Enercare: Eliminating Disconnected Silos to Achieve Higher Project and Business Alignment

Enercare Company Overview

Today, Enercare is a leading provider of water heaters, water treatment, furnaces, air conditioners, and other HVAC rental products, plumbing services, protection plans and related services. With operations in Canada and the United States, Enercare serves approximately 1.6 million customers annually. Enercare is also the largest non-utility sub-meter provider, with electricity, water, thermal, and gas metering contracts for condominium and apartment suites in Canada and through its Triacta brand, a premier designer and manufacturer of advanced submeters and sub-metering solutions. Recently Enercare entered into the Connected Home space with their Enercare Smarter Home product offering which is a simple, integrated system that puts home comfort and peace of mind in the palm of your hand, even when you’re not at home.

• Location: Canada
• Industry: Utilities

Project and portfolio managers were spending too much time on administration activities because of disconnected tools.

Michael Fernandes
Senior Program Manager | Agile Transition & Transformation

Initiative Overview

Enercare’s dramatic growth of products and services has been fueled by innovation, but always anchored in best practices with total commitment to delight its customers. Success and growth come with more complexity and the need to improve operational efficiency. Transitioning to a bi-modal delivery model was also a priority in order to rapidly respond to customers’ needs and stay ahead of competition.

In just three years, the number of Enercare employees increased from approximately 140 to over 5,000. Enercare also started to refresh and modernize its systems and processes that help serve its internal and external customers. Further, along with employee growth, introducing new products, services and technologies has increased the number of projects in the organization across multiple portfolios.

Homegrown tools to manage projects and portfolios were all disconnected from each other. As a result, project and portfolio managers were spending too much time on administrative activities. Further, they struggled to keep project financials and resource utilization data up to date. The ability to compete more successfully meant addressing gaps in scheduling, status reporting, financial reporting, and overall collaboration between stakeholders across departments. Doing it right would also mean a single project and portfolio repository that was no longer widely dispersed in silos. Additionally, Enercare needed a solution with:robust capabilities to address a bi-modal environment along with the flexibility to grow in functionality and feature sets to maximize value for a company that is constantly growing.

Objectives

Enercare PPM Objectives

The PMO’s objectives were to:

• Increase the maturity of the PMO and IT to work in a Bi-Modal Environment
• Increase transparency to support investment decisions
• Manage, control and report project financials across portfolios
• Decrease project and portfolio related administration activities
• Increase quality of delivery and deliverables
• Increase collaboration across functional groups
• Increase speed to market and customer satisfaction

Sciforma Solution

Sciforma’s flexibility enabled Senior Program & Agile Manager, Michael Fernandes, to craft a solution tailored for Enercare’s unique requirements. Sciforma’s scalability enabled him to adopt a phased approach, prudently building upon base functionality. The immediate benefit, which spearheaded adoption, was having a single location for storing project knowledge and data. The ultimate benefit of the Sciforma solution is the ability to monitor impact on resources and cost when priorities from project to project change.

Administrative project tasks across multiple roles reduced by 30%.

Michael Fernandes
Senior Program Manager | Agile Transition & Transformation

Enercare’s Takeaways

Ignited Productivity

This phased implementation enabled Enercare to see immediate benefit; administrative project tasks across multiple roles reduced by 30% and moving towards 40%. Phased implementation and training ignited productivity that is sustainable with dedicated support.

Better Time Utilization

Lower costs along with greater adaptability and customization translated into better time utilization. Project and portfolio managers now spend more time on strategies to increase throughput and quality while spending less time consolidating timesheets, collating financials, building status reports, and searching for available resources to execute projects.

Better Business Alignment

All this with the ability to see What-If scenarios as never before possible, and with higher project and business alignment than ever before possible…