Centric

Legislating Change

An electric and gas utility faced significant changes to business processes due to deregulation legislation affecting their state. With approximately 650,000 natural gas and electricity customers in a 15,000 square mile territory, the utility would need to address process and system changes that affected nearly every organization in the business.

A Practical Solution

The utility enlisted the help of the utilities specialists at Practical Solutions, (PSI) an operating unit of Centric Consulting. A project team was formed to analyze legislation, identify requirements, estimate costs, develop business cases, and secure funding approval. This team implemented the necessary business process and systems integration changes that support the new legislation.

• PSI provided Project Management, Process Improvement and Systems Integration work for this project.  Specifically, PSI:
• Identified all business process and systems integration requirements for deregulation
• Designed and implemented CIS related changes
• Designed and implemented software for automatic enrollment into Customer Choice
• Led effort to enhance Transmission Scheduling and Settlements to support deregulation
• Installed and integrated Lodestar products for settlements and industrial billing
• Integrated existing CIS with EDI ASP for their market
• Assisted in effort to architect and add a browser front-end on mainframe CIS
• Designed User Interface for CIS Browser front-end, as well as additional Internet-based applications

Results

The utility completed all required systems enhancements at a cost up to 25% lower than the typical costs incurred by other utilities in their state.