Muscatine Power and Water Maximizes Its Use of Planful To Save Months of Time While Gaining Deeper Financial Insights

Muscatine Power and Water (MPW) is a municipal utility providing water, electric, and communications services to Muscatine, Iowa, and surrounding areas. It was established in 1900 and is now the full-service utility provider to hundreds of local businesses and thousands of residents. In late 2019, with new finance leadership on board, it wanted to maximize its use of Planful to expand and accelerate access to critical financial performance management insights. Working with Bakerfield Solutions, MPW doubled-down on its Planful investment and cut months from budgeting, reporting, and workforce planning efforts.

As a new general manager took the reins at MPW, the finance team saw an opportunity to gain more value from its existing Planful implementation. Utilities are typically conservative organizations and resistant to change, but more financial details and faster financial processes were critical to the organization’s ongoing performance.

“As a utility, our focus is cash and our only customers are rate-payers,” explained Jill Blieu, Manager of Accounting & Finance at MPW. “So, we must be very, very careful with how we plan and how detailed our budgets are because there is the potential for a lot of scrutiny. With me just coming on board and more detailed requests from above, it was a good time to optimize our financial processes, and Planful was a big part of that.”

MPW faced several challenges standing between its current state and the expectations of the organization:

• Twice-annual budgeting was a slow, cumbersome process that required nearly 50 meetings. “With 30 or so managers and 2-hour meetings, and just considering the labor costs, the value just wasn’t there,” Jill recalled.
• Utilities typically run 10-year projections, but MPW kept those in spreadsheets while using Planful for short-term projections only. “We were running two separate planning processes, which wasn’t ideal,” Jill added.
• Reporting processes were rigid and left MPW unable to respond to ad hoc requests quickly.
• Workforce planning was a tedious process that required managers to forecast overtime for each employee manually, yet didn’t allow for eventual comparison to actuals. “Workforce planning always felt too much like a black box for us, and the huge spreadsheet we used was just fraught with risk,” said Jill.
• The new general manager wanted quick access to detailed financial information to understand financial performance and drill down to the transaction and expense levels on demand.

“Change is scary, and there can be a this-is-how-we’ve-always-done-it reaction, so we had to balance that against the insights we needed to gain,” said Jill. “We wanted Bakerfield to help us make some really substantial improvements in how we used Planful.”

Bakerfield worked with MPW to reimagine the organization’s financial performance management efforts. As the organization moved more processes on to Planful and out of manual spreadsheets, benefits like speed, accuracy, and fast access to financial information would soon follow.”

Planful lets us piece together information from forecasts, makes data loads really simple, and allows us to have quick turnaround times on requests,” explained Jill. “Weekly reports and structured planning templates used to be a collection of spreadsheets. Now, it’s been wonderful to jump into a Planful template, change something, and it’s updated in real-time.”

MPW uses Planful Spotlight to keep key reports in flexible yet always up-to-date spreadsheets so business owners can work in Excel’s familiar interface. And, Planful Workforce Planning gives managers the ability to work faster, make bulk updates, and integrate accurate headcount numbers across financial processes. MPW is also beginning to roll out Planful’s Budget Manager Experience so budget managers can input details directly in Planful.

Since optimizing and expanding its use of Planful, MPW has seen huge time savings and greater access to detailed financial information.

For budgeting, MPW moved from a slow process where “things never really added up to 100%,” according to Jill, to transparent, accurate budgeting that gives stakeholders near-instant access to granular details.

“Planful lets us go into a report during a meeting and drill down to answer questions; that’s been huge for us,” Jill said. “We can run the variance analysis, see the line-item details, and answer questions on-demand throughout the month. Planful has also allowed us to cut our typical budgeting process of 30-45 meetings down to about 20-25 because we can handle questions through chat instead of tying up such high-value people. We can even feed Planful data and Actuals data directly into Microsoft Power BI for deeper analysis, which has been a big time-saver for us.”

MPW has also seen great results across its workforce planning efforts.

“Our labor budget used to take me months to do, and it now takes a day or so,” said Jill. “[Planful Workforce Planning] has become such a game-changer that it’s now one of my favorite parts of Planful.”

Financial reporting became less of an effort for MPW, too.

“Planful lets us piece together Actuals data for quick turnaround times on weekly reporting,” Jill added. “I’ve gotten into the reporting functions and fine-tuning what we can deliver, and having the drill-through capability is so important for everybody in the utility.”

Combined, MPW is using more of Planful and getting more time to focus on the numbers, elevate the financial IQ of the entire organization, and position its finance team as strategic advisors.

“Planful gives us the time and access to key details so we can spend more time understanding the organization,” Jill concluded. “We’ve even assigned a finance partner for every budget manager and set up weekly meetings to help them work on their budgets. Everyone’s been responding really well because they now have a partner and an ear in Finance to get advice from.”