ESOS ? Why we must have it

The 9,000 big UK businesses directly affected by the new Energy Saving Opportunity Scheme could save UK?250 million between them, or an average UK?27,000 each, if they reduced electricity consumption by just 1%. The total amount is equal to the output of five power stations, at a time when Britain?s grid is under strain.
On 26 November 2014, UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey met with over 100 opinion makers from businesses, charities and universities at the Institute of Directors. The gist of what he presented was:

  • ?Britain?s big firms are spending around ?2.8 billion extra each year on inefficient energy technologies ? the equivalent output of nearly five power stations;
  • Now is the time to seize the opportunity with ESOS ? and organisations up and down the country are already gearing up to make changes to save energy, save money and save the environment.
  • If business did what business is supposed to do [that is innovate to make money] and act and invest, it will save ? and that’s the bottom line.?

The environmental benefits are as important although EcoVaro agrees with Ed Davey for taking a pecuniary approach. Businesses above the threshold of 250 staff and a balance sheet of UK?34 million would have not achieved their status unless they spent their money wisely.
The discussion panel included Rhian Kelly (Director of Business Environment at CBI), and Paul Ekins (Director UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources & Deputy Director of the UK Energy Research Centre). Hugh Jones, Managing Director, Advisory at the Carbon Trust responded to Ed Davey?s remarks by commenting:

  • ?At the Carbon Trust we have already engaged with hundreds of businesses on ESOS, helping to explain how they can achieve compliance while also making significant energy savings and cutting carbon.
  • Businesses often aren’t aware of opportunities in energy efficiency, or they don’t realise how attractive the paybacks can be. By requiring companies to understand exactly how they can make cost-effective investment in energy efficiency, they are far more likely to take action.
  • From the interest we have seen so far we expect ESOS to benefit British business by helping companies to reduce overheads and increase competitiveness.

The UK?s Energy Saving Opportunity Scheme ESOS is a gold mine of opportunities for big business, the environment and the population that breathes the air. Measurement of critical energy throughputs is the beginning of the process. EcoVaro is standing by to help you convert your data to meaningful information.

Check our similar posts

Making Click-and-Collect click

In my previous post, I introduced you to integrated e-commerce and explained why it is the right way to extend your business online. If you already have a brick-and-mortar retailing business and you’re looking to improve your online presence, you could start offering a click-and-collect service.

With click-and-collect, customers order online and then collect their merchandise from one of the retailer?s local branches. Why would they want to do that?

Apparently, there are buyers who now prefer a click-and-collect service over the delivery service of a purely online retailer. With the latter, they sometimes have to wait forever for the delivery van to arrive or contend with a missed-delivery card.

Basically, customers who want both the convenience of placing orders online and better control of their time find click-and-collect a better option.

Last December 2011, IMRG (Interactive Media in Retail Group) reported a ?significant rise in the percentage of click-and-collect e-retail sales in the 3rd quarter of 2011?. This accounted for 10.4% of all e-retail sales in that quarter. More specifically, the gain was 7.4%, which was also the strongest quarterly gain since IMRG started collecting this data.

Clearly, this particular service is gaining popularity. But how do you meet the rising demand in this area?

A click-and-collect service requires a highly synchronised ecosystem. You don’t want to have a customer order items from your online store, drive a couple of minutes from his house to your nearest outlet, only to find out that one of the items is no longer available.

This can only work if all systems involved are interconnected. Changes in the inventory in your individual outlets should reflect on your database in real time. In turn, these changes have to be reflected instantly on your online store. Conversely, once a buyer has picked items online and is already directed to a local outlet, those items have to be reserved there.

But that’s not all. Your system has to be seamless enough to support fast and reliable service. You don’t want your buyer to have to wait a long time before the items are ready for pick-up. It also has to be capable of tracking the status of ordered products, handling uncollected orders, and monitoring inventory.

By implementing an integrated e-commerce system, these won’t be the only things you?d be able to do. You can even add more value to your service. For example, you can connect to your CRM and learn more about your customers? purchase history, buying habits, and preferences.

