Resources

THE BACKGROUND

A major railroad company serving 28 states in the U.S. spends over $70 million annually on energy-related expenditures across more than 25,000 accounts. With such a large energy portfolio to consider, railroad leadership established an in-house energy management program to ensure continuous savings. The institution’s leadership had recently switched from an existing Expense & Data Management provider to PK.

THE PROBLEM

Prior to switching to PK, the data captured over the last 7 years was unorganized and many meters were not recorded in the system. Most of the data captured was summary data and had little detail to complete a regulated tariff audit program. PK was tasked to come up with a comprehensive plan to ensure every meter is audited for regulated tariff opportunity once a year at a minimum.

THE SOLUTION

PK has extensive experience in expense management and auditing, and has the most comprehensive Rate & Tariff database across 6,500 utility vendors. ProKarma conducted a preliminary discovery and analysis and proposed to divide the meter inventory in sizeable chunks by opportunity-type & load profiles into quarterly buckets of ‘scope’. A program to ensure audit and reporting on every meter for a period of 3 months every year was implemented. A 90-day audit period followed by setting up automatic tolerance validations was proven as most effective from an ROI perspective. This was seen to be a welcome departure from approaches by other firms of charging the customer throughout the year without transparency into what was being done.

PK began by collecting the institution’s master data and 36 months of historical invoices. ProKarma implemented the full bill pay transition from the incumbent inside 60 days.

A key aspect of the Rate & Tariff engagement focused on the historical review of utility invoices to see which meters qualified for alternative tariff plans without making any physical/operational changes on the ground and/or capital investment.

PK completed its 1st quarterly report and showcased potential $50,000 annualized savings on just 15% of the total meter inventory. The savings, combined with the findings from PK’s analysis of bills and expenses, helped the institution better manage its energy and sustainability goals moving forward in a measurable, transparent way.