Utilities

The Utilities industry is made up of both public and private entities, encompassing Electricity, Natural Gas and Water. Ownership plays a strategic role in how the utility is managed, governed, and how profitability is measured. As these companies seek to focus on additional sources of economic added value while optimizing their core businesses, they are also responding to new governmental regulation and the pressures of Wall Street with regard to profitability.

As these companies seek to grow profitability (4-6%) on average, and address issues such as deregulation, streamlining operations, and improving productivity over new growth initiatives, they must also consider the repeal of PUCHA and how M&A will play a role in the US utility environment.

Improved management or the restructuring of debt and capitalization structures continues to drive a focus on technologies that will support a better overall financial position and corporate governance. The decision-making emphasis by technology buyers across all three major utility sectors (electric services, natural gas and water) remains on investing in technology that can create clear productivity improvements. The ability to do so continues to be a key decision factor for the next several years in proving return on (technology) investment and justifying IT budgets.

Utilities are striving to become customer-centric, not regulatory-centric and driven toward greater profitability and efficiency by incentives, new market-based initiatives and regulatory incentives, including increasing support for incentive-based ratemaking (such as performance-based pricing, revenue sharing, and price-cap regulation) as an alternative to cost-of-service rate making.

New Dimension Solutions consulting experience in the Utility sector continues to assist clients to maximize their return on any technology investment whether it is for Optimizing assets performance, Reliability Centered Maintenance, or Application and Industry consulting, training and facilitation. Other professional services include, addressing the complete project life-cycle from opportunity analysis through implementation and continuing support delivering a transformational value proposition.