Rising capital costs, increased global competition, stringent regulation and compliance requirements are forcing Utility companies to review their current business models and rely heavily on data analytics to stay ahead of competition. Until recently, data has not traditionally been a major concern for utilities. The most data-intensive elements within the utility industry has always be related to customer-related fields like billing. Unlike other sectors such as financial services or telecommunications, the level of complexity of this data not been high.

The process of generating and distributing electricity, gas and water being essential services, the billing mechanism has been simple. The utility companies only collected very rudimentary data relating to the levels of consumption on customer premises. However, Smart grids have changed the way data is captured and used.

By deploying advanced analytics, leading utilities are transforming their demand-side efficiency programs to target customers across portfolios, identify efficiency opportunities, engage customers continuously, implement measures, and monitor savings and ensure persistency. Utility companies across the world are facing a disruptive impact on their fairly stable, mature, and conservative industry. In addition, the volume and complexity of data is growing by the day. To succeed in this increasingly competitive and heavily regulated environment, utility companies must address these challenges in a structured and strategic manner by building high levels of scalable analytical capabilities across the organization.

Using analytics, utilities can leverage vast amounts of transaction data to make strategic decisions regarding service offering, and supply chain management, pricing, customer segmentation, global go-to-market strategies, and micro-targeted advertising etc.

LivesensePro's in-database analytics solutions help utilities and other program administrators overcome long-standing barriers to energy efficiency by providing the following benefits:

• Increased scale: Reaching a much larger proportion of the buildings in a utility's service territory and identifying deeper retrofit and operational savings in that larger population of buildings.Quality Improvement
• Reduced time: Enabling strategic targeting, remote auditing, and portfolio-wide analysis in a fraction of the time it takes to complete on-site assessments.
• Reduced cost: Identifying, measuring, and claiming savings with significantly fewer resources than traditional methods.
• Expanded savings opportunities: Identifying no- or low-cost operational savings, in addition to retrofit measures.
• Improved customer engagement: Lifting program participation barriers and increasing customer satisfaction through targeted outreach and continuous engagement.
• Improved savings monitoring: Enabling ongoing, continuous real-time tracking of efficiency savings to increase regulatory transparency and enhance measure persistence.

By applying analytics, Utility companies benefit by uncovering new customer usage insights, improve regulatory compliance, anticipate and manage energy constraints more effectively and enhance the customer experience.