Spend Optimization Suite
Turn Your Strategy Into Reality
Utilities are confronted by the complex process of managing risk and planning mitigating investments subject to financial, resource, and regulatory constraints. They need solutions to assist with this process.
Spend Optimization Suite (SOS) delivers the help they need. It supports the Strategic Asset Management Planning process to deliver an optimized portfolio of capital and O&M spending plans.
It enables asset managers, planners, and other stakeholders to work together to analyze and fine tune investments while managing risk and budget.
SOS in a nutshell: Acquaint yourself with SOS with this short (< 2 minute) introductory video.
Find out how SOS can solve commonly seen investment planning problems with this (6 minute) video.
What You Can Achieve With SOS
Use Strategy to Drive Decisions
- Link Strategy to risk management and investment planning decisions
- Set priorities and adjust for sensitivity analyses and business changes
Build A Prioritized Risk Register & Long Term Asset Plans
- Create multi-year investment plans optimized across complex constraints – cost, resource, reliability, region, and more
- Compare scenario results side by side, drastically reducing analysis and discussion time
- Balance spend across regions/districts to focus on poor performers
- Reduce the common bias towards small projects
- Assess investments across fundamental viewpoints – value (benefit/risk mitigation) and risk of deferral
- Better understand and reduce “must do” projects
Ensure Optimized Investment Plans with What-if Scenarios
- Create multi-year investment plans optimized across complex constraints – cost, resource, reliability, region, and more
- Compare scenario results side by side, drastically reducing analysis and discussion time
- Balance spend across regions/districts to focus on poor performers
- Reduce the common bias toward small projects
- Assess investments across fundamental viewpoints – value (benefit/risk mitigation) and risk of deferral
- Better understand and reduce “must do” projects
Improve Effectiveness with Transparent Communications
- Use automated outputs to communicate project selection decisions, portfolio benefits, and risk exposure to planners, executives, and other stakeholders
- Demonstrate the rigorous, transparent process to regulators
Enable Best Practices
- Align your process with ISO55000 standards – UMS Group is both an IAM endorsed assessor and corporate member
- View risk holistically, in terms of business threats as well as asset health issues
- Link Problems and Opportunities to Needs to Investments to show a full-circle view of overall company risk being mitigated by optimized investment portfolios
Work with Experience to Ensure Success
- Benefit from UMS Group’s 40+ SOS implementations at utilities worldwide. This is more than twice the number of clients of its major competitors combined
- Leverage UMS Group for both its world-class SOS software solution and expert management consulting team
- Draw on UMS Group’s rich industry knowledge and change management experience to support you through every step
Business Benefits
Draw on our experience from implementations at >40 companies worldwide. Some of our customers have achieved:
%
Increase in spend approved by the regulator
%
Reduction in mandatory spend designations
%
Reduction in non-essential capital spending
To meet compliance obligations and risk profile objectives, based on SOS outputs
Freeing up discretionary spending to achieve additional value and mitigate additional risk
With a value case to reinvest 18% in reliability and operational improvements
SOS: Designed to Meet Your Needs
Modular & Scalable
- Modules can be purchased and implemented separately, allowing you to focus initially on your highest priority areas and grow the application with your business and data availability
- Connect to your AERO application for even more robust predictive analytics around economic replacement of critical assets
Consistent Corporate-Wide Platform
- The SOS provides a platform for effective investment decision-making across the entire business. This is accomplished through a robust process for quantifying the benefits of each proposed project and consistency across the organization in how individual projects will be evaluated
- We have helped companies use SOS to optimize a common budget across business units to better meet strategic goals. Although challenging, we have a proven process to reach upwards of ‘90% objectivity’ in the scoring, establishing comfort in the results across business unit stakeholders
Robust Optimization Engine
- True linear programming optimization algorithms provide better results than simple prioritization or heuristics (though these are often touted as optimization). This is especially applicable in the case of multiple constraints (i.e. budget, scarce resource types) and more complex scenarios
Configurable & Multilingual
- Create multi-year investment plans optimized across complex constraints – cost, resource, reliability, region, and more
- Compare scenario results side by side, drastically reducing analysis and discussion time
- Balance spend across regions/districts to focus on poor performers
- Reduce the common bias toward small projects
- Assess investments across fundamental viewpoints – value (benefit/risk mitigation) and risk of deferral
