Public Utility Finds Advanced Analytics Effortless
The Fayetteville Public Works Commission (Fayetteville PWC), which serves more than 120,000 water, wastewater, and electric utility customers in North Carolina including water service to Fort Bragg, selected Sisense as their BI Solution to perform the data analysis required to understand operational efficiencies and represent program benefits offered to their customers and stakeholders.
To illustrate electricity demand and the results of various programs meant to avoid spikes in demand, Fayetteville PWC utilizes Sisense to report coincident peak demands in the utility system. Fayetteville PWC was also able to better assemble meter data and integrate their business data in reporting dashboards to monitor purchase orders, payroll trends, supplier spend, Capital Expenditures and other operational KPI’s.
“Our biggest win so far is that we developed a strategic measures dashboard displaying those metrics for the whole company to monitor each divisions’ key metrics, to help with planning, and to create awareness,” said Laurie Shrauger, the utility’s Data and Analytics Manager. “We also created some operational level tools with some important measures for the teams.”
Fayetteville PWC needed a system that could be operated by business staff without requiring specialists or complex procedures. They had been using other BI analytics and data storage systems, Shrauger said, but found the maintenance and analytics capabilities too cumbersome, and “its analytics weren’t nearly as advanced as what Sisense provided us.”
We needed to adopt something simpler so that we could be more agile with our development. We wanted to have more flexibility. Ease of use and speed were our top objectives and that is precisely what Sisense gave us.
Added Fayetteville PWC corporate analyst Giles Dickenson: “The ability to learn the Sisense Fusion interface quickly was really helpful.”
Delivering data and critical insights about performance and cost into the hands of both stakeholders and employees was the foremost requirement of the project team. For both of those groups, Dickenson said he had one goal, namely that “it had to be easy for them to understand. That’s where Sisense excels.”
For internal talent, the goal was more operational. “They need to be able to do it in short periods of time. And they also could not be heavily reliant on IT technical expertise,” Dickenson said. “With Sisense Fusion, we are now able to see things far better. We have been able to collect the data and to effortlessly represent the benefits of our programs and what it means to the business.”
Sisense Fusion also required minimal training, even for content designers, a key benefit of its intuitive GUI design. “It’s really easy to do a demo. We just needed to do a quick how-to and they are off and running. We didn’t have to worry about them getting lost in a sea of hierarchies and filters. Sisense made it ultra-easy for the user with no hassle. We can deliver more because we have Sisense.”
Fayetteville PWC is now up and running with modern analytics ready for their internal users and stakeholders and is happy with the partnership between Fayetteville PWC and Sisense.
“We quickly saw a lot of positive changes in the applications and functionality. Sisense did almost all of the technical work. We needed very minimal support from our IT team,” Dickenson said. “We’re enjoying continuous improvement and that makes us like Sisense even more.”