New Planning Parameters, New External Considerations, New Tools
In your firm’s long term strategic planning group, a decision is made to build a new 100 Mw gas-fired generating facility costing $75,000,000. Two months after it is up and running, deregulation occurs and marketing determines that 650,000 customers are not part of your profitable target markets and decides to sell that customer group. (see Boston Edison, WSJ, 12/2/98).
Have you run scenarios showing the impact of proposed marketing strategies on enterprise and asset strategic planning decisions? How do you test the impact of marketing strategies on EBIT, stock price, debt to equity ratios and stranded costs? A tool that will allow you to combine the impacts of marketing and pricing decisions with utility service data, generation needs, and corporate financial models is essential in an environment where you can radically alter your customer mix and generation needs.
The Asset Manager is an integrative tool for assessing the enterprise-wide impact of marketing decisions. It links the results of specific marketing strategies (including customer switching behavior) with the related utility service data (revenue, kWh, billing demands, contribution to system peak demand, etc), generation needs, and corporate financial models. The result is a clear picture for system, strategic, and financial planners of the impact of marketing decisions on the enterprise.
