Company Overview
Golden State Water Company is a public utility in California. Their goal is to reliably deliver high quality water to their customers in the most cost effective manner possible. Golden State Water Company carefully balances pumping water from aquifers, versus importing water, in order to provide a cost benefit to their customers.
GSWC’s focuses on not only meeting their customers’ needs, but also exceeding their expectations. Through sustained financial strength, operational flexibility, and a skilled workforce, GSWC prides itself on providing unparalleled water service.
Challenges
In previous years, GSWC utilized an antiquated system, one that relied on multiple tools to run various applications imperative to their business. In addition, their budgeting software had limited, cumbersome functionality, was not user friendly and took a long time to refresh data and make changes. It had also reached end-of-life.
GSWC wanted to be able to consolidate their numerous applications, such as budgeting, reporting, and forecasting onto one user-friendly platform. They also needed to upgrade their budgeting capabilities to a more advanced, comprehensive system. In addition, they needed to do this in a short amount of time with limited resources.
Finally, their end users wanted ownership of the system so that they could make changes without relying on IT assistance. They wanted to be able to manage and expedite budgeting and reporting processes in a timely, productive fashion.
“IBM Cognos Express gave us an enterprise-class solution at a price point that perfectly fit us as a mid-sized company. And with the technical expertise and excellent support of Aviana, we were able to implement this budgeting-forecasting and world-class solution extremely quickly and easily.”
— Mark Davidson —Applications Manager —Golden State Water Company.
Approach
- Leverage Aviana’s experience and expertise to implement a solution tailored to GSWC’s needs in a timely fashion.
- Purchase IBM’s leading mid-market Cognos Express platform
- Implement a flexible, integrated, and user-friendly solution perfectly suited for future application consolidation and company growth.
Impact
- With the IBM Cognos Express Planning Module for Budgeting and Forecasting, and Aviana’s consulting, provide end users with an intuitive, flexible, and comprehensive budgeting solution
- Empower end users with the ability to generate, edit, and analyze budget processes quickly and easily
- Soon after implementation, reduced IT labor in the budgeting process by 50%and end user labor by up to 40% due to the new solution’s ease-of-use saving Golden State an estimated $35K per budget cycle
- Increase employee and IT productivity exponentially, allowing them to use the time saved troubleshooting budget processes on other projects
- Build a platform that will consolidate budgeting, business intelligence, and reporting tools onto one uniform platform, significantly saving on previous IT software costs
- With Aviana’s assistance, implement solution on time and under budget.