The Strategic Importance of Energy Management
Efficient planning of energy costs and consumption is a crucial factor for good business management and growth, yet many companies tend to ignore its strategic importance. One of the most frequent errors is to parcel out the tasks involving consumption management and energy costs, assigning them with no particular logic to staff working in different areas. Almost always this choice proves to be counter-productive: the absence of a team with the relevant skills and the use of obsolete, non-digital instruments to collect and process data lead to billing errors and inaccurate reports that increase waste and mean higher energy bills, ultimately damaging the business.
UBM for Efficient Consumption
Through its own smart digital platforms Enel X’s e-Industries global product line offers commercial and industrial clients an extensive range of services, providing an efficient, sustainable way of understanding and optimizing their energy consumption. The Utility Bill Management (UBM) digital platform in particular offers companies, including multinationals, a totally automated service that enables them to centralize, process, analyze and verify all utility bills (energy, water, gas, waste). This solution means clients can keep all their spending on utilities under control by collecting the relevant bills and ensuring they are all correct. The platform automatically identifies any anomalies and compares the performance of every corporate site, identifying possible ways to reduce consumption.
How UBM Works
UBM offers the benefit of releasing companies from the task of manually collecting, processing and paying hundreds of bills. We take over the management of all the tasks involved, collecting utility bills directly from suppliers on our clients’ behalf. Once received, the bills are processed with a detailed audit that verifies every entry. Any bills failing to overcome this hurdle are re-assessed and rectified directly with the supplier on behalf of the client, while the bill data that the system recognizes as correct is recorded on the UBM platform. The latter automatically processes the files for payment. Furthermore, in several countries the so-called “Bill Pay” system is already operational, whereby we take direct control of paying bills on behalf of clients, freeing them from this task and providing all-round administrative back-office management.
The platform also generates valuable reports with details of every utility. All invoicing data is collected, catalogued and archived in user-friendly dashboards that can be used easily with any type of device. The dashboards provide a variety of services: constant monitoring of consumption, comparison of energy costs of different corporate sites, recommendations on how to optimize them, consumption forecasts and benchmarking and budget analyses with other players in the sector.
Other Benefits of UBM
Clients are thus provided with the means to quantify and analyze the results, set growth objectives and rapidly identify the measures and related timeframes required to achieve them. The UBM also makes it possible to monitor CO2 emissions, making an important contribution towards achieving the decarbonization targets that have now become a crucial element in the corporate strategy of every successful, forward-looking company. It is an example of how Enel X can enhance its clients’ assets by finding the ideal combination of operational efficiency and sustainability.
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