An Energy Company Sees the Big Financial Picture

A North American energy company had dozens of assets managed by independent business units, hampering the C-suite’s visibility into overall financial performance and limiting its ability to make effective decisions. Disjointed financial systems obscured rich data sources, and creating an integrated, EBITDA-only view required costly, error-prone manual processes.

Over the course of a yearlong, three-phase engagement, we helped the company turn that around. We began by assessing and diagnosing pain points in EnergyCo’s* existing processes and tools. That enabled the creation of a standardized, enterprise-wide forecasting model that provided visibility into business unit and asset-level revenue, costs, cash flows, and related key performance indicators. Finance and engineering teams collaborated on the creation of a cloud-based data lake connected to the company’s ERP systems, to automate data consolidation. A single sensitivity tool owned by a central FP&A team enhanced the company’s ability to assess how changes to inputs would affect outcomes.

We provided training and implementation support for that initial phase and also mapped out a multiyear vision for a full potential forecasting process that will improve driver-based planning and forecasting across all business units.

The company launched the new model amid a live forecasting cycle, replete with a self-service dashboard spanning 130-plus KPIs across every asset and business unit. The new system can dynamically run more than 20 directional sensitivities for key business drivers and assets, saving hundreds of hours in manual effort while delivering enhanced reporting speed and accuracy. The establishment of product-specific data governance rules will enable EnergyCo to better manage future change.