The Energy & BMS Bureau
Our state-of-the-art bureau, The ROC is the centre of our vision of delivering value to our customers. From our facility in Stockport, we are remotely connected to over 1,700 locations across Europe and remotely manage and control hundreds of thousands of building assets across the private and public sectors.
Support that scales with your business
20%
Connected sites
21,000+
Cases handled annually
3,600+
Calls every month
5
BMS manufacturers
15%
Average energy saving
Three support products for your building or business
1. BMS Tech Support
First-line support for your buildings
BMS Tech Support is an on-demand service that gives you access to our skilled BMS Tech Support team when you call the ROC. It is designed to provide front-line BMS support for single or multi-site estates.
The ROC can provide cover for your business 24/7, so whether your business is selling clothes between 9 am and 5 pm, fixing buses on a 24-hour shift pattern or carrying out urgent operations, we’ve got you covered.
Ad-hoc schedule changes
From time-to-time, your BMS schedules are going to change. As you make changes to your building’s operating or opening times, you need time schedules to transition in-line with your building’s usage. Verification that the lights are on and the temperature is correct during your hours of operation is critical to operating any business. The ROC team can apply schedule changes to your BMS in an instant, ensuring your environment is safe and comfortable and where possible, your energy consumption is kept to a minimum.
Enquiries, queries and basic amendments
If your lights aren’t on, or the temperature in your building is out with predefined limits, it’s handy to have somebody to turn to, to investigate and provide support/amendments. The staff at the ROC are on-hand 24/7 to help with any problems that you may have with your BMS. Our remote fixes reduce the need to send an expensive engineer to site and can resolve the issue quicker, providing a maintenance cost saving and an improved first-time fix rate.
2. Command And Control
Control Your Environment & Maximise Your Maintenance Budget
Command & Control from the ROC is designed for building and estate managers that are looking to control their environment, reduce downtime and maximise their maintenance budgets.
The team at the ROC can remotely maintain and support your BMS system, ensuring that your operating environment is kept at an optimal level. Furthermore, we can deliver vital plant and environmental intelligence to your internal teams or 3rd party contractors to improve first-time fix rates, target problem areas and reduce truck-rolls to a minimum.
Environmental Issues
We can help manage any environmental issues with your building management system. If temperatures within your spaces are outside of set parameters, we can interrogate your BMS remotely and provide fixes where possible. Where a fix isn’t possible, because the root cause of the problem is outside of our control, intelligence can be provided to you, or your 3rd party contractors to bring the environment back into correct working order.
Equipment Testing
From time-to-time, plant on your sites may fail. Often, this plant is connected to your BMS, but is serviced and maintained by 3rd party contractors – FM teams, HVAC or lighting contractors for example.
Learnd are on-hand for your contractors, and can provide remote testing to ensure that any repaired or replaced plant is connected to your BMS as required and is working correctly across all functions.
Customer Plant Monitoring
Aside from being on-hand to test equipment on behalf of your contractors, the ROC team can also pro-actively monitor your plant for any problems as they arise. Our staff can report faults from your plant back to your internal engineering teams or direct to your preferred contractor.
BMS Issues
The team here at the ROC provide remote day-to-day maintenance of your building management system. Our highly-skilled staff ensure that your strategies are working, that I/O points are reporting and operating correctly and that your BMS networks are operating as they should be.
Remote Connection Issues
To leverage the power of your BMS and access its vital energy, control logs and critical alarms, some form of external communication is required. This often takes the form of a dedicated broadband line, a VPN to your internal network or a 4G connection. Setting up and maintaining these connections often takes specialist knowledge, which the ROC can provide. Our staff are on-hand to help with initial specification, set-up and maintenance, whatever your connection preference.
Environment Override Issues
Local plant overrides are not only costly but can have a detrimental effect on your environment too. Whilst the override itself isn’t a problem, it’s understanding why the BMS strategy was overridden in the first place which can deliver real value. The team in the ROC can log and collate overrides affecting your environment and dig deeper to investigate their root cause. This could be a dilapidation issue, underspecified plant or perhaps just a staff training requirement. Once understood, we can help you put-in-place tactics or strategies to reduce overrides and bring your environment back into line.
Seasonal Changes
Many businesses need temperature setpoints changing on a seasonal basis, whether it’s amending heating setpoints during the winter, or cooling setpoints during the summer. The staff at the ROC can make changing these parameters quick and easy, whether you have one large site, or several sites spread across an entire region or even nationwide.
Seasonal changes can also be applied for special events, such as extended operating hours during peak periods of manufacture in an industrial environment, or for late night opening in a retail site.
3. Energy Optimisation
Reduce Energy Consumption and Legislative Burden
Our Energy Optimisation services are ideal for those with multi-site estates that feel the pressure of energy, legislation and surcharge costs. Managing a large estate across an entire region or country is hard enough, without the hassle of having to understand the intricacies of a BMS system and the constant optimisation it can require to maintain an efficient state.
