Energy Auditing of your Business
At times, there’s a misconception that energy audits are time-consuming and pointless, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. At its most basic, an audit provides a clear overview of your company’s current energy usage, giving you insights into the areas that have a financial impact on your business, and doing so in a way that makes it easy to understand.
With the feedback from your energy audit, you can formulate a plan from which to correct your energy oversights. Identifying areas where energy is being wasted can save money in the long term, and the results of your audit will suggest ways where you can reduce your energy consumption to cut costs and reduce your carbon footprint. An effective audit is all-encompassing and takes everything into account, inspecting both the building’s interior, exterior, its fixtures and equipment, to determine how these systems interact with one another.
A successful audit can have a positive effect on both company morale and the wider culture of the business. In this respect, the results of auditing are two-fold: not only will it help your company run a leaner cost base, these new-found best practices could help to foster innovation and competition among your workforce.
In terms of competition, developing a greener, more sustainable business model through auditing shows an understanding of energy efficiency that could put you ahead of the competition. The adaptability you’ll show will illustrate your business’ willingness to adapt and stand out amongst an increasingly competitive market. As a result, your business could make inroads to a more environmentally conscious audience, which is perhaps the most important benefit to be had.
Building Compliance Services
Building compliance is often seen as a sore subject that hinders business, but is crucial to its success. In an organisation, all the mechanical and electrical systems and equipment are covered by the legislation. The working environments should meet the Health and Safety standards to keep their employees safeguarded from risks. Regular maintenance of the workplace plays an important role in keeping up with this standard. Navigating the path to compliance by keeping up to date with the constantly evolving legislation requires proactive planning and organization. It can be challenging and overwhelming for an organisation trying to keep up with the legislation.
Acufire UK can help you turn your building into an active asset of your business. Please feel free to contact us. We are ready to help.
Air and Ventilation Compliance Inspections
It is a legal obligation of an organisation to look into the occupational health and safety hazards of its employees. Indoor air pollution is a primary factor which contributes to risks posed in the workplace. An adequately maintained ventilation will circulate and substitute fresh air for stale air. A good amount of fresh air and its cleanliness makes for a comfortable workplace. Workplaces are required to be at a minimum temperature of 16°C in general working conditions and 13°C in situations where work performed is laborious.
Underperforming and less frequently serviced heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems pose several health and safety risks. Failure to deliver suitable working conditions is a serious breach of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD).
Acufire UK can work with your current Facility Manager (FM) to ensure all legal responsibilities are complied with. Depending on your system’s output, you may also need a regular TM44 inspection. We can advise you on this and other requirements your system may have.
Electrical Compliance
Every organisation, be it a large hazardous industry or a small service unit, electrical safety is one of the basic requirements for their loss prevention strategy. Acufire UK offers a range of electrical testing services to companies across the UK, with expertise in reducing workplace risks and create safer working environments. Regular testing of your electrical equipments, prevent electrical accidents or fires occurring in the workplace and is a requirement under the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989. Be compliant – call us now and avail our services today:
– The Portable Appliance Testing (PAT) and thermal surveying
– Fixed Wire Testing (EICR) to confirm compliance of electrical distribution and installation in accordance with IET Wiring Regulations BS7671
– Provide support to reduce downtime and keep your business fully operational.
Health and safety and your responsibilities
The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 places a legal obligation on the employers to ensure a safe and healthy workplace for their employees as well as others on their premises. All organisations, whether big or small, have the responsibility to identify any workplace hazards and take measures to reduce the risk or eliminate it. Statutory Compliance is a requirement by the law and the responsibility to be compliant with the law lies with a nominated person or team within the organisation.
AcuFire UK works closely with all those tasked with the responsibility of Statutory Compliance. As a team we work towards enhancing your company’s image as you demonstrate your responsibility to health and safety issues.
Just like any sales proposition, if the benefit of a proposed business case isn’t greater than its cost or effort, then it’s a bad deal. So, we approach business case development as an internal sales proposition for our client organisation. Often a client has a limited amount of capital or resource and far too many possible projects and no clear way to assess them.
Also, most business staff who can identify improvement opportunities for investment are focussed on the here and now of running their day to day operation. This makes strategic planning difficult for most operational parts of a business and leaves them to continue year after year with the same approach and resources.
