Business Intelligence

The advent, escalation and deployment of smart grid, advanced metering and emissions management initiatives have resulted in utilities being challenged to deal with exponential amounts of new data. This data needs to be transformed into information to optimize business decisions.

Microsoft Business Intelligence solutions integrate with utilities' existing technology and operational environment, taking advantage of existing IT assets and reducing the need for new expenditures for the systems that will usher in smart grid technologies.

While most utilities used to work within the confines of a regional economy, the world has changed and they are now part of the global economy. Plants in the western hemisphere compete for new and spare parts with plants in the eastern hemisphere. When utilities bid for fuels or water, they're bidding against other utilities and petrochemical plants, refineries, and manufacturing operations. In this new and dynamic environment, everybody within the utility organization should view the decisions they make in the context of this changed environment, where every decision can be aligned with company goals and strategy.

Microsoft Business Intelligence solutions benefit utilities by helping them arrive at this ideal state through the monitoring, analytics and planning capabilities that are built into Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, a powerful performance management application that provides the infrastructure to link people at all levels of the organization. Whether they're executives, line-of-business managers, or individual contributors, they're all aligned with the overall corporate strategy and empowered to compete in the new global environment.

Today's utilities need much more information about their customers whether it is anticipating their service needs or making intelligence decisions concerning energy use and environmental issues.

Utilities in deregulated markets make concerted customer retention efforts through appealing marketing and sales strategies. To do so require utilities to know who their high value customers are and what they value as a service.

By producing key performance indicators that are tracked with business scorecards, utility companies benefit from better performance analysis and gain visibility into their own business. Using a Business Intelligence (BI) solution like Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator utilities can examine customer value data, thus enabling improved strategic marketing and sales efforts as well as make decisions concerning energy efficiency and demand response.

Utilities can struggle with the heavy load of daily needs to update data. From creating purchase orders or scanning invoices to updating generation reports or complying with new regulations, the utility environment is full of manual data update processes. The inefficiencies created by manual processes for generating capital approvals and key performance indicator (KPI) reports cause delays and potential inaccuracies, affecting the integrity of published reports and hindering business agility.

Microsoft Business Intelligence solutions are as flexible as they are easy to use. Utilities benefit from these systems because they automate manual processes and combine and present performance management data. Microsoft BI solutions boost behind-the-scenes systems that drive bottom line profitability. Scorecards and dashboards allow users to analyze and manage asset performance, workforce issues, and customer relations. These intuitive views give insight into call center dynamics, fleet management and more, in real time.

With decades of stockpiled data on consumers, resources, and operations, utility companies have a goldmine of information on hand to make better, faster, more informed decisions. The problem is that the data comes from a broad range of different legacy systems, or it is transferred into the utility's technology systems via merger or acquisition.

By consolidating a family of companies' technology platforms and centralizing its data network, utility companies can, for instance, fully integrate their financial and production data analyses. Microsoft BI Solutions enable the preparation of scorecards and summaries that task workers, managers and executives can access from portable devices, ensuring near real-time performance management.

Most IT systems are implemented over time to solve specific business problems in individual departments of the utility, such as operational control systems in plants, meter data systems, customer information systems, financial systems and human resources and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The data that's generated from these systems tend to stay where it's created and becomes "owned" by different managers across multiple locations.

New and more widely available BI tools allow engineers and others to quickly surface and view near real-time information and use it to create key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be used to monitor and manage the operational health of an organization.

Extracting critical performance data from a data warehouse or application and aggregating that data for decision support are now possible in real time, all the time, enabling the utility to track and manage the entire array of it's key functions-system operations, finances, customer satisfaction, plant maintenance, even safety monitoring-with timeliness and accuracy. However, many companies struggle with data that is inconsistently defined across all these different systems, such as customer, product, time, and other key business dimensions.

Microsoft BI offers technology that drastically simplifies the job of making data more consistent across the enterprise. Microsoft Business Intelligence platforms are useful to Utilities because they are familiar to a broad range of users, simple to use, easy to integrate with other tools, comprehensive in scope and cost effective to deploy and maintain. They provide focus for everyone in the utility and facilitate access to data for enterprise-wide detailed analysis by job function enabling role based productivity through-out an organization.