Episode 41: From “spreadsheet hell” to better decisions at Eversource

Guest: Fran Berger

As the largest utility in New England, Eversource has all the planning and reporting needs one would expect of a Fortune 500 company – and maybe more! Operating in a highly regulated and unionized industry while also a public company, not to mention occasional acquisitions and mergers, leads to some unique challenges.

According to Fran Berger who manages performance and financial systems at Eversource, the decision to invest in IBM’s Planning Analytics technology platform (then called TM1) thirteen years ago was prescient and far-sighted (though they may not have realized it at the time!) The first corporate budgeting application built on this platform involved only a small handful of finance users, but once the capabilities of the technology were established, adoption grew. And grew.

Today hundreds of users in finance and operations interact with the system every day, benefiting from secure self-service access to the data they need to do their jobs, via the web or Excel spreadsheets (which integrate directly with Planning Analytics). Since the data is validated and controlled centrally in the Planning Analytics platform, everyone knows they are working with the same, trustworthy single-version-of-the-truth. This in turn frees up time for high-value analysis work, which in turn drives better decision making.

It’s a great story, filled with tons of ideas, great advice and lessons learned.