That way, it would be easier for you to provide a faster and more convenient buying experience for them in the future.

Click-and-collect is a very promising way to increase your sales and improve customer loyalty.

What is Business Intelligence?

How well do you know your customers? That is, can you actually pinpoint which among them are you most profitable with and which are making you spend more? Are you content with the accuracy of your forecasts and market predictions? Do you feel you’re spending more on legal costs and regulatory compliance than you should?

Your IT department may be handling these concerns pretty well but perhaps you’d like to know how you can further improve things.

What we’ve got is an IT solution wrapped in a fancy name called ‘Business Intelligence’ or BI. If you think that’s too strong a term, we invite you to read more below, then you be the judge.

Dashboards – Determine the health of your business at a glance

Most drivers rarely make use of their car’s dashboard. After all, you can still reach your destination by just using the steering wheel, pedals, gear stick and so on. But that’s not exactly the most efficient way to drive, right?

If you want to save on fuel, you’ll want to glance on the RPM and speedometer from time to time. You might also want to utilise the trip meter to determine which route is the shortest to a given destination. Other dashboard components like the fuel gauge, tire pressure gauge, engine temperature indicator, and volt meter can likewise provide information about your car’s health.

The same concept applies to business management. If you want to run your business intelligently, you can make use of BI dashboards. These are tools in a typical business intelligence package that will allow you to determine the health of your business via a set of smartly configured gauges and other intuitive graphical representations.

So that, literally, at a mere glance, you’ll already know whether various units in your company are working efficiently. A dashboard will also give you instant feedback of the strategies you’ve recently implemented; to let you know if things are working as planned.

If you want more information than a dashboard can provide, our BI packages also include highly customised reports.

Reports that help you decide faster

Dashboards are great for getting valuable information at a glance but they won’t tell you everything. For more details, you’ll need to view highly customised reports. Our reports are tailor made for each user. We see to it that, by default, each person gets the information he needs the most.

If you belong to the sales department, you normally won’t need a presentation of the data that is appropriate for people in accounting. That way, you don’t spend time filtering. Instead, you and your people can move on to making well-informed decisions.

Our BI systems make use of your vast collection of data to provide reports that will organise your regulatory requirements and call your attention to approaching deadlines. The same system will provide the right information for your people on the field. If your team members are equipped with smart phones and Pocket PCs, they can retrieve whatever it is they need to know to close deals, make sales, and serve clients faster than the competition.

Generating logical information from disparate sources of data scattered over an enterprise-wide organisation is no easy task. But we’ll make it look simple. That’s because we’ve got the expertise to bring it all together into a robust data warehouse and to extract them in the form of reports and dashboards through OLAP.

OLAP and Data Warehousing – Powering the generation of actionable information

Want to know how to generate reports with the highest degree of accuracy and reliability? In theory, what you need is a single repository or a data warehouse. That is, order receipts, sales invoices, as well as customer & supplier data is integrated with regulatory details, personnel data, and others. These are all specially organised for future reporting and analysis.

However, data, no matter how all-embracing, is useless until it is processed into actionable information. Through OLAP or Online Analytical Processing, you can seamlessly collect all relevant data from your vast repository to answer queries like “What is our company’s profitability for the 2nd quarter in all identified key cities for our top-of-the-line products?”.

The strength of OLAP lies in its inherent ability to perform data analysis and very complex calculations, thus enabling it to return complex queries much faster than other database technologies. It is therefore suitable for very large data sources, i.e., data warehouses.

Dashboards and reports will only give your organisation the edge if the information retrieved is reliable, fast, and accurate – exactly the kind OLAP is so good at.

Mobile BI – Step back and see the big picture anytime, anywhere

Spreadsheets are great for displaying detailed information. However, in today’s highly competitive market, retrieving information that matters the most in the shortest possible time is vital in maintaining a sizeable lead over the competition. To step back and see the big picture, you’ll need insightful tools like dashboards and automatically generated reports.

