Milton Keynes company

11th May 2010

Xcel Property Services (UK) Ltd in Milton Keynes has been awarded the Sustainable Routes £1000 grant.

Xcel Property Services (XPS) has used the grant to purchase additional IT equipment that will enable their office based staff to work from home more and reduce the frequency of meetings on site with external contractors.

XPS heard about the Sustainable Routes grant whilst working towards their ISO 14001, a standard that focuses on environmental performance.

In order to achieve ISO 14001, XPS identified business travel as one key area in which they could significantly reduce both CO₂ emissions and expense. Because they have grown organically as a company, their IT system, consisting mainly of personal laptops, meant they were not able to connect to their central server securely from remote locations. Therefore, all staff needed to be office based and contractors had to travel to XPS to access the company information they required.

Emma Bowman Smith, Managing Director at XPS comments: “As a provider of Facilities Management services, environmental impact is very important to us and many of our customers. We needed to improve our infrastructure to enable more effective working and reduce the amount of time our staff and contractors spent out on the road. We meet with our Business Link Adviser regularly and he referred us to the Sustainable Routes grant.”

Through the Sustainable Routes programme, XPS received a grant of £1,000 towards the cost of purchasing two new computers and an extensive upgrade to their central server.

Emma adds: “The Sustainable Routes grant was incredibly straight forward, logical and quick to access.

“Two of our staff have already reduced their travel to the office by one day per week and we can also eliminate weekly visits from our Directors as they can now access all company information remotely and securely. Our contractors will also be able to access files remotely so their time can be spent more productively.  We are working towards to franchising our business model in the near future and the new IT infrastructure will be invaluable in rolling that out also.

“The whole process has been extremely straight forward and rewarding, both in terms of reducing our business travel costs but also in making a big difference in the environmental impact and responsibility we have as a company.”

It is estimated that XPS will reduce their annual CO₂ emissions by 10% through reducing their business mileage alone. This equates to approximately 5,204kgs in reduced CO₂ each year.