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Enabling decision-making for 800 users with consistent financial data

Enterprise-Wide Data Insights and Reporting at Eversource Energy

We were able to really check all of the boxes and make our corporate-wide reporting more efficient, more pleasant for the end user.

Frances Berger
Manager, Performance & Financial Systems

 

00:00:14Eversource Energy, we are a Fortune 500 and Standard & Poor's 500 energy company. We are the largest energy company in the Northeast, one of the 10 largest in the United States. So, a pretty big presence, certainly, countrywide. We are very committed to serving our four million electric, natural gas, and water customers. And I think Lauren mentioned, we are also very committed and have a lot of focus on environmental leadership.

00:00:55Our problem statement, and really what we were trying to solve with this Board implementation, was the result of a merger that took place in 2012. So, there were two large New England utilities, we merged, and while there was a lot of emphasis in, really rightly so, on implementing new accounting systems and general ledger systems and budgeting systems, what really fell by the wayside a little bit, and left us with a bit of a gap, was the ability to get financial results and we were focused primarily on expense budget results. Getting that in the hands of our business users company-wide.

00:01:41So again, it checked all the boxes. We thought it offered a nice financial reporting capability. Certainly that was just kind of the basis of what we were looking for. But it also had that graphic functionality. It also had kind of that newer, more modern interface, and dashboarding capabilities as well. So we thought that was going to be a big plus and generate some real interest in our business units.

00:02:12It also interfaced very well with financial systems, our existing financial systems, as well as Microsoft Office. And some of the packages we looked at didn't really have that close Microsoft Office integration, and if any of you are in finance, you know that you certainly can't pry Excel out of the hands of some of our finance department.

00:02:35It also met our response time requirements. I think I mentioned in a previous slide that we were looking to go into a lot of transactional detail. We wanted to make transactional detail available to those end users. So that was really a lot of data. It was actually, we now have about, I think it's over 200 million rows of transaction level data. So really a lot of data. And what was very important to us was that the folks, when they wanted to click on that and get that transaction level, that they weren't waiting a long time to do that. That it was within a several second response time, you weren't waiting minutes to get a query to return. Such as happened in our accounting system, but then that's another story.

00:03:30So we actually rolled this out, we've got about 750 users right now and it's a very diverse end user population. It is anything from a financial analyst level to a cost center manager to a program director, project director, right up to the executive level. We have currently five primary capsules, or databases, with all the relevant security associated with that. We really do think that we have achieved all the benefits that we set out to do. We were able to really check all the boxes and really make our corporate-wide reporting more efficient, more pleasant for the end user.

00:04:26We've been very closely partnering with Board on a couple of enhancements that we really are quite excited about. And one of those are metrics and performance scorecards. So it actually, from the day we implemented in 2017, it actually was a long time vision and desire of our senior management for business, for our executives and our business users to be able to see their performance metrics hand in hand with their financial results. So those two, in the eyes of management, are very closely linked and there was a great desire to be able to provide that really in one system. And so this project is going to be starting up very soon.