With TM1’s strong automation and self-service features, our administrators can focus their time on model development instead of just spending all their time operating and maintaining the system. TM1 is an incredibly powerful and flexible system that allows our business models to grow and advance as business requirements change and evolve.

With eCapital’s expertise, we are able to harness the TM1 technology to solve our complex modeling needs, while knowing we are getting the most out of the technology and our investment.

Levi Kom Senior Business Systems Analyst Basin Electric Power Cooperative

CASE STUDY/ENERGY

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“We now have the flexibility and agility to handle complex forecast model runs associated with commodity price movements and their resulting impacts on each of our business entities, as well as a consolidated roll up. Andy Buntrock Mgr. Strategic Planning & Member Support Basin Electric Power Cooperative

With a history stretching back to 1961, Basin Electric Power Cooperative (BEPC) is a not-for-profit electrical power gener-ation and transmission cooperative that provides power to a consortium of rural electric cooperatives. The cooperative generates and provides wholesale electric power to 141 cooperative systems that provide power to three million customers across 540,000 square miles in nine states.

The company has taken a broad approach with its diverse energy portfolio including coal, gas, oil, nuclear, wind, and renewable energy.

Managing the complex needs of an in-creasingly diverse energy portfolio and a continuously growing customer base keeps the Basin Electric team on the lookout for new opportunities to improve their opera-tions and build for the future.

Envisioning the next ChapterIn mid-2015, Basin Electric’s senior

financial leadership began looking for an enhanced solutions to better help them with the next steps on their data and analytics journey.

Starting in 2008, Basin Electric had been utilizing Cognos Enterprise Planning to help manage their multiple financial and capital planning models. At deployment, the Cognos Enterprise Planning system had offered Basin Electric huge advance-ments in its budgeting process. However, this system was slowly becoming unstable and looking forward there would be numerous compatibility challenges.

In December of 2015, Basin Electric made the decision to upgrade and migrate all their Cognos Planning models to Cognos TM1.

Basin Electric’s Planning Applications included: • Operational Expenditures • Capital Expenditures (CapEx) • Benefits/Payroll • Allocations • Existing Debt • Depreciation • Financial Reporting Model

The Project Powers UpThe total project was anticipated to take twelve months with the initial focus on the development of the new system and a tran-sition period where the new system would run in parallel with the Cognos Planning solution.

The development team focused their efforts to build the system to be as efficient and user driven as possible.

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“Coming from a background of Excel-based models for financial planning and forecasting, I was a bit hesitant on whether TM1 would provide that same flexibility. However, I was amazed at the flexibility TM1 allows in running scenarios. I have also found the powerful ad-hoc reporting capabilities of TM1 assists to work more efficiently.

Katrina Wald Senior Financial Analyst Basin Electric Power Cooperative

“Being able to prototype a new application in half a day instead of half a month is a paradigm shift for my users. Joe Thomas Senior Business Systems Analyst Basin Electric Power Cooperative

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CUSTOMER ENABLEMENTSOLUTION FOCUSED INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE

With the Cognos Planning environment, we knew we would not be able to keep up with the frequently changing infrastructure (operating systems, browsers, databases). We also found that our planning environment was not very stable and tech support knowledge on Cognos Planning was becoming diffi-cult to find. TM1 is reliable and as technology requirements change, TM1 is able to keep pace with the changes.

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” Sandy BieberSenior Business Intelligence Architect

Basin Electric Power Cooperative

ECAPITALADVISORS.COM

During development, there was an em-phasis on putting the power of the system into users’ hands. Secondly, it was to help relieve administration effort so staff could re-invest saved time into the development of the system.

Powered by the ResultsOnce the TM1 system rolled live, improve-ments were seen immediately and Basin Electric’s end users adopted and endorsed the new system quickly. The TM1 models

Examples include: • CapEx Reporting went from being a system administrator driven process that took 45 minutes to run, to being a user driven process taking 3 seconds to run. • Ad hoc database refreshes for forecast and budgeting went from 30 minute manual runs done by the administrator to two scheduled daily runs handled automatically. • Adding new accounts and cost centers took the system administrator up to 4 hours is now an automated process that takes less than 10 minutes. • Multiple scenarios: The Basin Electric finance and forecasting team was amazed on how quickly they could run multiple scenarios directly in the system and analyze the differences between scenarios.

Administration Improvements: With TM1, the overall required effort to administer the system has been reduced because the models are more automated. Major changes to the system are easier to implements thanks to the flexibility of TM1. What was a nearly impossible effort has become manageable. Developers are creating new enhancements rather than running jobs.

Greater accuracy: Basin Electric’s staff used this project as an opportunity to fur-ther understand all the logic of the models as well as verify that the previous logic was still valid and meeting the goals of the cooperative. This review of all model logic allowed developers to improve and augment some of the model logic to be more accurate in its calculations.

Follow-on PhasesNow that the original project is wrapped up, Basin Electric is looking into many additional projects to further expand the

TM1 system and to continue to stream-line the financial planning process. The Financial Services staff is developing and testing a generation model and a marketing model. The Financial Services department is also using TM1 in con-junction with Cognos Business Intel-ligence to automate the generation of financial hedge reporting.

Curious about how eCapital Advisors can help you? eCapital Advisors is one of the nation’s largest performance management and business analytics firms. Since 2001, eCapital has enabled clients including Post Cereals, Bunzl Distribution, Anheuser-Busch, Northwestern University and hundreds of others to make better business decisions through their high-level software solutions and services.

Contact us today to discuss how we can help you meet your goals.

were built to integrate with each other in real time. This has improved data accura-cy and eliminated the need for system administrators to run jobs to synchronize data between different components of the model. Improved automation has resulted in saving hundreds of administrative hours a year.

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