Background
Superdry is an exciting contemporary brand which focuses on high-quality products that fuse vintage Americana and Japanese-inspired graphics with a British style. There are 139 owned stores across the UK and mainland Europe, 208 franchised and licensed stores, and 168 concessions and with such a retail portfolio comes the challenges of managing energy consumption and spend.
Challenges
Optimised Buildings and The Consultus International Group Limited were commissioned to reduce the energy consumption by 10% in 10 of the Superdry stores throughout the UK over a 6 month period. Each of the 10 stores had the latest BeMS (Building Energy Management System) already installed, with remote access. Each store has its main incoming electricity supply metered, along with HVAC sub-meters on the majority. It soon became clear that although latest technology had been adopted, these stores still weren’t running as efficiently as they could be and there was an opportunity to ‘optimise’ the operation of the HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) and Lighting within the stores.
Solution
The first objective was to monitor the energy being consumed through the metering that was installed into each store. These meters were already available which negated any integration requirements, this half hourly data was logged and ‘pushed’ to our cloud-based ‘Optimised aM&T’ (automatic Monitoring and Targeting) software. This created the transparency and baseline data to effectively monitor and measure the impact of the building optimisation deployed.
The second objective was to implement the ‘Optimised Analytics’ platform to monitor the BeMS and HVAC systems through intelligent algorithms and rules. This cloud-based platform tracks the performance of assets, equipment and systems and quickly identifies anomalies in plant operation saving energy and maintenance costs.
Once the above systems were in place the task of optimising the assets began. This started with analysing the base line data and energy profiles for each store, in particular, identifying energy usage outside of store trading times. Aligning time schedules to match trading times, operating at suitable temperatures during trading periods without affecting store conditions, correct use of override switches, and ensuring heating and cooling systems were not operating at the same time (fighting against each other).
Once these areas were addressed, the ‘Optimised Bureau’ managed service remotely monitored the performance of each stores HVAC, BeMS and lighting circuits to ensure continuous operational efficiency.
The Optimised Bureau is now providing continuous monitoring on behalf of Supergroup to identify anomalies and generate reports, alerts and ongoing energy management recommendations.
Outcomes
Since the various assets have been optimised and the new optimisation strategies have been implemented, significant savings have been realised. With the help of The Consultus International Group, savings over 11.1% were achieved in the first 6 months.
This has resulted in another 16 stores being implemented on the Optimised Bureau, and a total of 18.2% of savings have been achieved during the first 2 months of the Second Phase of optimisation works.
The net business impact is overall reduction on the electricity consumption of 14% through optimisation of existing assets and systems, with no need for additional controls to be installed.
“Very interesting and innovative software and services, highlighting lots of issues I wasn’t even aware of and was unlikely to be, without Optimised Buildings. Even stores that I thought were working efficiently had scope for further savings, very enlightening.”