Top 4 Considerations for Finding the Right Technology Partner for Utilities Companies

Utilities companies must improve their flexibility and resilience by enabling new technologies and solutions in an era defined by digital transformation. By embracing a new technology partner, organizations can drive new business models, move beyond traditional and conservative processes and operations, and enhance their workforce capabilities.

Utilities companies that embrace digital strategies and make bold commitments to digital transformation will drive industry-wide innovation. Exploring new technology partnerships helps businesses achieve their digital transformation goals. Choosing the right technology partner is key to a successful transformation and helps organizations:

  • Overcome industry-specific challenges and those unique to your individual business
  • Set up new operations and processes to run more efficiently
  • Easily integrate technologies with new and existing systems
  • Leverage a repeatable and lasting solution

Technology manages the complexities resulting from digital innovation so that businesses can continue to create solutions that positively impact people’s lives. Utilities companies must transition to digital technologies in order to be competitive, offer enhanced customer experiences, and survive and thrive in an age driven by technology.

1. What to Look for in the Right Technology Partner

Technology partnerships help organizations redefine and enable new business strategies. They seamlessly connect business and IT environments, so businesses can generate value through technology adoption and enable their workforce to focus on innovation. A technology partner should understand the inherent challenges of the utilities industry and how their solution can seamlessly fit into a company’s digital transformation strategy.

2. Understanding Unique Industry Challenges

Great technology partners understand unique utilities industry challenges, like environmental issues, economic competitiveness, and security. The right technology partner will help a business expand their IT capabilities, handling important technology updates and maintenance, so that existing IT and technology teams can focus on more crucial work and innovative projects, which can also help with employee retention.

Many energy companies have been around a long time, with legacy systems and processes that have been SOP for years. As they modernize their infrastructure and further enable data and analytics-based decision making, the need could arise to embrace new cloud capabilities like the ones offered by companies like Fortinet and firms alike. Transitioning to modern technology should be seamless and frictionless, and technology partners should offer Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions so that companies can:

  • Easily implement new technologies that are continuously updated over time
  • Facilitate a quick migration process compared to upgrading hardware
  • Scale architectures up or down as needed

Organizations like Epoch Solutions Group offer EpochField as a service that integrates with multiple back office IT systems, such as GIS and Enterprise Asset Management (EAM). This enables them to deliver new services and help companies overcome the limitations of on-premise deployments.

3. The Need for Configurability and Customization

Technology partners must be able to configure their technology to integrate with an organization’s existing systems, processes, and workflows. New solutions should be set up seamlessly and shouldn’t require a talent overhaul to operate. These solutions should be repeatable and serve as a foundation for future growth and opportunity.

Technology partners should also help business and IT teams expand how they use technology in their everyday workflows. It’s about providing a solution that helps organizations reduce the complexities of work via enhanced workflow processes.

Organizations are preparing for the future by shifting to new digital business models so they can unlock significant value. This is not simply an engineering-specific transformation. Rather it requires a holistic change to the business and operating model across culture, supply chains, products, and more. Configurable solutions from technology partners take into consideration the unique needs of every organization so that teams across the business and IT can benefit and operate in their individual capacities.

4. System Integration

A lack of system integration can lead to short-term challenges and long-term operational inefficiencies. Creating a sustainable business foundation that will support future technology additions and integrations should be enabled by a technology partnership.

Digital transformation for organizations is a continuous pursuit driven by the impacts of artificial intelligence, data availability, and analytics. As organizations build their technology architecture to enable data-centric decisions, the insights need to be accessible across teams and business areas to maximize the value and effectiveness of these strategies.

System integration helps people use their data quickly and efficiently, solving data management challenges that typically impede growth and opportunity. Organizations will have clarity and visibility into their operations and data that helps them to drive new products, services, and solutions.

Choose Epoch Solutions Group as a Technology Partner

Epoch Solutions Group understands the critical capabilities necessary to make digital transformation successful. They include:

  • Overcoming industry-specific challenges and those unique to your individual business
  • Setting up new operations and processes to run more efficiently
  • Integrating technologies with new and existing systems
  • Leveraging a repeatable and lasting solution

Contact a consultant to learn how Epoch Solutions Group can help your organization achieve its digital transformation goals now and in the future. Click here to schedule a demo today.