Assets that outlive the people who specified them.

“Nobody here specified that asset. The person who did retired in 2018.”

Capital-intensive operations accumulate decisions. Each was sensible when made, and the aggregate is rarely revisited — which is where a review across the whole operating system finds what a departmental one cannot.

asset register
planned vs reactive
outage cost
non-technical losses
RAB
capital deliverability
condition-based maintenance

Your words, not ours.

Where it concentrates here

Five places the money tends to go in energy and utilities. Each one is concentrated — a single agreement, a single queue, a single account nobody reviews — which is why sampling walks straight past them.

Maintenance regimes inherited from an original specification and never adjusted for how the asset is actually used.
Unplanned outage cost recorded operationally and never converted into a financial case for the fix.
Non-technical losses — unbilled or unmetered consumption — estimated rather than measured.
Capital programs committed beyond realistic delivery capacity, producing slippage that is reported as underspend.
Commodity procurement and hedging positions set under a strategy nobody has revisited since conditions changed.

Not every energy and utilities is the same business

Regulated networksAllowed revenue set for a period in advance, so an efficiency found in the final year is worth materially less than the same one found in the first.
Generation and independent powerAvailability, heat rate and outage scheduling against contracted despatch, where a maintenance window moved is a revenue decision.
Retail supply and energy servicesHedged cost, bad debt and cost to serve per customer against a tariff fixed before any of the three were known.
Water and wastewaterCapital maintenance, leakage and consent compliance — obligations that do not move when the budget does.
Municipal and co-operative utilitiesA rate case rather than a market, and a governing board that has to be persuaded before a cost can be recovered.
Renewables and distributed assetsOfftake agreements and O&M contracts signed at construction, with availability guarantees and liquidated damages nobody is tracking against actual performance.

Where this data actually lives

Maximo or SAP PM in the larger operators; eMaint, Brightly or Cityworks in the mid-market — with an asset register complete for what was installed and patchy for what was inherited
Esri ArcGIS, authoritative for where the asset is and silent on what it costs to keep
SCADA and a historian — OSIsoft PI, Ignition — rich enough to explain an outage and never joined to the ledger
A customer information and billing system — Oracle CC&B, Gentrack, Harris NorthStar, Itron — where unbilled and estimated consumption accumulates
Meter data management holding reads whose exceptions are re-estimated month after month rather than resolved
Mobile work management that records the job and not the cost of the job

Named because it changes what the intake asks for. An extract from one of these has known gaps, and the review is built around them rather than surprised by them.

Reported in your numbers, not ours

totex against allowance
planned vs reactive maintenance ratio
cost per connection
unbilled and estimated consumption
SAIDI and SAIFI
outage cost per event
capital delivery against plan
non-technical losses
return on the regulated asset base

The obligations that set the deadlines

The price control or rate case submission, and the cost evidence behind every line the regulator can disallow
Regulatory reporting packs reconciled to the statutory accounts once a year, by a team that reports to neither the regulator nor the auditor
Reliability and interruption reporting — SAIDI, SAIFI, customer minutes lost — which feeds an incentive or a penalty rather than a report
Environmental permits, emissions and discharge consents, where the consequence is an enforcement notice rather than a fee
Asset integrity and safety case records — pipeline, dam, pressure system — inspected on a statutory cycle that does not pause for a vacancy
Critical infrastructure and operational technology security obligations, with the evidence held by a team that does not report to finance

What the review would ask you for

7 requests written for energy and utilities and asked of nobody else — 2 of them core. They sit alongside the operating spine every business has — finance, revenue, receivables, payables, contracts, people, IT, operations, risk, commercial and governance — which is 107 further requests.

Asset register and condition Core With remaining life and replacement liability.
Operating and maintenance cost by asset class Core Planned versus reactive.
Outages and unplanned downtime Duration, cause and cost.
Commodity procurement and hedging Positions, contracts and exposure.
Regulatory reporting and price control obligations
Technical and non-technical losses Including unbilled consumption.
Capital program Committed, in flight, and deliverability.

Anything you do not have can be skipped in one click, with a reason. The intake is completed in the client portal, which saves each answer as it is given and can be returned to as often as you like.

When this stops being interesting and becomes urgent

A price control or rate case in preparation, where every cost must be evidenced
An outage or an incident whose full cost nobody assembled afterwards
A capital program that slipped, reported as underspend rather than as deferred liability
A commodity or interest rate move that repriced the hedge book or the debt
An asset class failing earlier than the register said it would
An acquisition or a transfer of ownership, where the asset base and the deferred maintenance behind it are read closely

Who this involves

Signs it: Chief executive or CFO; the asset director on anything touching the capital program
Resists it: Operations and engineering leads, whose maintenance regimes become open to challenge
Has been asking for it: Regulatory finance, who have to defend the numbers in a submission

Who commissions it

Asset directors, COOs and finance leads. Phase one is priced before phase two is discussed, the report is yours either way, and we take no vendor commissions or referral fees on anything we recommend.

See the proposal and the price Talk it through first

The proposal sets out the sequence week by week, what we would need from you, and what it costs for your number of operating units. No call required to see the number.

Closest to this

Operations that share more with energy and utilities than the sector label suggests.