Kristy Neckowicz, President Utilities and other asset-intensive organizations depend on sound capital planning and forecasting to manage financial performance while they invest in infrastructure. However, dependency on manual spreadsheets and other legacy systems makes it difficult to quickly discern the financial health of projects and programs, and accurately reforecast the impacts of project variances. Here, InVizion draws on its deep domain expertise in project, program, and portfolio management to provide an innovative solution to asset-intensive organizations. The firm integrates project data from disconnected enterprise systems for planning, tracking, reporting and what-if analysis, while greatly reducing waste and probability of error. InVizion empowers clients by presenting an accurate and holistic picture of their programs—including hidden financial impacts of proposed changes.
“Our flexible, economical, and quick to implement solution helps utilities plan their capital budget and manage existing programs,” says Byron Druss, Vice President, InVizion. As a prelude to the solution deployment, the firm aggregates available financial and project data from a multitude of systems such as accounting/ERP, project management, asset management, and other enterprise systems. It interviews clients and applies their terminology, business rules, and workflows for capital planning and budgeting, then automates the manual steps that involve spreadsheets. The easy-to-integrate solution saves the clients from overhauling their existing suite of systems, and quickly renders results. With InVizion in place, the clients can create a program or portfolio model with unlimited budgeting and forecasting scenarios. Planners and managers can analyze and compare multiple approaches to increase financial performance. They can also track and control critical success factors such as interim deadlines for project execution and constraints for budgetary allocation.
“InVizion has the unique ability to perform ‘what-if’ analysis at a summary level, while factoring in detailed inter-and intra-project relationships,” adds Kristy Neckowicz, President, InVizion. Clients can analyze allocations against funding and resource limits as well as regulatory milestones, to mitigate risks while optimizing budgets. They can set thresholds for funding and deadlines, and be alerted when projects exceed those thresholds. The solution makes it easy to create lookup tables and rule-based formulas which are otherwise error-prone in manual spreadsheets.
InVizion has the unique ability to perform ‘whatif’ analysis at a summary level, while factoring in detailed inter- and intra-project relationships
Through InVizion charts and reports, clients can accurately communicate up-to-date program status and compare portfolio scenarios. Subsequently, InVizion delivers value and impact at a fraction of the cost of contemporary enterprise systems. As the firm applies clients’ terminologies and automates business rules based on their institutional knowledge, adoption by all stakeholders and return on investment can be rapidly achieved.
Byron Druss, Vice PresidentInVizion has improved budgeting and forecasting for public agencies and private utilities. For instance, a large, private water utility has replaced their cumbersome and manual monthly processes to aggregate project financials from their disconnected enterprise solutions. In InVizion, they found a unified solution that leverages information they already have in their systems of record, and greatly simplifies long-range budget planning as well as monthly variance management for making data-driven decisions. After deploying InVizion, the client shaved 2 months off their annual budget planning cycle, and eliminated wasted effort for manual spreadsheet manipulations previously required for reporting and analysis. Implementing InVizion allowed them to focus their efforts on an increasingly demanding engineering portfolio.
While driving client successes, InVizion continues to enhance its solutions on top of its patent-pending features. Clients will be able to plan their budget scenarios as they consider multi-dimensional impacts on an instant “scenario scorecard” to help them mitigate any associated risks. InVizion looks forward to transforming program budgeting and management in utilities, energy, transportation, and other asset intense industries.
