Why Arizona Public Service Runs its Continuous Improvement Program on Shibumi
With Shibumi, the Utility Has Transformed its Financial Forecasting and Procurement Work Processes
Company Name:
APS
Industry:
Healthcare
Location:
Arizona
Company Size:
$4.3B in annual revenue
Use Cases:
- Cost Transformation
Business Impact:
- 7.5X MORE Continuous Improvement opportunities in the pipeline than expected
- Accelerated reporting FROM DAYS TO HOURS
Customer Overview
With 2.7 million customers and 6,000 employees, Arizona Public Service (APS) is the state’s largest, longest-running electricity provider.
Goal
Save Employees Time and Drive Operational Efficiency
Starting in 2019, Arizona Public Service (APS) wanted to become more lean-principled, drive cost efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction starting. They were coming off a great year in 2018 in which they had been ranked in the top quartile among utilities for safety and reliability, and they were keen to begin their Continuous Improvement efforts from a position of strength. “We wanted to create an environment where we could shift on a dime when we needed to, which turned out to be perfect timing with COVID,” said Tiffany Dorris, who leads the Customer Affordability team. Overall, the goal was to save time for employees, enabling them to focus on more strategic work, and help different business areas operate more efficiently.
APS found Shibumi to be fully configurable for their unique requirements, which included redesigning their financial forecast and building a new work management solution for Procurement.
Their original dashboard for financial forecasting was too vague to be highly actionable. Now, benefits are split out between hard value (i.e., cost savings), soft value (i.e, efficiency gains and time savings) and direct savings (i.e., benefits to customers that don’t directly impact APS’s budget). Shibumi enables financial forecast views at both the corporate and facility level, and users across the organization have reported that they’re natural and intuitive to use.
Meanwhile, Procurement wanted a work management solution with reporting ability to replace onerous manual processes that involved multiple spreadsheets and pivot tables. Using Shibumi, Dorris’s team built dashboards that highlighted which business units, facilities and projects were realizing benefits as a result of vendor negotiations, making it easier to measure impact. They also set up reports and presentations with live data, which resulted in huge time savings, since team members no longer have to hunt around for the most up-to-date numbers to slot in.
Since Shibumi is a single source of truth for program performance and financial data, it also provides peace of mind that important documents won’t be lost when employees transfer, retire or leave the company.
“People who are new to a project can get caught up very quickly by referring to PPTs, reports and financial information from the Attachment page,” Dorris said. “It also provides more context and insight into what the work group was thinking when the opportunity opened and why they made certain financial decisions. We’re thrilled to be able to do this in Shibumi.”
Solution
Configure Shibumi to Address APS’s Unique Requirements
APS implemented Shibumi to track the status, scope and impact of opportunities across 13 different business units that had historically operated in silos. It’s helped keep a variety of stakeholders actively engaged in improvement processes—and has been a valuable complement to corporate processes like strategic business and budget planning.
“I can categorically say Shibumi is the easiest platform I’ve ever worked with in the 20 years I’ve been at APS.”
TIFFANY DORRIS,
CUSTOMER AFFORDABILITY TEAM
APS found Shibumi to be fully configurable for their unique requirements, which included redesigning their financial forecast and building a new work management solution for Procurement.
Their original dashboard for financial forecasting was too vague to be highly actionable. Now, benefits are split out between hard value (i.e., cost savings), soft value (i.e, efficiency gains and time savings) and direct savings (i.e., benefits to customers that don’t directly impact APS’s budget). Shibumi enables financial forecast views at both the corporate and facility level, and users across the organization have reported that they’re natural and intuitive to use.
Meanwhile, Procurement wanted a work management solution with reporting ability to replace onerous manual processes that involved multiple spreadsheets and pivot tables. Using Shibumi, Dorris’s team built dashboards that highlighted which business units, facilities and projects were realizing benefits as a result of vendor negotiations, making it easier to measure impact. They also set up reports and presentations with live data, which resulted in huge time savings, since team members no longer have to hunt around for the most up-to-date numbers to slot in.
Since Shibumi is a single source of truth for program performance and financial data, it also provides peace of mind that important documents won’t be lost when employees transfer, retire or leave the company.
“People who are new to a project can get caught up very quickly by referring to PPTs, reports and financial information from the Attachment page,” Dorris said. “It also provides more context and insight into what the work group was thinking when the opportunity opened and why they made certain financial decisions. We’re thrilled to be able to do this in Shibumi.”
Results
Save Employees Time and Drive Operational Efficiency
As an alternative to spreadsheets and pivot tables, Shibumi delivers huge time savings. It’s also quick and intuitive to learn. Dorris noted that her team typically sets up an hour-long call to train new users but typically don’t need the full hour.
“I can categorically say Shibumi is the easiest platform I’ve ever worked with in the 20 years I’ve been at APS,” Dorris said.
Shibumi has transformed reporting within APS by enabling a highly customizable enterprise-level view of opportunities and their impact.
“I can categorically say Shibumi is the easiest platform I’ve ever worked with in the 20 years I’ve been at APS.”
TIFFANY DORRIS,
CUSTOMER AFFORDABILITY TEAM
“This was mind-blowing for our executives,” Dorris said. “If they have questions about an opportunity, they can just click on it for more details. Before Shibumi, they’d be getting two-week-old data. Now they’re coming to us and saying, ‘Can you get this information for me in Shibumi?’ Usually the answer is yes, and I can get it for you in an hour.”
Shibumi has also enhanced APS’s scoping capabilities.
“When we started with Continuous Improvement, we thought we’d have 40 opportunities per year, and we just passed 300—all of which are active in Shibumi,” Dorris said. “It makes it so easy to keep track and organize work.”
