Jason Mumm, global director of financial, commercial and risk services:
If you are a Fortune 500 company – or indeed any publicly traded firm – and want to know how your enterprise is performing relative to your industry, it’s a simple matter of dialing up Yahoo! Finance and taking some deep dives into the huge amount of data and information there. It doesn’t cost anything, and it is easily accessible any time. Sales growth is stagnating relative to Company X? Operating margins going down the tank? It’s all there in black and white to digest and to use in formulating your next strategic initiatives.
If you happen to be a U.S. municipal utility executive, however, you’re going to be hard pressed to find anything useful in terms of an industry-wide data warehouse to make any kind of similar comparisons. This leaves utility managers at a true disadvantage as to how they must often venture forth with their strategies without the benefit of knowing what good looks like, nor how far ahead or behind they are from the mark.
What’s needed is a centralized, quality-controlled database of hundreds of utilities from across the United States. From such a database, managers could easily create league tables by size, region, type of services, and more, creating a customized benchmark of peers from which to assess individual performance. That database has never existed…until now. Our management consultants recently created this database by compiling the single largest, most comprehensive, highest quality, repository of financial data for U.S. municipal utilities. After a painstaking process of gathering comprehensive annual financial reports from around the country, we now have over 100 data points for 500 municipal utilities, including both water and wastewater financials.
Figure 1: From UMC Presentation Scheduled for Feb. 17th
The Benchmark Database will be featured later this month at the Utility Management Conference in Austin, TX where the nation’s utility leaders will meet for one week to address the pressing business issues in the industry. MWH will be there as Silver Sponsors presenting this and several other industry leading innovations.
Figure 2: From UMC Presentation Scheduled for Feb. 17th
Figure 3: Dot Chart Showing U.S. Utilities Included in our Database Currently
