mThink

  The day’s big news of Google’s precipitous drop in share price concealed the fact that Google’s average CPC is down 15% from a year ago. This decline in one of Google’s key performance metrics has potentially far more long-term consequences than a silly printer’s mistake. Yesterday’s premature release of Google’s disappointing quarterly earnings caused [...]

In the past, the utility industry could consider itself exempt from market drivers like those listed above. However, today’s utilities are immersed in a sea of change. Customers demand reliable power in unlimited supply, generated in environmentally friendly ways without increased cost. All the while regulators are telling consumers to “change the way they are using energy or be ready to pay more,” and the Department of Energy is calling for utilities to make significant reductions in usage by 2020 [1].

The smart grid is progressing well on several fronts. Groups such as the Grid Wise Alliance, events such as Grid Week, and national policy citations such as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in the U.S., for example, have all brought more positive attention to this opportunity. The boom in distributed renewable energy and its demands for a bidirectional grid are driving the need forward, as are sentiments for improving consumer control and awareness, giving customers the ability to engage in real-time energy conservation.

If you define a machine as a series of interconnected parts serving a unified purpose, the electric power grid is arguably the world’s largest machine. The next-generation version of the electric power grid – called the intelligent utility network (IUN), the smart grid or the intelligent grid, depending on your nationality or information source – provides utilities with enhanced transparency into grid operations.

The great American philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, chances are you will end up somewhere else.” Yet many utilities possess only a limited understanding of their call center operations, which can prevent them from reaching the ultimate goal: improving performance and customer satisfaction, and reducing costs.

Utilities face three key barriers in seeking to improve their call center operations:

Should utilities replace current consumption meters with “smart metering” systems that provide more information to both utilities and customers? Increasingly, the answer is yes. Today, utilities and customers are beginning to see the advantages of metering systems that provide:

Mapping customer delivery requirements against the realities of supply chain capability is often an endless source of friction. Demand forecasts are constantly changing, customer needs are ever more specific, and service requirements are rising in every industry. Growing overseas sourcing makes seasonal fluctuations tougher and places greater stress on intra- and inter-organizational communications. Supply chain integration has long promised to smooth the wrinkles between sales and operations planning.

ASCET: What has changed in Crate and Barrel’s inventory management process since 4R and Crate and Barrel began working together? Ed Rennemann (ER): We had not changed our store replenishing process since 1984. Historically, we have given our store managers the visibility to see what was available in the DC along with rates of sale [...]

We may never see a television series about supply chains. However, nearly everyone is familiar with Survivor, where the best players develop fast-changing strategies to outdo competitors and persevere through shifting conditions. “Outwit, outplay, outlast” is the show’s motto. So perhaps Survivor can be viewed as a good model – a template, in fact – [...]