General Utility Operations Consulting

Product & Services Offerings

Business Analysis

Not every consulting assignments fits into a category like work management, GIS, or asset management. Issues may exist in many areas that involve several business processes and affect several departments and systems. Yanco Associates is knowledgeable and focused on the design, installation, maintenance, and operation of all utility assets, and we offer general consulting services using this knowledge and experience.

Some examples of this type of work are as follows. Recently, a large utility desired to review the operation of their control centers that manage the distribution of power to several million customers. These control centers also manage the repair and restoration of the assets, as well as the risk of further customer outages based on additional failures. Their work must be prioritized and managed effectively and efficiently. Yanco Associates was engaged to investigate the current situation and make general recommendations to the leadership team as to how best to manage the switching process and record the actions.

A second example is a utility that had merged several smaller companies into their company and desired to find a uniform set of business processes that would work across the utility and allow the free movement of personnel across the company without extensive training in the business work processes and the various formats and systems used.

Focused Business Solutions

Yanco Associates works with your leadership team to define the scope of the work that is required to solve the issue or to capture the potential benefits of modernization. This is an important step in the success of the project—clearly define the desired outcome and the areas and departments to be included in the work.

Strategic Planning

After understanding the issues and opportunities, Yanco Associates works with your leadership team to define a scope of the work that is logical and includes each phase of the effort to ensure the utility moves to the operational situation they desire. This is typically done in an executive workshop were we outline the opportunities and build the logical roadmap to move the company toward the desired end result. These discussions include scope of the work, expected costs, and the benefits to the utility in both the short and long term. Both the logical and sequential groupings are reviewed as appropriate.

Support Process Reengineering

Once the scope is defined, we will work with the utility’s team to define the required business processes, as well as the systems required to support the desired changes. Typically, several guiding principals are developed; for example, protection of the worker, maximizing asset life, minimizing required training, the ability to share the work among individuals or groups, outsourcing, etc. The business processes are typically captured in flowchart or UML Activity Diagram format to allow the development of procedure manuals and/or the supporting software.

To help ensure success, we will work with your team and, after developing the functional requirements, typically run a scenario workshop to simulate various situations to be sure that all the variables have been covered in the "to-be" business process design. We ask the team to initiate various scenarios related to the project such as moving work from one district to another, simultaneous outages, or a switching error to see if the process and or system will facilitate the work or catch the mistake.

Work Focused Business Process Modernization, Product Specifications, Configuration, Implementation Planning, and Installation Support

Typical Services

Business process review, a walk through of major functions and business activities, and a delivery evaluation and opportunity presentation.
Business process, system, and data assessment based on the current process and systems that are used to facilitate the work.
System specifications, including available packages, custom application features, unique (utility specific) designs, interfaces, etc.
System selection, project planning and implementation support.
Installation, integration, and project management.
Data conversion and migration.
Software prototyping, FAT, SAT, SIT testing.
Change management.
Documentation and training.