A step towards the future of energy management

Smart energy management is among the key challenges for companies from the energy and housing sectors – not only due to stricter ESG building regulations, but also to enable a better overview of consumption and costs. In view of the markedly volatile trend in energy prices, increasingly tenants, too, are seeking greater transparency regarding their service charges. This requires several digital readings per year.

However, in practice many companies still collect meter data for final year-end readings using analogue methods, entailing high operational costs. The transmission of these manually recorded meter readings involves various people and media, ties up considerable resources and is highly prone to error. Moreover, it will still be some years before smart meter solutions are installed nationwide.

Aareal Meter as a digital process accelerator

For many years now here at Aareal Bank Group we have harnessed our sector expertise in order to develop, together with our clients, specific solutions to make their lives easier. This is how the idea came about to digitalise this time-consuming and labour-intensive process and, working with pixolus GmbH, to develop Aareal Meter, a digitalisation solution that is easy to implement. The meter readings as well as key meter information are recorded through smartphones, then forwarded digitally to a central online portal, where they are processed immediately by the payment management departments of housing enterprises and energy companies. As a result, paper lists with hand-written, partly illegible meter values and thus transposed figures have become a thing of the past.

More process transparency for jenawohnen GmbH

Positive feedback from our clients soon made it clear that this product fulfils a genuine need in the market. One such example is jenawohnen GmbH, which with around 14,500 homes is the largest landlord in Thuringia. Managing and reading almost 3,000 meters per year for water, electricity and heating entailed considerable time and cost factors. Implementing Aareal Meter was a complete game changer in this respect. Meter data reaches the system significantly faster, allowing plausibility checks to be performed much more rapidly as well. This also means that queries from tenants can be answered more promptly. After just two years, the processes at jenawohnen were operating so well that meter readings can now be conducted four times a year without any problems, with all parties benefiting: tenants get greater transparency on their consumption data, while housing enterprises can optimise their consumption, improve their tenant services and take early action to consolidate their own liquidity planning in the event of any payment shortfalls.

Efficient energy management with minimal effort

Martin Konrath, Director Banking & Digital Solutions and specialist for digital products at Aareal Bank, confirms the positive impact of Aareal Meter: "Due to resource savings, in many cases the investment is paid back as early as the second meter reading. Once the processes have been implemented, carrying out multiple readings during the year becomes child's play."

You can find more information about Areal Meter at: https://aareal-meter.de/ (in German).