Pyrovio is a management consulting firm that helps clients identify a success strategy that is aligned with their capability and helps them implement that strategy to realize growth and positive organizational change. Pyrovio specializes in energy, healthcare & manufacturing clients. Mark Effimof is a Senior Manager at Pyrovio and the point person for their engagement with Southern Company Gas.

HUNDREDS OF FORMS, NOT ENOUGH TIME.

Mark:  Every year, Southern Company Gas has a limited budget and they fill the cookie jar with demand intake forms, which are requests, and always the cookie jar floweth over. They have more demand than they have an available budget. So they needed a method of collecting this information and then working with their executive sponsors to give them a profile of where the demand was coming from. The technology, planning & business solutions group at Southern Company Gas had the challenge of manually collecting, hundreds of demand intake forms, but they had no way of managing the collection of this data to evaluate & select which projects they should move forward with within their annual capital planning process.

BLIZZARD OF SPREADSHEETS IS NO MORE, IN COMES ALLOVANCE.

Mark: It was a real burden on the technology planning team. So we were able to introduce Allovance, which is a cloud-based solution, to automate their strategic planning process. It helped them get greater alignment in their organizational priorities and objectives and provided them with project evaluation transparency and decision justifications using a structured prioritization decision-making process.  It allowed them to seek the right balance and mix of projects and maximize the value of their portfolio. 

Of particular note is the planning team was no longer dealing with a blizzard of paper and managing multiple spreadsheets, rather, they were out in the field working with their business units, collecting demand intake forms, working with their project requesters, shaping the projects, really providing the value add. Then at the end of the planning cycle, they were able to score, prioritize and select projects in a very streamlined fashion.

WE SPEAK THE LANGUAGE OF DATA & REPORTING.

Mark: Where they were once doing manual analytics and reporting, we were able to integrate the Allovance project portfolio with Power BI. We were also able to develop dashboards that could track the progress through the planning cycle so that they had a pulse every step of the way. More importantly, we were able to go back in their previous years and link that data with the current year so that they were able to see year-over-year trends and analysis by asset categories as well as business groups. This was not available prior to Allovance.

YOUR ENTIRE PROCESS, ON ONE PLATFORM.

Mark: With Allovance, we were able to invite project requesters to review the previous year’s projects as well as add new projects in a very streamlined and comprehensive fashion, whereas in the past they were constantly getting incomplete submissions. With Allovance, there’s only one way to submit it, and it’s the right way. And so we built in edits to assure that the data we were collecting was meeting minimum requirements, and then once we had it, we were able to do complex reporting to meet the specific needs of the client.

With Allovance, they were able to assure they were getting accurate submissions so that they could both approve the projects with the sponsors initially and select the projects that had the highest value. Furthermore, we did it in such a manner that they’re already set up to do the cycle next year for the projects that didn’t get approved. They’re able to roll them over so that they’re already ready to go for next year.  In addition, they were doing a lot of manual reporting, and it was always too late.  We built it into Allovance so that the reports automatically updated daily so that they had a pulse of their capital planning process throughout the cycle.