Reports can be beamed to mobile devices such as smart phones and Pocket PCs. They can also be viewed on eBook readers as well. You can also do the same tasks with spreadsheets. But imagine how you’d need to scroll over a large spreadsheet on any of these mobile devices just to know which customer in your current location has performed well over the last month.

If you really want to make quick, well-informed decisions, BI dashboards for mobile devices is the way to go. You can make use of various business objects such as drill-able charts, performance metrics, and metric trend graphs to make crucial decisions even when on you’re in the field.

Implementing Large-Scale Complex Business Change

Sometimes, driving your people to work harder is not enough for your organisation to withstand the pressures laying siege to it. With uncertain economic conditions, unpredictable fresh competition, and looming threats from the environment or even pandemic-grade diseases, empowering your people to not only ‘think’ but also to ‘step’ out of the box is currently the name of the game.

However, such initiatives typically require sweeping changes throughout your entire organisation … and to think even the slightest change is often met with hard resistance.

Whether you’re about to undergo an M&A, relocate due to a major catastrophe, scale down to a skeletal workforce, or implement a brand-new company-wide strategy, our systematic approach to large-scale complex business change can help you make the transition as seamless as possible.

We understand the importance of the human aspect in change management. That is why we’ll focus on making your people appreciate the benefits of having to learn new skills, perform new tasks, employ modern technologies, and go through new processes in order to tone down the resistance level.

Our entire process spans from top to bottom, wherein we’ll start with your sponsors, down to your managers, and then to other stakeholders in making them appreciative of the needed changes and in order to achieve alignment with your organisation’s goals. Our top to bottom approach is also aimed at casting a positive “shadow of the leader” on people down the line, enabling them with an optimistic view despite the gruelling tasks before them.

We invite you to have a look at the steps we take in implementing large-scale complex business change to win over a strong and lasting commitment to it.

Evaluating the Required Change

Large-scale complex business change initiatives can be implemented expeditiously and economically if you’ve clearly defined the scope of the change as well as the forces that shape your organisation. You’ll want to know which areas yield easily and which are hard to change to determine where and how you’re going to focus more of your efforts on.

To arrive at a sound and systematic plan, we first gather as much information as needed and analyse them. We determine whether your departments have the required capabilities and how we can arrive at a clear organisational alignment. That way, we don’t waste time, effort and resources when the moment comes to carry out the plan.

These are some of the diagnostic procedures we perform in evaluating the required change.

  • Change complexity analysis. We’ll assess the contribution of people and task factors to the overall complexity of the change project. This will help us determine how to approach the problem efficiently.
  • Causal analysis. By establishing cause and effect relationships, we can identify root or circular causes. This will allow us to pinpoint problem areas and prevent a repetition of past mistakes.
  • Structural analysis. Any company is propped up by a number of structures: organisational, process, motivational, social, and physical, among others. Understanding the structures that drive, motivate, hamper, connect, and influence your people’s behaviours can provide insights as to how or where structural change can best be executed.
  • Context analysis. We’ll look into market forces as well as political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors enveloping your business. We’ll also analyse your driving objectives, organisational alignment, and organizational capabilities. By analysing the internal and external environment in which your business currently operates, we can formulate a customised strategic and effective plan of action.

Managing Stakeholders

Change initiatives won’t prosper without total commitment from all stakeholders. Stakeholders refer to people in your organisation who either have interests in the change project or can be affected by it.

We deal with your stakeholders starting from the top because if we can’t gain full commitment from those already in the best position to spur the diverse entities in your company into active cooperation, striving to secure commitment from other areas will be futile.

That is, if you don’t have the full support of your key and principal sponsors, i.e. the people who have the biggest say and have greatest control over resources in your organisation, you can’t hope to sustain the change endeavour, let alone provide the much needed spark to get it started.

Here’s how we carry out our stakeholder management actions.

