Following the success of Team GB at the Rio Olympic Games, resulting in the best performance in over 100 years, we take a closer look at what was behind their astounding achievement, and what lessons energy suppliers could learn.
- The best ever performance at an away games
- The greatest number of medals won in over 100 years
- Improved performance for the fifth successive games
- The first nation to improve their total medal count immediately after hosting a games
Team GB’s success in Rio is undeniable. But what’s equally unequivocal is that their success wasn’t down to luck, but the result of several instrumental and institutional decisions that over time have had a game changing impact.
A recent article posted this week looked at how the retail sector as a whole could learn from Team GB’s success, but energy supply is, unsurprisingly, a different beast entirely. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a closer look at each of the lessons highlighted in the article, and seeing how these can be applied to the energy industry.
This week: Target Setting
Before the games began, UK Sport set its medal target at between 47 and 65 medals. 47 medals as a minimum was the best they’d ever done on foreign soil to date, and the upper limit matched the total medals achieved 4 years ago in London – the highest medal count since 1908.
Lofty ambitions, but in the end goals that were not only achieved but exceeded.
The value of effective goal setting and its impact on performance is well known. And when it comes to the Olympics, measuring performance is refreshingly simple; bronze, silver or gold. However, in energy, and this is true for any large organisation or industry, the metrics and KPIs of business performance are much more wide ranging, and inevitably complex.
So when it comes to energy, the lesson is not simply to set more goals, or to be more ambitious with the goals themselves – the key is to target the right goals.
Revenue Leakage is a great example of this. Revenue leakage is the financial loss that’s the result of an irreconcilable gap between the industry’s aggregate view, and a supplier’s customer level billing. It’s a challenge that all suppliers face, big and small alike, and is a nuance born of the industry’s privatisation in the early 90s.
Because revenue leakage has been part of the fabric of an energy supplier for over 20 years, it’s often accepted as the cost of doing business. Teams do their best to manage the problem, but it’s rarely proactively targeted with challenging goals. But, with the advent of modern technology and data analytics, it’s now possible to retain the granularity of the customer level without losing sight of the aggregate industry view.
At ENSEK, we’ve done just that. Libra, our energy data reconciliation platform, is capable of reconstructing the full industry cost stack. Using the power of cloud computing, we’re able to disentangle the vast sets of industry data that suppliers receive, and intelligently piece it back together to create a comprehensive view of a supplier’s portfolio.
With current and emerging technology putting suppliers back in control of their portfolio, and anywhere from 2-4% of turnover being available through revenue leakage alone, it’s time to see what some Team GB style target setting could do for your business.
Over the coming weeks we will be exploring the remaining Olympic parallels and how the UK Energy industry can embrace and apply the same thinking.
