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$5.8 billion Utilities Service Company gains insight into more than 50 process areas with one dashboard
CSI gives client the ability to quickly evaluate underlying data to identify trends or one-time events
Business Challenge
Northeast Utilities Service Company, a $5.8 billion utilities service company in the northeastern United States wanted to achieve a streamlined organizational structure that supports and services its customers and shareholders. This company wanted to gain greater insight into its process stability, to identify any potential risks in service more quickly and effectively. They chose CSI because of its expertise in business intelligence solutions, as well as deep experience in customer experience-based process improvement with other energy transmission companies.
CSI Solution
Working with the client’s existing information management architecture — specifically Oracle’s Hyperion Financial Management - System 9 application — CSI developed dashboards to allow this client to view their process stability at a more detailed level. This type of dashboard provided senior management insight into the leading indicators and trends of their business — a critical business intelligence that allowed the management team to better serve its customers and shareholders.
CSI, a leader in information management solutions, also provides expertise in business process optimization, the natural output of trusted information. CSI has worked with energy transmission organizations during the past several years, improving operating and business processes and customer satisfaction. Leveraging this hands-on experience, married with its information management capabilities, CSI worked with this client’s tools and technology to create dashboards to better understand the meter-to-bill lifecycle and its impact on customers.
CSI regularly works with clients on proofs of concept and prototyping engagements are part of its commitment as a trusted advisor to its clients. According to Jared Hillam, CSI’s vice president of business intelligence, “Information management systems represent a major commitment of funds and resources within our clients’ organizations, and are intended to leverage the competitive capabilities of a company. It is critical that the fundamental elements necessary for a successful implementation be established up-front. This can be achieved through prototyping and proofs of concept (POC). Our process uses a partially populated data warehouse and a collection of business intelligence reports that will provide our client with a broad range of sophisticated cause-and-effect analysis. This is often used as a starting point for a full-production business intelligence system.”
Return on Investment
With a wealth of customer experience-based process improvement expertise gained in the trenches with other energy distributors, CSI is in a unique position to advise clients like this on not only the technical requirements to gain information, but experienced and practical next steps on leveraging that information for optimizing their business processes. According to Lisa Burkarth, one of Northeast Utilities’ Customer Experience customer data owners, “The meter-to-bill dashboard continues to be a very benefical investment. The dashboard is used on a daily basis, by department and operational management, to quickly identify potential problems in over 50 process areas. A large amount of information can be reviewed in a few minutes instead of the hours that it would otherwise take to compile, organize, and evaluate the data. Where there are concerns, the dashboard provides the ability to quickly evaluate the underlying data, to identify trends or one-time events. CSI provided a very cost effective and functional solution that was several times less expensive than a previous vendor effort — which failed to deliver the needed results. The success of the meter-to-bill solution, in addition to the short time to deliver and the relatively low cost, led to the request and creation of two more dashboards to be used for monitoring call center and credit processes.” |
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