  • Conduct research to identify all stakeholders: the sponsors, your internal and external partners, the main targets of the change, and all interested parties. That way you can “switch on” implementors of each change action in the proper sequence.
  • Not everyone will offer resistance to your change endeavours. We’ll help you identify those stakeholders and sponsors who are willing to offer support, evaluate the level of support they are willing to give, harness all available supports and utilise them extensively to benefit the change.
  • Gain a deeper understanding as to why certain stakeholders are willing to lend support. In doing so, we can implement the right strategies that will encourage them to continue supporting you.
  • Assemble a leadership team that will champion your change initiatives. We’ll facilitate effective collaboration among its team members, transforming them into a cohesive force designed to carry out plans and motivate everyone else down the line.
  • Upon realisation of the change project, we’ll see to it that all stakeholders get a taste of the carrot at the end of the stick. This will encourage them to continue active cooperation in future change initiatives.

Planning for the Change

Anyone who has experienced having their car stuck in the mud knows that stepping on the accelerator will only get the vehicle trapped even deeper. Without the aid of a towing truck, getting the car out will require careful planning since different combinations of pulling, pushing, lifting, rocking to-and-fro, and stepping on the accelerator may be needed.

Of course, some combinations are just better than others. The same principle holds when effecting change.

Our approach to change management typically varies depending upon the information we obtain from the different analyses performed earlier. For instance, since not all organisations are suitable for a collaborative approach, we will employ either collaborative, consultative, directive, or coercive change management strategies wherever applicable.

A well-planned change will result in a smoother, less costly, and less disruptive transition. Here’s how we’ll help you plan your change initiatives.

  • When put in a predicament similar to the car-in-the-mud, the basic strategy entails identifying the current resisting forces and predicting what other resisting forces may be encountered along the way. After researching and pointing out your organisation’s resistance forces, we’ll lay out the most appropriate facilitation, education, and negotiation techniques.
  • To bring down wastage to the lowest possible levels, we’ll engineer a change delivery plan that involves the most cost-effective sequence of driver, process, technology, organisational, and people alignment.
  • To win and maintain a high level of trust, confidence and commitment from all sponsors and stakeholders, we’ll present a clear road map of the change process as well as landmarks that will prove how far we will have gone. These landmarks will then be brought to each sponsor’s and stakeholder’s attention each time they are arrived at in order to build up assurance and continued commitment.
  • We’ll design measurement tools and schedule reporting deadlines so that you’ll know what to look forward to and when to expect them.

Managing the Change

Your company will hold a better chance of maintaining a sizeable lead over the rest of the pack if you constantly establish a rally point and instil in your stakeholders the drive to rally to that point from the get-go. To make this happen, your company must undertake the unfreezing, transition, and refreezing phases of change skilfully in order to bring all stakeholders into the right mindset.

Our specialists’ systematic and efficient methods for each of these phases are designed to simplify the management of each phase as well as provide a seamless shift from one phase to the next. This is what we’ll do:

  • Set up a change project management office to ensure that everything associated with the change initiative is given the needed attention and resources even while all the other usual processes in your organisation run concurrently.
  • To unfreeze your people and get them started on the road of change, we’ll employ unfreezing techniques wherever they are most appropriate. We’ll resort to different kinds of methods ranging from presenting persuasive evidence justifying the need for change to showing a motivational vision for inspiring your people to embark on the change process.
  • Since it is during the transition phase when your people can find themselves groping in the dark, we’ll offer executive coaches for your senior managers; facilitators to provide guidance during team meetings and other change activities; coaches to educate and inspire them to meet the change with the right attitude; trainers to teach new systems, procedures, and technologies; as well as employ a variety of other techniques in order to make the transition phase as seamless as possible.
  • Although your people should always be ready to undertake the next major change after a previous one, there should be points in between where they can taste the spirit of success, establish a temporary base to rejuvenate, and immediately gain a deeper understanding of the nearby terrain so as to envision the next rally point. We’ll see to it that this vital phase of change is carried out completely.

Ready to work with Denizon?

Contact Us Today