Corporate & Shared Services

Utilities’ corporate and shared services are consistently challenged to reduce costs, improve performance, increase transparency, streamline and simplify processes, and raise the value of the services provided. Many organizations are looking closely at corporate and shared services (A&G) functions to provide earnings improvements, by providing reduced cost and greater value to the line units.

Oliver Wyman has assisted many companies to address business challenges in the following areas:

Supply chain management (sourcing, inventory, stores)
Finance
Human resources
Forecasting, strategy, and risk management
Information services / information technology
Legal
Communications
Environmental affairs

Recent engagement examples

Support services redesign: Oliver Wyman worked with a utility client to redesign and consolidate decentralized HR, Communications, IT, Fleet, Real Estate, Facilities, and Environmental functions. The resulting organization achieved operating cost savings of 13 percent.

Supply chain strategy: Oliver Wyman assisted a large utility to develop sourcing and inventory strategies for 10 material and service categories, yielding 8 percent in operating cost savings.

Shared services efficiency improvements: Oliver Wyman worked with an electric and gas utility to find process improvements, cost savings, and asset efficiencies among it administrative and services functions. Working with a client team, we developed a set of recommendations and significant cost savings for each of the functions reviewed (Human Resources, Information Technology, Supply Chain, Fleet, Facilities, Property).