Con Edison powers finance with Oracle Cloud EPM
America’s fourth-largest investor-owned utility eliminates customizations and accelerates financial planning processes with Oracle Cloud EPM Planning.
“With Oracle’s Cloud EPM Planning, we now use automated processes, and have reduced our reliance on spreadsheets, to enable our finance team to spend more time on strategic and operational analysis.”
Focus on technology
Con Edison is an energy company charged with powering The City That Never Sleeps. The company is responsible for operating New York City’s electric power system, which serves 3.4 million customers. Con Edison’s key priorities are safety, operational excellence, customer experience, and increasingly, technology—both in terms of investing in green energy as well as the systems that run Con Edison’s business. This growing focus on technology is what helped drive Con Edison to modernize its financial systems and processes.
The finance team’s planning and budgeting system was constrained by heavily customized on-premise applications, including Oracle Hyperion. Too much time was spent on manual processes and spreadsheets for gathering and analyzing data. Because there was no standardization, it was difficult for different teams to collaborate and compare data easily. This led to an end-to-end annual budgeting process that took eight months or more. It became clear to Con Edison that the time and excess resources needed for its financial planning process were holding the company back.
Starting fresh
Once implemented, the finance team found Oracle Cloud EPM not only improved internal planning processes but also paved the way for continued process improvement within Con Edison. The company started fresh by adopting standardized processes embedded in Oracle Cloud EPM, allowing the business to build efficiency and effectiveness. With Oracle Cloud’s ease of use, the finance team was successful in simplifying the planning process and created the ability to compare budget, forecast, and actuals in a single data model on a monthly basis. The prebuilt processes in Oracle Cloud EPM helped to significantly reduce an eight-month budgeting cycle and also helped Con Edison adopt quarterly forecasts in the tool and setting the stage for rolling forecasts. This also allowed the company to reduce time spent on detailed budgets by 40%, enabling the finance division to spend more time on larger organizational goals. Most significantly, because everything was in the cloud, Con Edison was able to execute on this project and go live in the middle of the pandemic.
The finance team now enjoys a strengthened FP&A function and has freed up time for strategic initiatives, such as running scenario modeling and propelling Con Edison toward continued future growth.