Case Study

Independent Vetcare

IVC Evidensia is Europe’s leading network of veterinary care providers with 19,000 staff across 11 countries.

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Formed as Independent Vetcare in 2011 with just 20 UK practices, in 2017 IVC joined forces with Evidensia, an established veterinary group across Northern Europe.

Since its inception, the IVC Group in the UK has grown significantly and today is formed of over 1,050 veterinary practices.

Project Scope

100% Renewable power across 1,000+ sites
Full portfolio management
Contract end date alignment
Dedicated account team
Smart meter installation

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UGP were the best on price, and whilst I can’t say that isn’t important because it is, it wasn’t just down to price. Other factors that UGP offered significantly influenced IVC’s decision...

The Challenge

Prior to 2020, IVC practices were responsible for contracting and managing their own energy suppliers via a third party broker, signing up to whichever deal offered them the best rates on the day of enquiry. While this was a manageable situation when the Group consisted of 20 sites, at several hundred practices the situation had become unmanageable .

Most significantly, as each site had been contracted independently, contract end dates were not aligned and invoices poured into the Group randomly across the calendar year.

Additionally, as the bills were coming from a wide variety of different suppliers, they were in multiple formats (e.g. CSV, EDI) and could not easily be synchronised with IVC’s payment system. This caused continual strain on central resources who had little control or visibility over the Group portfolio due to the highly fragmented nature of the contracting process.

A lack of any consolidated management information regarding unit rates, contract dates and other key pieces of data added additional complexity to the task of portfolio management and attempts to resolve any problems or queries usually resulted in a lengthy and laborious process.

The decision was therefore made to consolidate the Group energy portfolio and begin a tender process that would tackle these key issues as well as secure consistent great value rates and make the switch to using renewable power.

Tendering Process

The tendering process began with a thorough review of the commercial energy market. Six suppliers were chosen to propose a solution; a mixture of “Big 6” and smaller fast growing energy companies, of which United Gas & Power was one.

After an initial tendering process, UGP was shortlisted along with a big 6 supplier. Competing head to head, both companies proposed full approaches to the specific challenges represented by the IVC Group’s energy portfolio needs.

Our Solution

United Gas & Power submitted a full proposal that was ultimately accepted based on the following key components:

100% renewable power
Smart meter installation across all sites
Aligned contract end dates for all sites
One single, consolidated billing date and process
Full and visible management information
A universal fixed low rate for gas and electricity across all sites
A portal that IVC could access directly for site or consolidated information
A file format and template that could easily be uploaded onto IVC’s system
A dedicated full-time Account Management team to handle the switching/on-boarding process
Dedicated IVC resources for future account management, with direct line access

Onboarding

The onboarding process has been handled entirely by the IVC Key Account Team at UGP. The extensive migration involved a significant amount of administrational manpower in order to contact and process the migration for each account onto UGP’s supply.

A bespoke tailored management information portfolio was created for IVC as part of the onboarding process and all sites were centrally organised and communicated with by UGP

From my side the onboarding process has been really smooth. It’s a large migration but from our perspective everything was taken care of by the UGP team...

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