Business for sale

Business description

The business was originally established in 1981 to offer consultancy services to save utility (energy and water) consumption and cost. Energy prices are rising rapidly but over the last ten years environmental issues, carbon savings have become the main driver for utilities management by consumers. In 1995 the business believed IT advances would offer superior methods of managing utilities by via automatic reading of utility meters (AMR) every, say 30 minutes, and automatically analysing the meter data via specialist software.

Pioneering this concept of “Automatic Utilities Auditing”, the business rapidly developed low power radio based automatic meter reading systems initially for the major energy using sectors including the MOD, universities, hospitals and major industries.

Having won two government development design awards, the business lobbied government to gain acceptance of the automatic utilities auditing concept as the “new way” to manage utilities and carbon emissions to assist the UK in achieving the UK’s Kyoto Agreement targets. As a result the government (The Carbon Trust) are now backing the concept.

The marketing strategy for the product commenced with the development of a full “turn key” supply strategy, supplying and installing meters, automatic meter reading hardware and meter data analysis software. And then recently, a revenue stream to maintain and support the systems. Each major utilities using sector was identified and “disciple” Utility Managers in each sector targeted to trial the concept, initially by small scale pilots. From those days the business has steadily grown an impressive customer base of many well known concerns paving the way for significant exploitation of each sector.

Approximately three years ago a further path of development was undertaken to develop automatic utilities auditing in the Small to Medium Size (SME) sector. A less powerful and sophisticated, lower cost, “junior” version of the original low power radio based AMR system was developed and the marketing strategy to gain a wide customer base is currently underway. Systems are currently installed on some 100 schools, 35 TA sites and numerous local authority premises sites - more are being added each week.

Having established the concept in both Major Energy Users market and SME’s, further development joined the less powerful system to the original system, to allow a low power radio meter reading infrastructure to be established over, say, a city allowing any utility meter under that infrastructure to be read and analysed automatically. One city council has won a Beacon award by installing the system across a 20mile diameter of the city, and after connecting all its own buildings to the radio infrastructure, is now offering, through the infrastructure, a remote utilities management service to other consumers. Other councils are now piloting the concept.

The market potential for this joining together of the two levels of system, was not initially identified but the success of this has led the company to a key review of its products and the recent development of a uniform system that can be used from the major energy users, SMEs and, in the future, the domestic sector. This milestone development incorporates all the company’s experience and knowledge to date together with the latest low power radio, electronic circuit miniaturisation and production techniques and is due for launch in the first quarter 2006.

The business has developed its own meter data analysis software since 1991 and in recent years this was totally rewritten on the latest software platform. Further deeper analysis modules of the software continue to be developed at the wishes of customers or when some new ideas to assist the identification of utility wastage emerge.