CLIENT: CITY OF CLEVELAND WATER DEPARTMENT
Country: USA, Ohio
Sector: Utility/Infrastructure
Service: Financial Management/Management Consulting
Project: Project Management Support Services for Cleveland Water Department AMR Project
Project Description: IBS in conjunction with Black & Veatch provided project management support to the Department of Public Utilities – Cleveland Water Division on the Clear Reads project. Our role on the project included:
- Contract management - assisted with evaluation and selection of vendors for various aspects of the project, oversaw project budget, reviewed and authorized all payment requests for the project, ensured project deadlines are met and reported project status to senior management of client.
- Policy development, which included several new policies such as: Access policy – majority of residential meters were located inside households. Initially meter installers were having a difficult time getting into homes to install the new meters until we proposed crafted and supported approval of an access policy.
Other Policies developed include: an Opt Out Policy- if a client didn’t want meter in their home and Claims Policy-where homes had water damage from incorrectly installed meters.
QA/QC and oversight activities included: Review of daily read exceptions and follow-up with both meter installation vendor and meter reading department to ensure timely resolution, Tracked all Client project complaints and assigned to appropriate staff for resolution, Undertook field and site visits to ensure installation protocols were being followed. Helped refine SOPs in metering, billing and collections department to fully leverage the AMR technology.
Other activities included: development of a financial model that incorporated key assumptions for revenues, recurring expenditures, capital budgets and financing requirements. Other services included developing demand and growth forecasts, Client demographic and use patterns, operating cost components and cost drivers, revenue and rate requirements, alternate rate modeling, and a review of operations to determine opportunity areas for business improvement and operational efficiency/improvement. We also performed data analytics and forensic audit on usage and billing data from the manual meter readings to identify anomalies and opportunity for revenue enhancements.