Projects &
Qualifications
Please contact us to receive client references for any of these projects
Transmission & Distribution
Organizational and Staffing Assessment including all aspects of transmission and distribution for a growing, major western electric utility. The company was seeking to maintain existing cost structures while optimizing staff and organization. First Quartile provided comparisons to leading utilities facing similar situations and helped guide the budgeting/planning process to reach the desired goals.
Analysis of Outage Response for a large mid-western utility. The company sought to evaluate and improve their customer experience during outages. The study covered all aspects of the response plan, preparations and training, customer communications, and operational execution during significant storm events.
Distribution Benchmarking for a major North American electric and gas utility operating across multiple states. The benchmarking required developing benchmarks and trend analysis findings to identify areas of opportunity, summarizing insights into cost and performance gaps relative to a selected peer group, and highlighting key opportunity areas for the utility to focus on. Areas of benchmarking included transmission and distribution operations and costs, reliability, and safety.
Customer Service
We offer Executive-Level Dashboard Development linking key benchmarking indicators used by a large southern municipal utility.
- First Quartile created a dashboard allowing the Customer Service leadership to understand and improve performance.
- Additionally developed process-based scorecards measuring core processes and their influence on the afore-mentioned top-level performance indicators.
- Additionally developed process-based scorecards measuring core processes and their influence on the afore-mentioned top-level performance indicators.
Field Service Operations Improvement for a Midwestern electric utility. Conducted a diagnostic assessment of the existing processes, management approaches, and technology, and moved to redesign of the supervision, scheduling, routing, and execution processes for field orders. After implementation of the renewed management processes, the company was able to increase its completed field orders by over 20% while maintaining the existing staff complement.
Contact Center Assessment and Implementation for a North American gas distribution utility. Executed a benchmarking-based performance assessment, a detailed practice analysis, and solution development for improvement of service, call handling quality, call flow, training, supervisory roles, and technology integration resulting in programs to improved service levels and move contacts to self-service
Regulatory Support
Rate Case Filing Support utilizing a benchmarking-based analysis of the Customer operations of a major Canadian retail energy supplier. The analysis was designed to evaluate the overall costs and fair market value, with the results used in support of a rates filing
Regulatory Support for a North American utility in their rates and regulatory filings. Work involved the provision of benchmarks and analysis for transmission and distribution expenditures, as well as reliability performance. Over the course of several different consulting cycles, First Quartile efforts ranged from the simple provision of benchmark comparisons to more complex work, up to and including providing written and oral testimony in hearings.