My journey to building an App I knew Utilities needed — Part 2 (The Beginning)

You can go all around the world
Trying to find something to do with your life, baby
When you only gotta do one thing well
You only gotta do one thing well to make it in this world, babe

To paraphrase Janis Joplin — or at least put a Utilities spin on her timeless wisdom, a Utility company really only has two jobs to make it in this world: providing safe, reliable service and sending accurate bills on time. But as you probably gathered from Part 1, things get messy fast in the world of Utilities.

Now, I didn’t start this journey building a Meter to Cash app. Nope. My first brush with Celonis and process mining happened back in 2021, in a totally different part of the Utility business: Work Management, specifically the New Construction process for New Connections.

At its core, “new connection” just means a customer asking a Utility to hook up their service. Some of you may have experienced it in some way — getting electricity at a new home, or a water service at the farm, or requesting gas. Let me let you in on a little secret — this is one of the most complicated processes at a Utility.

The reality is that getting a new connection involves a whole tangled mess of planning, procurement, design, logistics, and construction and not to forget, the changing life circumstances of the customer. It’s like a complicated dance between what the customer needs and what the Utility can actually deliver.

The Situation
So back in 2021, the Utility I was working with was drowning in customer complaints. Delays, unexpected costs, and broken promises had caught the attention of regulators, and leadership needed answers fast. Traditional BI reports painted a gloomy picture — average connection times hovering well above 100 days. Not exactly a good look for the utility, but it left out key parts of the story.

It wasn’t as simple as saying, “Hey, do better, Utility!” Sure, the Utility had some internal bottlenecks and inefficiencies, but in plenty of cases, the delays were caused by the customer — taking time for signatures, payments, or getting electrical inspections completed.

To really understand what was happening, we dug into the process using Celonis. That’s when things started to click. We zoomed in, event by event, literally pausing the metaphorical timer whenever the Utility was waiting on the customer. Suddenly, instead of just throwing everything into a vague “delay” bucket, we had clarity. We could clearly see when the Utility was hustling versus when they were just waiting around.

The new service request flowed from initial customer request through design, customer approvals, construction scheduling, and finally providing the new service — each stage with its own potential delays. The key take away from this was that Customer actions could layer up to 40 days on the total duration of the process. This was a significant finding and quite suddenly a very different telling of the story.

And this level of detail allowed us to create very detailed reporting on true performance across all service regions

Without this detailed insight, the Utility was stuck using broad-stroke BI reports that didn’t reveal why delays were happening.

At the end of the day, every Utility wants to do right by its customers. They genuinely want to solve issues, speed up service, and keep things running smoothly. But without detailed, real-time data, they’re essentially operating without a map.

Utility Leaders: Strengthen Your Rate Cases with Process Mining

My message to Utility leaders - your current reporting methods might not be doing you any favors. Traditional BI solutions lack the ability to investigate your processes, making it hard to differentiate between what’s genuinely within your control and what’s beyond it. Process mining, especially with Celonis, lets you clearly pinpoint internal inefficiencies, show regulators your proactive improvements, and distinguish these from external factors that are out of your control.

Stay tuned — next time, we’ll explore the development of the Meter to Cash app and how it’s being prepared to address even greater challenges ahead.

At The Good Quarter Company, we help Utilities focus on their existential needs — providing reliable service, maintaining regulatory compliance and accurate billing — through actionable insights leveraging AI and Process Analytics on the world’s pre-eminent Process Intelligence platform — Celonis.

We’re just at the beginning of this journey, and it’s inspiring to see this vision taking shape. I’m grateful to be part of this process, working alongside Utility leaders to drive meaningful improvements that will shape the future of the industry.