A major integrated electric utility embarked on a strategic planning exercise to take a fresh look at operational benchmark metrics and industry peers. The leadership team retained ScottMadden as an independent advisor to conduct the analysis to ensure it would be fair, objective, and defensible to its board of directors and regulators.
With the changing environment in higher education and healthcare, this top-20 private research university was facing a situation common to many higher education institutions—ensuring operations are optimized to support the university’s mission and long-term strategic plan. As such, leaders undertook a full review of its finance function to ensure the appropriate structure, processes, and people were in place to safeguard and to optimally position the resources of the university, with a goal to better enable its mission.
With the advent of lower natural gas prices in North America, the nuclear generation industry in the United States has been under significant and continuing cost pressure. Across the industry, every effort is being made to identify and capture opportunities for sustainable cost reduction. While cost reduction is nothing new to the nuclear industry, the competitive pressure has intensified in recent years.
The healthcare industry is in flux with an aging population, rising costs, healthcare reform and policy uncertainties, emerging technologies, changing workforce models, and a shortage of healthcare professionals.
ScottMadden has worked for more than 30 years with an American energy and regional gas company that serves nine million electric and gas utility customers. The company’s brands are known for energy innovation, excellent customer service, high reliability, and retail electric prices that are below the national average. Due to a strong history of successful partnerships, the client asked ScottMadden to assess and make recommendations to improve the talent retention and recruitment of its Instrumentation and Controls (I&C) professionals.
The nation’s largest for-profit hospital system and a leading provider of healthcare services recently sought ScottMadden’s help to refine their HR operating model. With nearly 200,000 employees spread across the United States, the client needed a dependable recruiting administration team in their HR service center to ensure consistent and efficient recruiting processes. When the newly established recruiting administration function was not operating as intended, the client engaged ScottMadden to identify the underlying issues, as well as develop and implement viable solutions.
This best-selling food manufacturing brand began as a small family-owned butcher shop, but has since grown to a household name, with hundreds of employees and distribution in more than 40 countries. ScottMadden developed an end-to-end procure-to-pay (P2P) model that could accommodate the expected growth of this organization.
The University of Saskatchewan, a large Canadian research university with more than 20,000 students, was experiencing low levels of satisfaction across its portfolio of administrative services. Research submissions were declining due to increased administrative burdens placed on faculty. At the same time, overall university administrative support costs continued to grow. The University’s leadership desired to transform its administrative functions to provide best-in-class service aligned with the University’s teaching, research, and community service mission, vision, and goals.
ScottMadden partnered with a large energy provider to align its security program with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF). The decision to align with the CSF was driven by a desire to develop a best-in-class security program and meet industry security expectations. The security program scope included the following:
ScottMadden partnered with a multifunction shared service organization (SSO) in the entertainment industry to assess its security practices. The SSO had a typical design, where confidential data (e.g., salary, social security number, personal address) moved through many systems and was subjected to multiple touch points and delivery options. A security control framework, based on ISO 27001, had been implemented by the enterprise; however, policies and related security controls were incomplete. As with many SSOs, data security often came secondary to gains in operational efficiency and customer service, which were more visible to the business.
ScottMadden and RTI International assisted Bruce Power in streamlining and automating its environmental monitoring programs (radiological, conventional, and groundwater). The result was a significant reduction in the amount of time and effort it takes staff to collect routine environmental data from the field, analyze the data in the laboratory, and report on adverse trends.
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