Utility Performance Improvement through Business Process Transformation

Organizational performance and business processes The City of Atlanta Department of Watershed Management (DWM or Department) developed its strategic plan (SP2022) and identified eight strategic priority areas. One of the strategic priorities, Smart Utility focuses on leveraging innovation, information technology, operational technology, and process technology to optimize the use and management of financial and human capital investments to improve financial, operational, and customer service performance and resiliency. The Department delivers its mission by performing its core functions through its six Offices and its support functions through its seven administrative divisions. Smart utility program's goal is to implement initiatives that improve these Departmental functions and empower its workforce with better data when they need it so that they can make better decisions in a timely manner and meet targeted performance metrics. The core and support functions of the offices and administrative divisions are implemented through manageable collection of tasks or activities with a specific objective. These collection and sequence of events, tasks, and decisions performed by employees and stakeholders to achieve a measurable and/or quantifiable objective is called a business process. Each task within a business process employs and interacts with organizational assets including technologies, equipment, and systems. Tasks also require data by collecting, generating, and integrating from different data sources. Tasks are either performed within or outside an IT/OT system automatically or manually. In addition, there are policies and protocols that governance each task. Figure 1 shows the components of a business process and how they are influenced and impacted by People, Policies, Data, and Technologies. The fundamental driver behind Smart Utility initiatives is the need for improving organizational performance and efficiency. Performance of those functions is delivered through the effective and efficient implementation of business processes under those functions. Hence, improving the organizational performance requires improving the performance of business processes. Improving business processes might require improving one or more of the business process components — People, Policy, Data, and Technology. Recognizing the importance of process-driven transformation, the Department instituted the Business Process Improvement initiative with the goal of systematically managing the assessment and improvement of business processes. Following are the specific objectives of Business Process Improvement initiative: - Review existing approach to business process knowledge management and develop an improved approach to be standardized for the Department - Develop business process hierarchy and best practices to manage information and knowledge about business processes. - Assess business processes within a specific process area and identify transformational changes — people, process, policy, and technology - Develop organizational change management strategies to enable and support the implementation of transformational changes Assessing and Improving Business Processes Achieving process improvements beings with identification of current gaps and deficiencies that limit the process from effectively and efficiently performing its intended purpose and meet its desired objective. Figure below shows the different areas where business processes might suffer from gaps and deficiencies. Assessment of business processes is possible only when information about individual task exists adequately. Documentation of information about business processes typically includes written as well as diagrammatic representation of the process tasks aka models that help visualize process details. These models are useful to share knowledge of the business processes with people within and outside teams primarily involved in the implementation of the business process. Once business processes are documented, then it makes it easier for assessment and identification of opportunities for improvements, which might include addressing redundant tasks, resource inefficiencies, and technology gaps. This entire process of documenting, analyzing, and making improvements to business processes is called the Business Process Management (BPM). Figure 2 shows the possible improvements under People, Policy, Data and Technology. DWM's Business Process Framework The Department's approach to managing these business processes is no longer siloed but an integrated one to better manage the relationships, data sharing, IT/OT system requirements, and other interdependencies of business process across all Offices and Administrative Divisions. The first step in this department-wide business process management is creating a framework that allows for the hierarchical organization of core and support functions and hundreds of business processes under those functions. This section will describe the business process framework developed and used to manage business process modeling, assessment, and improvements. The Department reviewed process frameworks such as those developed by American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC)and Water Research Foundation (WRF) to guide the development of the Department's process hierarchy. These frameworks offer a defined structure of process groups, sub-groups, and a list of business processes. However, these frameworks could not be used as-is because the nomenclature and the organization of the business processes did not represent how the Departmental functions and people are organized. The Department used these frameworks to guide the development of the structure, organization, and hierarchy of the DWM's Business Process Framework (Figure 3). Implementation of BPM to improve Customer Metering Processes The DWM then applied the framework and the principles of BPM to document, assess, and identify gaps and areas of improvement in the Metering Life Cycle Processes. Customer metering is one of the complex process groups as it touches almost all the DWM Offices and outside DWM into the City's Department of Finance. There were hundreds of people engaged in this complex group of processes. This effort was performed in tandem with the review of improvements to the Customer Information System. Summary DWM's Business Process Framework is one of the first ever initiatives within North America that approaches process improvement and transformation as a focused strategy to improve organizational performance and efficiency. Utilization of a standard BPM software to manage business processes helped improve the management of knowledge and understanding of business processes.