Creating an offer request
Buying process starts with creating an offer request for Buyer's energy project.
Creating user account
Creating customer account
In order the create an Offer Request, you need a customer account. This is done when logged into the AEM-service with your user account. When creating a user account, you define yourself to be a Buyer and give the basic information on your housing association. Each customer account is tied to one housing association.
Once you have a Buyer customer account you can create an offer request using our ready Offer Request templates. Getting started takes only a few minutes. We estimate that the duration from starting to draft an offer request to having received qualified offers and having signed a contract takes about 0.5-1 months.
Customer account can be created by a party that has the right to represent the housing association. Therefore, the customer account is typically created by the housing association board member or property manager. You can invite relevant parties to your customer account i.e. members of the housing association board and the property maintenance manager.
Offer request creation
We currently focus on multi-family residential housing companies and their energy project needs. There are 24 ready templates to choose from that cover the most common energy project needs of multi-family housing companies. We are adding more templates as need be. The template will prompt the Buyer to add building specific information such as current energy usage and project location. You can also include attachments in your Offer Request. The templates currently available for multi-family housing companies are as follows:
- Energy efficiency (general survey, energy survey, energy efficiency investment and cost optimization)
- Solar PV (Planning study, implementation)
- Exhaust Air Heat recovery (pre-study, project consultant, heat recovery implementation)
- Ground heat (pre-study, project consultant, ground heat implementation)
- Air-water heat pump solution (pre-study, implementation)
- Heating general (heat network rebalancing planning, heat network rebalancing implementation, heating solution comparison study)
- EV related (EV charging station planning and implementation)
- Ventilation related (ventilation measurement and adjustment)
- Outdoor lighting (planning and implementation)
- Agreements, grants and certificates (agreement legal check-up, energy certificate, ARA grant calculation
consultant)
Based on the data submitted by the Buyer, Action Energy Market -platform automatically generates the offer request documentation and a project page. The offer request is published on the Marketplace when the Buyer approves the project page and documentation to be ready and correctly describing the energy project. Providers registered on AEM will automatically receive an email about a new Offer Request that fits their profile.
Invite others to the customer account
Many energy project offer requests have a need to include housing company related historic energy data. When such data is needed for an offer request, additional persons possessing this data, such as the property maintenance manager, can be invited to the housing company's customer account to fill in this data. The email invite to the person wished to join the project and to fill in the needed data is sent via the AEM platform.
Property manager as AEM -platform user
Property manager can take AEM -service into use in order to manage energy projects on behalf of the housing associations it manages. Several customer accounts of different housing associations can be created under one user account. Each customer account requires its own subscription and is always tied to one housing association. Under the housing association's customer account the property manager can invite housing association representatives to share access to offer requests and offers received.
AEM -platform allows for the property manager and housing association to work together on the offer request. The parties can also use the platform to message to each other to discuss about the offers. Each user receives a notification of a new message in the platform to his / her email account. The invoicing and receipts of each customer account managed under the same user account are shown as separate. Therefore, it is easy for the property manager to allocate the accumulated service fees for each housing association.
Templates save time
Action Energy Market automatically saves the Buyer's organization data and preferences in the customer account. Creating the next offer request is even faster as large part of the data is pre-filled.
Templates for housing associations currently cover the following areas:
- General energy efficiency (condition evaluation, energy survey, energy efficiency grant consultant)
- Heat recovery (pre-study, project consultant, heat recovery implementation)
- Ground heat (pre-study, project consultant, ground heat implementation)
- Heating related (heat radiator rebalancing, heating option survey)
- EV related (EV charging station planning and implementation)
- Ventilation related (ventilation measurement and adjustment)
- Outdoor lighting (planning and implementation)
Offer Request publication
Once the Offer Request has been published on the marketplace, there is a two-week time window that Providers can use to submit additional questions about the project. For simpler consulting Offer Request the Q&A time window is not used. The questions and answers are posted on the project page to help all Providers to understand the Buyer's project need better. After the Q&A period the offer period starts. The received offers can be viewed and compared on the Buyer's customer account.