Utility Consulting

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Introduction
Market liberalisation is bringing an end to the era of fully integrated, monopolistic public utilities that supply their services to consumers end-to-end. In energy markets public utility companies are unbundled, splitting the “natural monopoly” activities into transport and distribution and commercial activities into power generation, wholesale trading and retail sales. Transport and distribution are strictly regulated. Generation, trading and sales compete in an open market that is becoming increasingly international. End-users can choose among different suppliers. Complex administrative arrangements are developed to manage and financially settle all ensuing transactions between market participants. Large IT infrastructures and systems, fed by “intelligent” metering solutions, are needed to enable utility market processes. These administrative processes create significant costs at the end of the energy value chain. Cost to serve for end-users becomes a key variable for profitability in the intrinsically low-margin retail end of commercial utility activities. Cleverly building enterprise architectures that realise low cost-to-serve targets becomes a core capability for utilities post-liberalisation.

Focus
UCPartners focuses on all customer-oriented business processes in utility markets. We start in the area of developing market rules, defined collaboratively by the utility sector and its trade organisations and endorsed by government regulation. Next comes strategy development for commercial utility activities, followed by designing enabling business processes. This leads to an enterprise architecture with lean, state-of-the-art IT systems and a delivery organisation that realises the commercial strategy at the lowest possible cost. UCPartners executes or supports analysis and architecture design processes as well as implementation projects in project management roles.

Clients
Clients facing activities in utility companies, both commercial and regulated, benefit from the systematic approach offered by UCPartners. This approach also applies to cross-company market processes, and the organisations and government institutions that develop and endorse these processes. Utility consulting engagements are managed by UCPartners' consultants, who are certified TOGAF™ enterprise architects.

Client benefits
By systematically following an enterprise architecture approach in the realm of public utilities clients:

» Assure regulatory compliance
» Develop deliverable strategies
» Achieve cost-to-serve levels that ensure competitive advantage
» Reduce time-to-market
» Optimise shareholder value
» Develop market arrangements that meet public interest obligations and create public
» benefits 

Utility Consulting - Client case