Data Mart Applies Power of Business Intelligence to Help Utility Attack Growing Collections Problem
The Client
- Diversified energy company, involved in the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity, as well as energy management and other energy-related services
- One of the largest investor-owned electric companies in the United States, serving millions of customers in multiple states
What the Client Wanted
Assistance with developing a solution to analyze and resolve a growing collections problem
Challenges
- Problem had existed in some form for nearly 20 years, but it was beginning to negatively affect the company’s credit rating and earnings per share numbers, leading to lower shareholder confidence
- Senior management needed a solution in a short time frame
LÛCRUM’s Solution
- Built a data mart and front-end application that provide data to the credit and collections team to identify, attack and solve the underlying issues causing collections challenges
- Introduced the power of business intelligence information into the process of fixing this long-standing problem
Efforts
Development and implementation: three months
Benefits
- Increased visibility into customer collections issues
- Ease of use, allowing managers to view key data any way they want or need to provide detailed analysis
- Flexible structure of the tool allows the business to design and execute custom views into its data, providing the ability to analyze the business problem from different perspectives and with varying levels of detail
- Saves time – reports that used to take two days or more to assemble now take one hour
- Provides proof instead of managers relying on “gut feelings” as they analyze collections issues
- Provides immediate positive, bottom-line impact
- Allows the customer to begin finding more creative ways to solve their collections challenges due to looking at the data in different ways
“We’re finding out more now than we were ever able to know in the past about our customers and their accounts! The field loves this tool. It is so much better than what we were using. Before, all we had were gut feelings; now we have the proof, backed up by hard data.”
-Director of Credit & Collections
“We can now start to figure out why this problem is happening. We’ve found billing exceptions, and people with 42 bad payments in 12 months. We never had that visibility before.”
-Business Analyst
