Improved Processes and Immediate Cost Savings for a Texas City
Overview
Optimizing Bill Payment Process and Rate Tariffs for Maximum Savings
The City of Frisco, TX is a large, growing suburb located north of Dallas. Learn how they improved the bill payment process for their 1,500+ electric and gas accounts while identifying annual savings of over $60k/yr.
Problem
The City has over 1,500 electric and gas accounts serving streetlights, pump stations, facilities, irrigation stations, etc. These accounts are spread over multiple providers (CoServ, Oncor, and Atmos) and required extensive manual review each month to manage the reconciliation and payment.
In addition, electric rates had not been optimized based on each individual meter’s usage profile. This provided potential opportunity to reduce cost with no capital expense.
Holistic Utility Solutions was engaged for a 2-part consulting engagement that involved 1) improving the bill pay process and 2) optimizing the rate tariffs.
Solution
The process began by reviewing the existing data files from each utility provider. Since each was in a different format, the key data from each file was abstracted to put it into a consistent database format.
Since the main focus of rate tariff optimization was Time of Use rates from CoServ, 15-minute interval data was requested from the utility to allow detailed analysis of usage by time period.
Holistic Utility Solutions completed workshops with City staff to understand existing workflow and data files. A new process and supporting data file templates was developed. In addition to automating the transformation of data needed to complete monthly bill payment, dashboards were created to visualize data.
Interval data for over 100 accounts was modeled with a custom data tool to determine which rate tariff was the lowest cost for each account.
Result
The end result was an improved process that reduced staff workload for review and payment of utility bills from 2-3 days per month to only 3-4 hours.
The rate optimization process identified an estimated $60k/yr in cost savings simply be changing the accounts to the optimal tariff, leading to immediate savings for the City and taxpayers.