£103.5k
Utilities£12.5k
Communications£25.6k
ReprographicsThe school continues to develop and the challenges of running and maintaining the school keep Bursar Derek Todd and his team very busy.
Along with 800 other independent schools, St Albans is a member of the Independent Schools Bursar’s Association (ISBA) and it was whilst attending the ISBA National Conference at Celtic Manor that Derek Todd first spoke to Eric Tiv about employing the expertise of Utilitas Solutions.
As with most schools energy costs can be significant and as the school had grown, so had the number of electricity and gas supplies across the site. “The first task was collecting historic invoices of all the schools meters and building a profile of consumption and contractual obligations. Over the past 5 years of working with Derek I’m pleased to report that we have made savings of nearly £70,000 on electricity and gas expenditure for the school” reported Utilitas analyst Steve Garnett. “Derek obviously wishes to attain the very best prices possible for St Albans School and appreciates purchasing at the right time and for the right duration forms an important part of the procurement process offered by Utilitas.
The school constantly evolves and develops and 2012 saw the completion of a brand new state of the art Sports Hall and swimming pool as well as the acquisition and refurbishment of new buildings to further improve the facilities on offer to the 800+ pupils. Utilitas have been on hand to offer advice where required and to ensure the school continue to get best value energy supply contracts.
Utilitas then audited the Schools communications...
...aided by the ICT Manager and also Administration Manager Michelle Clinch who said: “It is essential that the School has the right level of fixed and mobile communications to operate effectively. Working with Utilitas has enabled us to attain savings in communications with a combination of rationalising our infrastructure and by attaining more competitive prices.”
Given the level of holistic savings that Utilitas had been able to uncover, the team at Utilitas were then tasked with auditing the expenditure incurred by the school on general waste collection. Extensive recycling was already taking place at the school so there wasn’t much room for improvement there, but after tendering to the market Utilitas were able to negotiate annual savings of £10,000 and also help to iron out a couple of minor service issues.
As with most schools, St Albans need to print an awful lot of documentation across their many departments and buildings – nearly 1 ½ million copies, at a cost of over £60,000 per annum. After an extensive audit Utilitas were able to provide a solution that introduced new multi-function machines which could be fully utilised with the schools planned ICT developments. As well as uncovering historic overcharges in excess of £6,000, like for like annual savings of over £20,000 were realised and these are set to increase with a complete audit of the school’s printers.
