Scottish-Power-Case-Study1-604x270

Scottish Power SME Case Study

Surendra Khandelwal, Finance Director of Aberdeen Laundry Services Aberdeen

Now in its seventh year of operation, Aberdeen Laundry Services (aberdeenls.co.uk) is a well-established business in the North East of Scotland. An independent commercial laundry and dry cleaning business, the company works with clients in the oil and gas, hospitality and public sectors. Since opening in 2009, it has grown considerably, now employing over 120 people and recently creating a turnover of three and a half million in the last financial year.

With this business growth, however, brings increased costs, particularly on energy outgoings. Despite thriving as a business, ALS is therefore keen to find ways to reduce its operational costs and reducing energy usage is key.

In a bid to tackle this, Finance Director, Surendra Khandelwal looked for support to cut costs. He started by researching tips for making businesses more energy efficient. This led him to information about the collaboration with Resource Efficient Scotland (RES) and ScottishPower.

Helping businesses use their energy more efficiently is ScottishPower’s priority, which is why the energy provider has teamed up with RES, a programme of Zero Waste Scotland, to look at business’s resource efficiency as a whole, something that has been hugely beneficial to ALS.

Surendra Khandelwal, Finance Director of ALS, said: “Since we have so many sites across Aberdeen, Scottish Power and RES focused on four of our locations to make sure they were as energy efficient as possible. Once we managed to improve things in our bigger stores, we then carried out similar methods in the rest of our branches to bring them up to speed with the rest. We quickly got into the swing of things and started to see gradual improvements on our energy bills over the space of just a few months.”

Surendra continued: “RES helped us to make lots of small changes that made sense from an energy efficient perspective. For example, they advised us to lag all of the pipes that take steam out of the factory to help save a great deal of money. We have already executed this. We were also advised to change the lighting in the factory from conventional bulbs to light-emitting diode (LED) panels to save money on our electricity bills in the long-term. This has had a positive impact on our energy costs and is just one example of the measures we’ve introduced to become more energy efficient.”

ALS has also moved away from older washing machines to newer and faster versions which process laundry more efficiently, both in terms of the amount of water they use as well as the heat that they require. As a loyal customer of ScottishPower, Mr Khandelwal welcomes these initiatives and tips which encourage businesses to become greener and more energy efficient.

Mr Khandelwal added: “These tips were bound to be a success and we have already seen marked improvements since incorporating them into ALS. We’re looking forward to keeping in touch with ScottishPower and RES to receive more assistance with our energy efficiency plans. Both RES and ScottishPower have given us some really helpful advice, which has made a difference to our energy bills. We also keep up to date with offerings on RES and ScottishPower’s websites, so they can expect to hear from us again in the not so distant future.”