Case Study

Chelan County Public Utility District

Powering a public utility through search.

Challenge
What Accenture Did
People And Culture
Value Delivered
Related Capabilities

Challenge

Generating electricity from its three dams, Chelan County Public Utility (PUD) delivers utilities to customers across the Pacific Northwest as well as over 51,000 retail customers in its service area.

In addition to utility delivery, the PUD also provides water, sewer and wholesale telecommunications services. Therefore, strong information management is key to discharging these responsibilities effectively, with both business and maintenance teams needing fast access to the PUD’s large array of operations, maintenance, and technical documentation.

However, with multiple different systems to search and a lack of universal metadata to refine search queries, Chelan County’s employees were struggling to find what they needed quickly and efficiently.

Key organizational insights and past learnings risked being missed with teams often having to ‘reinvent the wheel’ on each new project.

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What Accenture did

Chelan County PUD engaged Accenture to help turn the dial on new internal search capabilities for its on-premises SharePoint system.

The goal? To give employees a single easy-to-use "OneSearch" portal for quickly finding content from across the organization, including its separate IBM FileNet and Maximo Asset Management repositories.

Using Aspire, Accenture’s advanced content processing technology, we:

Automatically classified, enhanced, and normalized the data
Identified duplication
Enabled users to refine searches by context (function, location, document type and more)

Putting employee needs at the center, we also ensured general queries could be performed by any user from day one while retaining advanced query functionality for more specific document searches.

People and culture

Accenture has significantly improved the day-to-day working life of the PUD’s workforce.

Internal search is faster, easier and better. Technicians and business users can instantly access relevant information to help them do their jobs. Instead of having to conduct multiple queries on different systems (and getting just a handful of results in return), they can now see hundreds of relevant items with a single search.

That’s saving them tens of hours every month, which they can devote to providing an ever-better service to the customers they serve.

Accenture has significantly improved the day-to-day working life of the PUD’s workforce.

Value delivered

550K

Labor savings are estimated at $550,000 per year (assuming 1,000 searches per month, saving 30 minutes per search, at $80 per hour).

10S

Tens of hours are saved every month since can users can now see hundreds of relevant items with a single search.

Powered by user-friendly and flexible search capabilities, Chelan County PUD’s employees are now finding more relevant information much faster.

Simple searches on the internal system now return highly relevant results, even when users don’t know precisely which documents they’re looking for.

With the old system, some searches would take multiple people several hours each week to dig out the necessary information. That’s now a thing of the past, with the new system saving time and money for the PUD’s teams every day.

What’s more, because content from multiple sources is now indexed, the PUD can join up work processes much more efficiently, such as immediately notifying engineers and planners when maintenance teams log performance and condition information against specific assets.

Ultimately, Chelan County is now providing a better service to its customer-owners. And it’s doing so more efficiently by embedding modern enterprise search for exceptional customer service.