Case Study

Fife Council - tackling energy consumption step-by-step.

Making the most of software-based M&T systems is not something that has to be done all at once: many users prefer to take a step at a time.

Today's Monitoring & Targeting software is highly sophisticated: programs are capable of executing a number of complex tasks and dealing with a wide variety of inputs. That processing power can be daunting; indeed many organisations only use a fraction of the capabilities of these systems.

Systems such as Stark Software's Essentials software allow users to take advantage of this power and versatility in an incremental manner; starting with the essentials of M & T and accessing new functionality and enhancements as and when needed.

One of Stark's customers, Fife Council, has made maximum use of this ability. The Council is the third largest local authority in Scotland, with over a third of a million residents. Fife lies north of Edinburgh between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Tay.

Energy Team Expanded

In 2000, its energy team was expanded from just two Council officers to ten. Since then, its multi-million pound electricity bill has been cut by nearly 10%. George Elder joined at this time as an Energy Officer, carrying out audits of the Council's non-domestic buildings and recommending efficiency measures to improve energy performance. Fife Council has nearly 1,900 such buildings, including 280 schools.

"The first priority was to build up a picture of energy consumption across the non-domestic estate," he recalls. "Until two years ago, utility bills were paid in a fragmented manner at a number of offices across the county, with only a portion of the bills being paid centrally at the Council's headquarters in Glenrothes. This made it impossible to get any overview of energy performance."

Firstly, all the premises had to be entered on the database of the Stark Essentials software suite. Once this had been achieved, the data from utility invoices could be added and a consumption profile built up for the whole estate, individual buildings and separate utilities.

Downloading from the net

While electricity bills are now downloaded automatically from the internet straight into the software, water bills still have to be entered by hand. The Council has been told it will be several years before the water company is able to offer internet-based billing.

For electricity, though, this service has reduced the time spent by the department on data entry from two weeks' work every month to just half an hour. However, being able to download a single file containing consumption across the Council's estate, broken down into the various tariffs for different usage types, requires powerful data handling skills, and the Stark system is being continually enhanced to accommodate new and more complex data transfer requirements.

The Council's energy invoice processing has gone from a fragmented system to a more coordinated system. The electricity supplier, Scottish Power, also sees advantages in providing a single consolidated bill to a centralised payments office.

The Stark M & T system also has the ability to verify each bill as it arrives, whether it comes in automatically as in the case of electricity and gas, or manually as is the case with water. With over 900 sites being billed each month, the software alerts the energy team if a bill for an unrecognised site arrives. It also automatically checks which specific sites the bills refer to and the time period covered.

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