Business Challenges |
A Large Utility Company is the
fourth-largest combination electricity
and natural gas energy company in
the U.S. It offers a comprehensive
portfolio of energy-related products
and services to 3.3 million electricity
customers and 1.8 million natural
gas customers. Having regulated operations
in 11 Western and Midwestern states,
and revenue of $7.9 billion annually;
the utility company owns over 260,000
conductor miles of electricity transmission
and distribution lines, and more than
32,000 miles of natural gas pipelines;
and operate power plants that generate
about 15,433 megawatts of electric
power.
However, in this faced paced environment,
being one of the largest was not the
end all. The large utility company
felt the need for progressive thinking
while addressing traditional constraints
was critical to stay ahead of the
rat race. They believed that they
needed to prove to a slow industry
that there are other ways of doing
business. |
| The challenges that they needed addressed
were: |
- Improve external relationships
- Enable acquisitions and growth
- Integrate new acquisitions and business
Cater to customers demanding better
service and lower costs
- Comply with changing regulatory
controls
|
| The large utility company approached
CTE to help them create a vision of
the future and a plan for phased implementation.
|
| Solution |
A senior management team
from BCI attended CTE’s Cambridge
Executive Workshop (CEW), an intensive
program where corporate executives and
staff collaborate to identify new ideas
and move them to deployment.
During the CEW Workshop, the executives
felt that transparent Utility would
enhance the utility company’s
credibility and trust. Thus providing
‘real-time’ visibility across
departments, processes and jurisdictions
would be the way forward.
Common data views and processes reduce
operating costs and improve timeliness
of response (for e.g. GE and 6-Sigma
efforts). This would reduce management
time spent on searching for elusive
data; thus enabling faster decision-making.
CTE suggested the Transparent Utility,
which is the application (and policies)
that will enable the utility company
to have a ‘real-time’ view
of the enterprise from many different
angles (for e.g. Operations, Quality
of Service, etc.). The utility company
can choose to provision select data
sets to partners such as the media,
regulators and the finance community.
Additionally, Real-time Operations Management
would leverage mobile and Internet technologies
to connect 2,500 the utility company
field operations staff to the enterprise
in real-time. |
| Benefits |
The suggested Real-time Operations
Management will dramatically improve
the utility company’s operations
and customer satisfaction and Transparent
Utility pave way to improve operations
by improving relationships and internal
management.
It is estimated that Real-time Operations
Management will increase productivity,
reduce overheads and logistics and save
upto 4.25 - 6.5M/year. It will also
enable faster completion of jobs. The
Transparent Utility is slated to improve
access to financial markets, improve
regulatory relationships and enable
business development.
|
