UTILITIES

The vast majority of North American public utility companies are mandated to undergo a Rate Case—which is simply a formal, legally-mandated process where their rates are fixed ahead of time. This ensures customers pay only a set amount per unit of usage. 

Rate cases often serve as one of the primary instruments of government regulation within the public utilities industries. This means that companies must have quick, easily-accessible data at its fingertips in order to conduct strategic planning and forecasting sessions and better predict how their operational costs impact their overall revenue.

Unfortunately, many of today’s organizations still rely on outdated and inadequate manual excel data sheets for their forecasting needs. This exposes them to unnecessarily high personnel costs and ongoing user input errors since their data is often stored across multiple locations. Critical, bottom-line numbers quickly become tough to track down and easily access within important time frames, and often lack clarity and accuracy. 

And when regulators get involved and request a particular company’s rate case data, it often takes the enterprise weeks to track down, review, reassess and validate their own data sets since they’re spread across a multitude of spreadsheets.