Big Savings for Woodhead Enterprise

Background

Woodhead Enterprise are an established provider of commercial office space in the East Midlands, providing fully serviced accommodation to clients based in the Lincoln and Nottingham areas. Significant investment in leading-edge facilities has attracted a diverse spectrum of clients from the professional services, health care, technology start-up, public sector, and financial service sectors.

As a subsidiary of the Woodhead Group, Woodhead Enterprise are part of an organisation named one of the UK’s fastest-growing SMEs by the London Stock Exchange Group. Operating to strict standards, the company is ISO9001 and ISO14001 accredited and required an energy partner with the same level of sophistication to manage its portfolio.  

Challenge

Consuming over 2 million units of energy annually, Woodhead Enterprise spend in excess of £120,00 per year on gas and electricity. Keen to reduce costs and minimise the burden of administration, Big Energy Group were tasked with delivering procurement savings whilst providing value through a variety of bureau, account management and metering services.

One particular area of concern related to their incumbent supplier, who would often provide inaccurate estimated bills or expect the company to pay advanced billing costs of up to £17,000. Struggling to budget accurately and effectively manage costs, Woodhead Enterprise had unsuccessfully tried to resolve these issues and asked Big Energy Group to assist.

Due to redevelopment of the local area, the company were also asked to relocate their gas meter which encroached into neighbouring land. As a complex and time-sensitive issue, Woodhead Enterprise sought expert help to manage the process and avoid costly penalty charges from their supplier.

Solution

Big Energy Group were able to procure long-term fixed-price energy contracts at 4.5% cheaper than those offered by the incumbent supplier. Providing greater budget certainty and protecting the business from forecasted wholesale price increases, this enabled Woodhead Enterprise to benefit from favourable rates and find a supplier with an established record for client service.

The most impressive savings came from our kVA review though, where we identified that the company was paying for additional kVA capacity that wasn’t needed. We calculated that the company could save nearly £11,411 by simply reducing their capacity to 230 kVA. We handled all the paperwork and administration, securing a 9.5% saving on company-wide annual capacity spend.

A review of the company’s historical consumption enabled us to audit and verify all of the different energy invoices, where we have rectified billing errors amounting to over £31,000. We additionally reduced the workload involved in undertaking the metering work, where we successfully worked with multiple third parties to relocate the gas meter at minimal cost and without penalty.

Testimonial ‍

“I have worked with the team at Big Energy Group for some years. Their expansive supplier network and experienced procurement desk places them as my ‘go to’ third party intermediary.”  
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- T. Wathall, Site Manager at Woodhead Enterprise