We are in a phase of global utility market development in which many companies have declared that they are refocusing on the operating basics of the business. But in fact, financial success will be determined much more by regulatory success than by operational excellence. Strong evidence suggests that the entire world is moving toward tougher, tighter and more ubiquitous service level standards for utilities.  Management must step back to define what regulatory success looks like for their company, and what competencies will be needed to make that happen. The answer usually has significant process and organizational implications beyond the Regulatory arena.

What We Offer

Regulatory Strategy

Regulators everywhere are promulgating standards for reliability and imposing various customer service metrics such as new connections cycle time (days from customer request till meter spinning), response to customer requests, billing accuracy, appointments kept, etc.  Our work in Regulatory Strategy often includes one or more of the following issues:

	Performance Based Regulation (PBR) – UMS Group has the capability and experience to design and analyze every facet of PBR agreements.  The key is to define a compelling value case for customers within a risk profile that is acceptable to the regulator, and then to negotiate reasonable terms for delivery.
	Customer Service Guarantees – The design of these programs must target balanced value for the utility, the consumer and the regulator.   This requires that the utility have a complete understanding of the cost and/or savings impact from driving service levels higher or lower. Building a service quality index and conducting detailed customer service benchmarking are critical first steps.
	Process Redesign – Successful utilities are beginning to view the activities for managing their dealings with regulators as a core business process.  They ensure alignment between their business and regulatory strategies, they define and communicate clear 'rules of engagement' for employees, and they establish common sources of data and information on each issue to safeguard against inconsistent messages.  The growing number of rate cases and mergers/acquisitions will drive this to become increasingly more important.

Support in Regulatory Proceedings

UMS Group is uniquely positioned to support clients in rate cases, price determinations, and other regulatory proceedings, with expert witness testimony or behind-the-scenes counsel on a wide range of issues:

	Regulatory directions, and emerging standards and trends.
	Benchmarking and comparative performance analysis across multiple jurisdictions or within key areas of concern to the regulator.
	Certifying best practices in operating effectiveness and efficiency to highlight management initiative and innovation.
	Regulatory risk identification and mitigation, with associated rate case / price determination strategy support.
	Rapid identification of your strongest performance arguments, with hard analytic supporting evidence.

UMS Group has deep expertise in the use of public and proprietary data to build an affirmative case of performance excellence, and in quickly identifying where a client may have some exposure to criticisms of weak performance.  In those areas, we have strong capabilities to identify which factors beyond the client’s control impacted these areas, specifically what impact they had, and how these impacts must be considered in developing legitimate performance comparisons.  We can also identify the highest leverage improvement strategies that can be adopted to demonstrate that management has taken a proactive approach to managing any existing performance gaps.

Litigation Support

The business and regulatory environment is growing ever more complex.  This is especially true for utilities, who must navigate rapidly changing rules and requirements associated with industry reform.  Internal and external counsel must provide their clients with the most effective capabilities and experienced team to deal with this complexity and rapid change.   UMS Group brings to its assignments a depth of industry insight that few firms can match.  Our consultants typically have many years of experience and bring to every project access to our extensive proprietary databases of cost, staffing, performance, and best practices.  Our work in Litigation support ranges from data acquisition, to the identification and allocation of costs, risk assessments, statistical analysis and process modeling, outcome modeling, and valuation of client and utility cost or revenue impacts.

Litigation is almost never as much about interpretation of the law as it is about interpretation of the facts.  There are often numerous ways to view the facts, define the issues, and measure performance of the parties.  We leverage our understanding of the utility industry to reveal alternative perspectives and to help de-mystify the underlying business drivers for our client’s litigation team.

Our clients turn to us for support in a wide range of claims and disputes, involving:

	Reliability
	Public Safety
	Environmental Standards
	Contracts
	Asset Acquisitions & Divestitures
	Outsourcing

We are particularly strong in managing large volumes of data, reducing complexity, identifying trends and fact patterns hidden within the data, and framing affirmative arguments to counter claims.

Click to request Regulatory and Transaction Support Global Case Studies

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