Betfred win big by investing in EMMA AI
£234,000
Reduction in energy spend
< 1 year
Payback time
£0
Upfront capital investment
The challenge
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.
The solution
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.
“We knew we had opportunities to reduce expense and show the world we were serious about our environmental responsibilities. EMMA gave us the tool and the knowledge to make best practise in one store the new target for all stores without adding layers of people and cost to do so.”
– Len Hodges, Estates Manager @ Betfred
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.
When I heard about EMMA AI, I honestly thought it was another gimmick, but the team at Optimal Monitoring have proved to be honest and easy to work with, delivering on their promise to make us great savings. You have got to love a product that does that.
The results
Using EMMA’s AI knowledge base to create fact based, exception reporting, in the form of simple recommendations sent daily and with a request for feedback; ‘Was my suggestion, right’? ‘What did you do’? ensured that action was taken, and shop teams felt engaged, and that the AI engine became ever more granular in its recommendations as feedback is how an AI platform learns. All of which combined to deliver real, quantifiable savings.
“We’re a gambling business, our people are competitive by nature. EMMA gave us the means to be able to harness and exploit this. We knew we had opportunities due to the variances in consumption we saw across the estate, so using data and instructions that everyone quickly accepted as gospel we created a bit of competition.”
– Len Hodges, Estates Manager @ Betfred
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.
The continuous and quantifiable nature of EMMA AI’s instructions was able to maintain the savings and improvements made, even as staff and roles changed, an issue that has plagued energy management over a long period. Focusing on overnight consumption and comparing Q1 of 2020 with Q1 2022 the savings are clear, showing an annualized reduction of 6.3% or £234,000pa in electricity spend, equal to 131 tonnes of CO2e.
Having proven the positive impact of EMMA AI on savings and emissions, the EMMA platform has now been rolled out to all stores nationwide and expected savings should increase to around £381,000pa 1with a Return on Expenditure (savings over licence fees) in the hundreds of percentage points and with payback within a year. N.B. EMMA AI has no capital cost as it replaces invasive hardware with its AI engine, needing no additional infrastructure in most cases.
What we learned
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.
Data alone never helps
Betfred had a mass of valuable data but no effective means to turn that into wealth creating activity. EMMA AI solved that.
Dealing with 000s of locations is difficult
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.
More tech and people doesn't help
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.
AI technology delivers a high ROI
Use of AI technology delivers a very high Return On Investment, with low operational impact enabling Energy management to become continuous and mainstream.
More staff cannot deliver these results
It would never have been viable to achieve this level of saving with staff led analysis and communication.
Savings can be realised from day one
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 in the timesframe seen.
Continuous comms is essential
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 AI can join the dots
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
Want to see exactly how much you could save?
If you would like to see exactly how much your business could save across all your sites, then drop us your details below and a member of the team will be in touch to arrange a demo or a free evaluation of your site energy data.