Our approach is to work with the client to develop medium to long term and multi-faceted improvement opportunities, which provide the biggest return on investment. Whether it be in terms of money, effort or future skills. By developing solutions that bring maximum benefits it’s possible to get to the point where the business case is a no brainer and some client businesses will borrow to implement them.
Risk management will mean very different things to different businesses based on their size, sector, customer base, finances and workforce among many other things. We work with our clients to develop risk management approaches to their specific needs. Whether it be strategic business risk in terms of business continuity, single points of failure, supply chain dependency or more traditional forms of risk, such as health and safety, employee well- being or fire.
Some clients operate in highly regulated sectors and thus records, competence, execution on time and reporting is critical to them. Other clients want to invest capital in minimising or removing business risk. Whether you require support on simple risk assessment or full governance of a large corporation, we can help you develop your approach.
The 80 20 Rule Explained
The 80 20 rule is one of the most helpful concepts for life and time management.Also known as the Pareto Principle, this rule suggests that 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results. It is the essence of the phase “Less is More.” This can dramatically improve performance in any area of business, life or in our case compliance and risk. It can also greatly reduce the effort required to get you compliant.
What Is The 80 20 Rule?
The 80 20 rule, also called the “Pareto Principle”, was named after its founder, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, back in 1895. He noticed that people in society seemed to divide naturally into what he called the “vital few,” or the top 20 percent in terms of money and influence, and the “trivial many,” or the bottom 80 percent.
Later, he discovered that virtually all economic activity was subject to this principle, in that 80 percent of the wealth of Italy during that time was controlled by 20 percent of the population.
We can take Pareto’s 80 20 rule and apply it to almost any situation. Understanding the principle is essential to learning how to prioritize your tasks, days, weeks, and months.
How Does The 80 20 Principle Work?
The Pareto Principle is a concept that suggests two out of ten items, on any general to-do list, will turn out to be worth more than the other eight items put together.
Unfortunately, those top two items are often the items people avoid doing or are prone to procrastinate over. This may be because they are perceived as hard or scary to do. This leaves people focussing on the least important tasks on their to do list and creates that all to well-known phenomena of being very busy but getting nothing done. Do you know that feeling?
Important to remember is the fact that this principle is not a hard and fast mathematical law. If fact in many cases it may be 10% of the actions result in 90% of the outcomes, especially in todays information age.
Using The 80 20 Rule
The first and most critical application of this is to clearly define what you want. This is goal setting. In a business sense it may be defined as a turnover goal, a reduction in risk or as part of a business case.
For example, you may want to reduce your legal liability by ensuring compliance against your H&S or fire obligations. You may not know what your legal obligations are. So how do you set a clear goal? Search the internet? Try and interpret the legislation? The usual result of this is a feeling of overwhelm, worry penalised or that it’s just too big a subject to contemplate. Most people will turn off at this point and put it in their mental too hard, scary, time consuming or painful box. Yet you know deep down that its important and can really hurt your business.
An alternative approach might be to recruit expert help, finding a good guide on the subject or setup a compliance services so you can focus on your real job. All of these options will require actions to implement but are often far more effective than searching around and potentially getting overwhelmed.
80 20 Hacks You Can Use Today
There are many applications of this approach in many walks of life. The key is in identifying the top 20%.
- List out the top things that worry you in running your business.
- What are you doing to address them?
- What could you do to address them?
- What do you need to change?
- Categorise your hazards by measuring occurrences and effect. Then focus on the top 20% with mitigation.
- Minimise your Covid-19 risk by following simple hygiene and social distancing
- Optimise your energy usage using our Energy Audit
- Contact us to discuss your risk management or compliance issue
- It’s likely that 20% of your customers account for 80% of your turnover or profit. Who are they? Do you do anything different with them?
- What do you spend your day doing? What effect on your top goal do they have?
- You may have the best product or service in the world, but it’s worth virtually nothing if nobody knows about it. Contact our marketing partner Web Choice for help or advice
- Define your personal goals clearly and effectively
Want to know more about the 80 20 principle try The 80 20 principle by Richard Koch