- Better understand and reduce “must do” projects
In-house Implementation Expertise Worldwide
- UMS Group is first and foremost a consulting company, where every implementation team member has experience in successful change management
- UMS Group consultants provide top-notch service and ongoing support, with personalized client managers assigned to every client. Talk to someone who knows your business rather than a generic helpdesk
- UMS Group has experts around the world, from North America to regional European offices to Asia Pacific
Affordable
- Reap the benefits of a world-class, tried and true methodology and user-friendly application without the time and cost of a software-house enterprise IT application
- Our solution can be tailored to meet your needs – in terms of data availability, resource availability (during implementation), and customization
- Foundational to this process is the idea of maximizing value for the money spent. We’re confident the SOS provides the most “bang for your buck” of any solution in the market
Integrated
- Standardized flat-file upload functionality to batch import new or update existing data is included out of the box. The application creates a template which is immediately responsive to configuration changes. No need for IT, customized programming, or “black box” integration rules
- If you’d like something more direct, UMS Group technical experts can work with you to accommodate customized import/export requirements with existing systems using various common integration approaches
International Standard Support (ISO55000)
- The SOS is aligned with and supports achievement of international standards such as PAS55 and ISO55000
- UMS Group is both an endorsed IAM assessor and corporate member, and we bring this expertise to every implementation
Ensure Your ESG Goals are Built into Your Investment Decisions
The myriad internal and external pressures and constraints utilities face today make the investment planning process challenging as it is, much less considering newly emerging targets and priorities such as ESG goals. UMS Group’s Spend Optimization Suite (SOS) can align your strategic framework to these goals as well as justify progress towards the achievement of these goals by using data for ESG measures as minimum constraints in optimizing your portfolio.
For example, some of our clients use the following quantitative and qualitative ESG measures for investment scoring within SOS:
ENVIRONMENTAL
- Carbon Footprint
- Efficiency Savings (MWh)
- Renewable Energy Generated
- Environmental Stewardship
- Waste Minimization
- New Solar Installations
- Fleet Miles per Gallon
- Potable Water Saved
- Biodiversity and Heritage
SOCIAL
- Meeting Customer Needs (focusing on Environmental and Social Justice)
- Employee Engagement, Diversity, and Inclusion
- Employee and Public Safety
- Work Environment
GOVERNANCE
- Strategic Initiative Alignment
- Stakeholder Relationships/Partnerships
- ROIC
Not only does our SOS methodology allow you to evaluate your investments across such ESG criteria, but it also provides transparency around impacts to your goals and consequences of deferred investments, all while continuing to support your other existing strategic objectives, commitments, and constraints.
ESG and Beyond: Plan For your Current and Future Strategies with SOS Multi-View Optimization
Do you need to plan near term budgets using your current strategy and objectives, but simultaneously consider future goals and priorities in one or more alternate strategies? Are you struggling with how to evaluate and plan using different, and sometimes conflicting, strategic frameworks?
SOS can support a Business Value Framework configured into multiple different views – for example, a “Standard/Current View”, a “Sustainability View”, and an “ESG View”. This ability:
Read More
- Supports different organization and weighting of strategic objectives as well as the underlying success measures for investment evaluation (or even differing objectives/success measures between the two views)
- Facilitates multi-dimensional and consistent Investment Value and Risk of Deferral scoring to pre-established measurement criteria, regardless of the chosen view being analyzed
- Captures full value to be provided by each investment across perspectives
- Provides insight into the extent to which investment portfolios achieve the desired outcomes across the views
- Illuminates trade-offs between interest groups, i.e. board, customers, regulators, employees, community, etc., with potentially competing priorities
STANDARD VIEW
Strategic Objectives
- Financial Performance
- Customer Satisfaction
- Reliability
- Operations & Infrastructure
- Environmental Impact
“TRIPLE P” SUSTAINABILITY VIEW
Strategic Objectives
- People
- Planet
- Performance
ESG VIEW
Strategic Objectives
- Environmental
- Social
- Governance
Ensure that your bases are covered for the short term while also laying the foundation for future success.
Industries
Risk Management & Investment Planning Resources
Spend Optimization Suite (SOS) Overview Flyer
Spend Optimization Suite (SOS) Brochure
Talk to Our Experts Today
SOS Case Studies
Discover how we help clients achieve success.
Insights in Your Inbox
Receive perspectives on the industries and issues that matter.
