Lisa Roberts // UniFirst Corporation

Tell us about yourself.

My name is Lisa Roberts, I’m the Manager of Engineering Administration at the UniFirst Corporation.

What was life like before EnergyCAP?

Prior to using EnergyCAP, we just tracked our bills from getting copies from our accounts payables Department in an Excel spreadsheet. So there’s very little data that we could capture. We couldn’t feed it into any reporting systems. We really couldn’t get a good idea of late fees we were paying, or whether or not our bills are accurately billed or in line with what they should be.

How are you using EnergyCAP in order to make your utility information work for you?

So we use EnergyCAP to feed our Universe production monitoring system. That’s a very important key element that helps us identify how much money we’re spending per 100,000 lbs of garments processed, and that helps us identify which locations are spending more money than others. There’s a number of things that we can now identify, monitor, track, try to reduce just because of the data that we’re able to capture in EnergyCAP?

How has your understanding of the value and use of utility information changed over the 15 years you’ve used EnergyCAP?

It’s definitely helped me understand the industry more. For sure. Back when they started this, they were just bills. I was just asked to reduce late fees.  So the bills started coming to me and that’s just what I did. So we reduced late fees, but then they started asking me other questions and so over time, it just kind of built on.

It really helped me understand more about what I’m looking at on these bills. What does this energy mean? What does it mean for us? What does that future look like? With energy, you’re making smarter choices. Knowing if I look at a location and they have low energy costs and there’s no incentives or rebates in the area, really, what’s my benefit to doing a lighting upgrade in that area? there’s just been a number of things like that that has been helpful.

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