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Maximising savings on water bills requires fully informed procurement professionals.
Author: Graham Mann, Senior Partner, H20 Building Services.
Procurement professionals are increasingly dealing with water procurement in addition to energy, and in order to maximise the savings on water and waste water bills procurement need to be fully informed and up to speed as it is not just a case of approaching water suppliers in order to obtain the best price.
As more and more companies become aware that they can potentially switch water supplier in Scotland now or very shortly in England there is much more to it than that. It is highly likely that the best value deal will not be secured and other potential water savings opportunities will often be overlooked for no other reason than lack of information.
Procurement professionals need to have a more holistic approach and consider commissioning a water audit expert with many years of experience and can demonstrate an entrepreneurial approach, exploring all potential avenues to ensure maximum value and savings achievable in the short, medium and long term.
Certainly we are coming across more and more customers who are being either advised to go down a well trodden path of switching water supplier in the usual way or re-negotiating their existing water supply contracts. They are sadly loosing out on many other opportunities and it is a sad fact that many are being let down by bot being fully informed for many reasons. These are large companies with substantial water and waste water bills.
From what I can see in the market at the moment there is a distinct lack of expertise, it is a massive market opportunity with very few real players.
Over the last 6 months we have audited water billing data across some 40 businesses of differing sizes from large to medium sized businesses and concluded they are missing out on additional savings on water bills of some £620,000 per year and that is purely a water audit desktop exercise.
It would be a dead cert that we would uncover many more cost reduction opportunities and with the large companies the water and waste water supply deals were way down on what is actually possible.