If you care about saving your company money on energy costs this year, or know someone who does, you owe it to yourself to read Eric Bloom’s post, “Procurement Arrives in the 21^st Century.” Eric is an analyst at Pike Research, one of the few industry analyst firms that gets that there is an energy revolution going on and practical ways to harness it. Here is an excerpt that caught our eye at World Energy:

“Still, the procurement industry is stuck in the 20^th century. Less than 10% of energy procured by commercial and industrial customers today is traded online. Instead, energy procurement is most often handled on paper and by phone. To illustrate just how far procurement still has to go, think of it this way: Twenty years ago, if you wanted to book a plane ticket, you had to either call airlines yourself and compare offers or hire a travel agent. Today, you go on Orbitz or another service and instantly compare hundreds of offers. With business customers spending hundreds of billions of dollars on energy every year, you would think the market would have gone in a similar direction….”

This sentiment was on my mind yesterday as the General Services Administration announced a successful, multi-state procurement for its New England Region, which will save the participating agencies over $3.75 million a year. If you think a paper process can net a similar result, including 150 bids from six suppliers, with 41% of the bids coming in the last 15 seconds of the event, and all done in a fair and transparent manner, then I’ll respectfully let you get back on hold to compare those airline offers.