left with a real challenge.
As a critic of the old, over scaled, expensive and wasteful ESM/ITIL based service management systems, how can I now offer some constructive suggestions on a new way of looking at service management in the cloud?
Cloud service management strategies
1. Find a common language
- ITIL provides a meaningful and commonly understood language for all parties. We can use this language to identify the differences between a global public cloud (Azure, Amazon, Google, Rack Space et al) and a locally hosted private or public cloud service management model (DIY, All of Government, Datacom, HP, Gen-i, IBM etc).
- We can run through the ITIL framework step by step and identify where the global public cloud provider owns the service management environment; where it is owned by a local outsourcer; and where this responsibility is shouldered by the internal IT Department.
- This allows the service consumer to see and pay for the value being delivered while ensuring all other parties have a clear, profitable and sustainable model for delivering on their promises.
2. Be clear on the desired outcomes
- Rather than requiring that major public cloud providers redesign their internal processes (unlikely when dealing with players bigger than Australasia’s biggest companies) we should instead focus on the key elements we require. Namely:
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