Urban Energy Reduces Project Management Time By 3 Days Per Week

Background

Urban Energy provides sales and operational support for companies in the solar construction sector. By offering relevant project management and enterprise tools, Urban Energy helps its partners improve cash flow visibility and reach sustainable financial stability.

Robust financial and operational intelligence is necessary for companies in highly competitive markets like solar to build and maintain their advantage. But when analysis and forecasting are slow and resource intensive, actionable insights take too long and accuracy degrades. To reduce risks across multiple products and partners, the company sought ways to improve data speed and reliability, boosting forecast confidence.

Key Challenges

Urban Energy faced inefficiencies due to data silos, manual processes, and lack of a centralized financial and project management tool.

This resulted in high project management costs, team time demands, potential for delays, costly errors, and reduced confidence in cash flow and forecasts.

High Project Management Costs and Time Demands

Urban Energy encountered significant challenges with high project management costs and the substantial time required to manage projects. These issues were largely due to data silos and a reliance on manual processes. The lack of integration between project management and financial tools resulted in potential delays and costly errors, leading to inefficiencies that strained resources and reduced the overall effectiveness of project management efforts.

Low Confidence in Forecast Accuracy

Another critical challenge was the low confidence in forecast accuracy, which stemmed from the time-consuming and error-prone nature of manual data compilation. The inability to quickly access and compare up-to-date project timelines, costs, and financial data made it difficult for leadership to trust forecasts. These concerns can make it difficult to trust models and respond proactively to potential issues they highlight.

Inadequate Data Visibility and Integration

Poor data visibility and integration across multiple sources made it difficult to create a comprehensive view of project terms and financial performance throughout the project lifecycle.

This lack of a “single source of truth” complicated efforts to track critical project drivers in real time, such as employee time allocations, supplier payments, and invoicing, further impeding the efficiency and accuracy of project management.

It also creates time and team demands that make it more difficult to look for new forecasts and analyses that could improve other operations.

Solution Implementation

Acterys implemented its xP&A platform for Urban Energy to bridge disparate sources of data and create a single source of truth to improve project management and cash flow forecasts. The solution operates across the entire lifecycle of each project and allows the company to integrate financial tools as well, creating a detailed understanding of P&L at a step or for a total project.

Urban Energy centralized its data aggregation and management from financial systems, HR tools, and project-specific elements. This implementation enabled near real-time updates, support for common tools like Power BI and Excel, and the ability to make direct updates using a unique “write back” functionality.

Acterys Results

Significant Reduction in Project Management Time

Leveraging the Acterys xP&A Suite, Urban Energy projects it will reduce weekly project management time and cost by three days per week for every project team.

The efficiency gains came from core Acterys functionality that eliminates the need to manually compile data from multiple siloed sources. By removing this significant drain on time and other resources, Urban Energy was able to create a more robust 360-degree view of project terms and needs across the entire lifecycle.

Improved Confidence in Forecasts

Urban Energy says the Acterys platform enables decision-makers to be more confident in project forecasts, placing them more in line with top performers in the solar construction sector.

“Before implementing the Acterys xP&A Suite we had to do so many manual iterations to get up-to-date information that the confidence level in our forecast was low. We also didn’t have the capacity to compare, at a glance, the P&L of the project with the budgets. The intrinsic value is seeing the wall way before we hit it. With Acterys we see the bar progressing on a daily basis.”

— Laetitia Mignardot, COO, Urban Energy

Uncovered an Unexpected Cash Flow Application

More sophisticated and accurate data usage has the potential to unlock greater improvements and new functions as companies improve analytical efficiency. Urban Energy realized the benefit of the xP&A Suite by identifying a use case for cash flow forecasting for its projects and clients.

Acterys helped the Urban Energy team achieve near-real-time updates and tracking of:

• Direct and indirect employee time allocations.
• Supplier payments for projects.
• Project-specific invoicing.
• Customer remittances.

The company also recognized the potential for additional dashboards, such as an Insurance Policy Management Dashboard and an “Interconnection” Dashboard, both of which are critical for managing the complexities of the energy grid industry.

Conclusion

Urban Energy significantly reduced project management time demands and analysis delays by implementing the Acterys xP&A Suite. The tools’ ability to knock down data silos, manage a wide range of data sources, automate tasks, and create a single source of truth improved operations and forecast accuracy. Urban Energy was even able to uncover a new forecasting potential that will help it make better-informed decisions and gain a competitive edge in a tight sector.

Case Study Written By: Bryan DeGraw, Finance Market Intelligence Analyst, The Hackett Group