Climate Change Agreement Portal
Over the last few years, ARM has developed, and continually improved, an online portal for BPF Energy to allow their members who have signed up to either the Plastic Sector or Packaging Sector Climate Change Agreements to better administrate the schemes.
A Climate Change Agreement (CCA) is a voluntary agreement containing targets to increase energy efficiency and reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Participants of the scheme benefit from Climate Change Levy (CCL) exemption, of up to 92% for electricity and 81% for natural gas and other fuels.
To take part in the scheme you will become a Partner with BPF Energy Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Plastics Federation.
BPF Energy was formed to help the BPF administer a scheme that is open to both members and non-members of the Federation. There is a 58% discount to the BPF Energy fees for those who are full BPF Members.”
Find out more at https://www.bpf.co.uk/bpf-energy/home.aspx
Originally the administration of the scheme was a huge burden, not only for the BPF Energy, but for the members themselves, with them having to complete numerous, complex spreadsheets regularly to adhere to and benefit fully from the scheme.
With the portal developed by ARM in place, which has now been running since 2017, members are able to login online and access all their information and update their data as and when they please in a simple, straight forward, user-friendly way.
After the portals initial setup, further development has since continued to ensure both the members and the BPF Energy themselves have been able to make the most use of the information and data entered, being able to pull reports, view graphs, charts and trackers. BPF Energy has numerous capabilities built into their side of the system to give them a wide range of resources to utilise, such as:
- Ability to view, edit and control all member organisation and contact details and access, including change reports and user login reports. Alongside this, appointed consultants can be given access as required which automatically expires after a given period.
- When setting up a new member, multiple facilities can be created with differing energy types, reporting periods, baseline data and configurations of target data.
- Archive and historical data can be easily reviewed and charted alongside real time data entry and can be viewed in a graph format showing actual vs target performance.
- There are in built data checks and a red-flag system in place ensuring that any member data entry remains within expected ranges and can be flagged to both the member and BPF Energy. In addition, BPF Energy can run regular member update reports to track the members who are actively and regularly entering new data and those who need a nudge!
- A query system also allows BPF Energy to track any queries from members and their status to ensure nothing is missed or forgotten.
As part of the administration of the scheme, data is required to be sent to the Environmental Agency (EA) for the members and audits to be carried out. The portal now allows for the right information to be exported, in the correct format required, with ease, saving vast amounts of time and effort.
At a member level, they have access to their contacts and facilities in one place so its easy to view multiple facilities, view historical data and keep track of their performance (Actual vs Target) at both an organisational level and individual facilities level.
They also have an inbuilt note/comment system and data check flags for data that is outside the expected ranges for when they are inputting, and the ability to contact the BPF Energy team with any queries.
As the requirements of the CCA change over time, the system is able to evolve and adapt with ease and allow for continued improvements, additional features and greater efficiency without the need to reengineer the whole system.
“ARM’s experience in being able to understand our data issues and be able to advise in applying best practice to get a product that we needed was a refreshing approach especially given the complex calculations required to operate the scheme on behalf of the Environment Agency”
The user experience has been transformed and it has enabled us to provide more help to our user base in respect of the scheme as our data processing time requirement has been reduced significantly”
Darren Muir, Finance and Administration Director, British Plastics Federation
