
Betfred win big betting on Optimal Monitoring's EMMA AI®
£234K+
Reduction in annual energy spend delivered after 3 months operation expected to rise to £381K+
<<1 Year
Fees recovered from OPEX savings made in the first year
Zero
Capex cost was zero, savings from operational changes only, no new equipment needed
Challenges
Betfred are one of the country’s largest and most successful betting shop groups, founded and led by the inimitable Fred Done – the Fred in Betfred. They maintain a large retail estate (1400+) of high street betting shops. Each with relatively low individual consumption, but collectively a large and increasing cost. The challenge was how to optimise consumption and at the same time empower and demonstrate how Betfred were actively pursuing their Net Zero carbon strategy, at a cost in money and effort that provided a good return on investment for the firm as well as the environment.
Solutions
Betfred used Optimal Monitoring’s EMMA AI® platform to capture, curate and analyse their existing data to identify abnormal and anomalous use of energy. Using its AI knowledge base EMMA provided immediate and actionable advice, as work tickets on a day +1 basis, that were delivered directly to the individual shop teams creating an army of energy managers who were able to effect positive and immediate change at no incremental cost and with very low effort.
Educating and informing end users was key as historically store managers didn’t really see energy management as part of their remit.Giving them relevant recommendations, based on yesterday’s data, that made sense to them, like identifying equipment which could be turned off overnight, or items operating in unused areas was critical as it has an immediate impact on operating results. EMMA AI was able to do this as its AI engine adopts a ‘no normal’ starting point and treats every site or estate as unique, important in Betfred’s case as they have few comparators in energy terms against which to benchmark.
Energy and Carbon Management became a board sponsored initiative, well-advertised throughout the retail estate.
Results
Initially all regions were informed of the need to better manage utility consumption but only the East region was provided instructions from EMMA AI allowing us to prove the additional impact of EMMA AI.Unsurprisingly it was found that store management reacted positively to the instructions from EMMA and took swift action to improve their shops consumption. |
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1Figures based on the 40p/kWh price cap.
Conclusion
Recap and what we learned:
- Betfred had a mass of valuable data but no effective means to turn that into wealth creating activity. EMMA AI solved that. The size and shape of the estate; 1,400 locations many of them quite small meant that it was uneconomic to optimise performance using traditional means. Only an AI solution could work in this environment.
- Throwing technology at people and telling them to get on with it doesn’t work. They need to be properly introduced to the opportunity, this creates and helped to absorb it into their daily work practises.
- A board level champion is a necessity.
- Only an AI solution that requires no capex for infrastructure and no army of analysts (the AI engine does that) can deliver these sort of results
- Initial instructions from management to ‘switch off’ delivered positive impact but continuous, exception-led, communication is needed to maintain this in the long term
- Only an AI solution can join the dots in an estate of so many small units to find the common threads of similar occurrences in different places and repetitive anomalies that otherwise go under the radar but when seen collectively are significant
- It would never have been viable to achieve this level of
saving with staff led analysis and communication. - Use of AI technology delivers a very high return on
investment, with low operational impact enabling Energy management to become continuous and mainstream.
You can download the full betfred case study here
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