That’s where we can help. The teams in The ROC are experts in balancing your comfort whilst wringing out every drop of energy savings from your buildings. Using our expertise and tools, we can protect your estate from incurring unnecessary energy costs and deliver energy savings with an impressive return on investment.
Energy Override Issues
Staff locally overriding your BMS strategy or putting your equipment ‘into hand’ can not only have a negative effect on your comfort levels and environment but can be incredibly costly from an energy perspective. Unfortunately, these added energy costs can be exacerbated by further surcharges such as DUoS or TRIAD charges.
Fortunately, the ROC has the answer. Our teams can monitor and interrogate your BMS system for overrides, resetting them and restoring your BMS to its optimised state where possible, and managing around potential site issues where it isn’t.
High Energy Usage Issues
We continually monitor your site’s energy consumption and use your own average consumption to seek-out anomalies and over-consuming time periods. When combined with internal and external air temperature values, the teams in the ROC can effectively target your worst performing and at-risk sites to drastically reduce your energy consumption.
Data Analytics
Our analytics teams can collect data from multiple different sources, transform, analyse and present it to you in a manner that’s easy to understand and can be used to help drive decision-making.
Further to the collection, understanding and presentation of the data, our tools and experience help us identify missing or broken data, preventing you from implementing an incorrect strategy, and putting your environment and energy spend at risk.
Optimisation
BMS systems aren’t a simple ‘fit and forget’ product. The way you use your buildings through the course of their lifecycle changes on an on-going basis. Your building’s requirements change based on a variety of different reasons, from changes in seasons and weather, to changes in use or staffing levels. All of these require optimisations in your BMS system’s strategy. The teams in the ROC are on-hand to make the adjustments to your systems to make sure your environment is ideal, but most importantly, that your energy consumption and savings are protected and augmented.
Remote support for Bluechip clients
Tracking KPIs
Service level agreements & key performance indicators
Being measureable and accountable is hugely important to us. Before we welcome new clients into the ROC, we agree upon a service level agreement and set of KPIs. We keep our own standard SLAs and KPIs that you can accept, or we can work with you to establish a method of measurement anad availability that suit your business; after all, no single building or business is exactly the same.
Working around the clock
Bigger than your average bureau
The ROC operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 364 days of the year. We have 22 members of staff dedicated to a number of tasks, from answering your support calls, proactivley seeking out energy saving opportunities, producing energy reports and optimising your BMS strategies.
Case Study | Matalan
Matalan goes wireless and saves 20% energy
Matalan goes wireless with its new building energy management system and achieves 20% energy savings. BEMS designed by WEMS and installed…
Frequently asked questions
Everything you need to know about the product and billing.
I’ve already got a bureau service from another supplier; can i move to yours instead?
Yes, we have a methodology for on-boarding sites from other suppliers. It’s something we do regularly with some of the large retailers that we work with.
How many sites can you support?
As many as required. We currently have clients with as few as one building and others with hundreds of sites.
I have multiple BMS systems across my estate, can you work with them all?
We support the five of the biggest and most widely adopted BMS manufacturers in the world, Trend, Siemens, Schneider Electric, Tridium and WEMS. If your BMS system is one of their contemporary or legacy systems, it’s more than likely we can connect to and support your site(s). If your BMS is from another manufacurer, don’t fret, we may be able to help provide a solution for remote connection and support. Just get in touch with us here, and we can discuss your options.
How do you price your services?
We price your bureau services based upon a BMS point count. It’s much more effective to use this method, (rather than simple building size) because it provides a simple measure of controls intensity at your site, i.e. you can have a large site with little relatively little control and a small site with a large amount of control intensity. Using building size as a a pricing metric would result in an over-inflated pricing structure.
What contract lengths do you offer?
It’s entirely dependant upon your requirements. We have several clients on single-year contracts and others on multi-year contracts, with our longest contract currently being five years.
What happens at the end of the contract?
Obviously we’d love you to stay with us and renew for a new period. But we also understand that budgets have a funny way of shifting and being reallocated. Our bureau sales team can work with you to re-work your contract if required. We can also issue shorter term contracts to cover gaps between budgets, or for sites that are being retired, or new sites coming online part-way through a contract.
Do all of my sites need to be covered in the contract?
No, not at all. Sometimes it can work out cheaper on a per site basis if you have more sites, depending on the price breaks. Having said that, we also understand that you may just want to cover your critical or flagship sites, or perhaps just your worst performing sites (from an energy or environmental perspective).
Still have questions?
Can’t find the answer you’re looking for? Please chat to our friendly team.
What our customers say
The bureau offers fantastic customer service, and importantly, is operates 24/7; longer than any of the bureau services we researched. We get through to a real person straight away and changes are made quickly
Matalan has made the commitment to have the WEMS system installed by Aimteq in all our retail outlets. The installed stores have shown a considerable reduction in energy consumption of circa 18% and this is reflected in our energy bill which has decreased dramatically since implementation
Another reason we opted for the Aimteq solution was the bureau service, which meant we could delegate the controls to an expert, who could remotely optimise energy consumption across all sites on an ongoing basis.