ENERGY 4.0 strategy in place , working to that and being flexible to change your strategy .”
As part of the contract , Arcadia has access to Gazprom Energy ’ s recently launched energy management tool InSight . The platform accesses live market prices and information and makes alerts available to its major energy customers – like Arcadia – and energy consultant partners , which can help reduce energy purchasing costs through a more strategic and agile process .
Giving Laurent and his team this monitoring ability ensures Arcadia is getting the best possible deal , he explains , adding that obtaining consumption data is also critical when running an energy management team .
“ It ’ s important to us to have live access to our data , especially as we have such a large portfolio of stores . We also run our own energy management database , which mainly looks after all of our electrics , and work with a broker / consultant on a similar system for water , so having this for gas too has been brilliant ; it ’ s allowed us to pull data , scrutinise data , assess and measure our consumption profiles , and run lots of analytics . If we see we ’ re using a lot of gas or electricity in a certain location , for example , we can contact the relevant management team to discuss it .”
InSight also plays a role in Arcadia ’ s CSR reporting and internal campaign to raise employees ’ awareness about how everyone can impact energy consumption .
“ One of our key goals we ’ re striving towards is reducing our energy consumption by 3 % year-on-year . That ’ s quite substantial when consumption is the size of ours ,” he says .
Revising Arcadia ’ s energy strategy has clearly been a pivotal career milestone for Laurent and he describes it as his “ biggest learning curve and test ” during his time at the retail giant .
“ I started life at the company procuring various contracts and the standard mundane types of products most procurement people buy , so buying something quite different and having the opportunity to start a new team and bring something in-house that had been fully outsourced , and actually see the success of this , is one of the biggest things I ’ ve done . I never expected to start buying utilities within Arcadia ,” he shares .
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