Because this utility company provides electric, water, and sewer services in a finite geographic area, it must find innovative ways to add value, reduce costs, and expand revenues. The company wanted to improve service and add value for commercial electric customers, provide better water quality during dry conditions, and reduce cost overruns for capital projects. Inherent in each of these goals was cost reduction across all divisions.

The electric division had to find a means to lower customer service costs by reducing the number of billing issues, administrative burden, and call center staffing. The utility was sending paper bills to 600,000 commercial and residential accounts and had to manually send bills to organizations that needed different views of the same bill at several locations. The lack of detail for line items on paper bills led to more customer calls to the utility's call centers and paper bills made it difficult to create cross- and up-sell opportunities. The billing system needed to go online to provide better information to customers and reduce customer service costs.

In the water division, water quality plunged and costs increased during droughts; the utility didn't have a consolidated means to view water data, so if reservoir levels dropped and valves were closed, customers experienced water pressure declines. However, by opening certain wells and pumping lower quality water, customers complained and treatment costs soared. The utility wanted a system that would show trends and historical data so they could predict when shifts should be made between reservoirs and wells to maintain water quality and decrease treatment costs.

As a major utility serving more than 350,000 electric customers, 200,000 water customers, and 150,000 sewer customers, the utility continually has major capital projects underway. To better manage the full range of projects across the utility, water and sewer divisions, the utility needed to consolidate several disparate IT systems used for project management and create a single desktop management system to let managers plan for the timely release of unused project funds on a just-in-time basis and provide solid accountability through an audit trail.

The utility engaged CTE to create IT solutions linked to business strategy to generate new revenues, reduce costs, and provide additional services to customers. CTE, a leader in collaborative business innovation services and products that accelerate deployment of enterprise applications, worked with a cross-functional team of executives and operations staff from the utility through three of its innovative Cambridge Executive Workshops (CEW), identifying ways to improve customer services and enhance customer satisfaction, develop new revenue streams related to the utility's core mission, and reduce costs across the organization.

The CEW is CTE's structured collaborative forum where business and technology experts work with Fortune 1000 firms and governments to help executives, managers, end users, and other stakeholders develop strategic ideas to significantly improve business and implement them quickly. During the CEW, CTE specialists work with clients to:

The fast pace of the CEWs helped the company develop truly innovative and powerful solutions to improve customer service delivery and reduce operational costs very quickly. The utility has developed several resourceful initiatives, including:

a capital project control program to reduce cost overruns.

In the electric division, the utility's sales and service model defines the type and amount of service commercial and industrial customers receive. In addition, the new technology solution, called SmartBill, allows customers online access to billing information, and provides aggregated bills for customers with multiple accounts. Both parts of the solution were designed to improve customer satisfaction and ease of doing business.

Another solution allowed the company to offer new services that increased revenues and improved customer satisfaction. New energy audits for commercial customers determine if there are physical infrastructure issues, such as broken air conditioning units, that cause the customer to consume higher levels of electricity. The energy audit is a new revenue source for the utility and a service that reduces electric bills for customers, improving the relationship between them and the utility.

In the water division, CTE helped the company develop a technology solution that gives water plant operators a view of water usage, history, statistics, and trends that they can use to forecast when different reservoirs and wells should be opened and closed to avoid using lower quality ground water. Not only does better quality water improve customer satisfaction, it also saves $100,000 in chemical use to treat the poorer quality water.

For capital projects, the new solution provides a desktop view into all projects and reduces tracking of individual projects on separate IT systems. By consolidating, company managers have a global view of everything underway and can deploy resources as needed. The savings from this solution are already $500,000.

Through these programs, and others under development, the utility and its customers are benefiting from CTE's CTE ability to quickly solve business problems with advanced technology solutions.