Statistical Performance Measurement (Benchmarking)
PSE's Benchmarking practice area can help you identify cost savings opportunities, better communicate the strength of your organization to interested parties, improve system reliability, track progress, and provide goals and better incentives both internally and to external business partners! We use the most accurate methods available to measure and track performance, which means you'll have actionable intelligence you can trust!
Applications
- Generation and transmission cost performance evaluation
- Power plant cost and availability performance evaluation
- Wholly-owned and operated by your utility
- Jointly owned and operated by another utility - Performance Audit
- Reliability performance evaluation
- Fuel cost performance evaluation
- Distribution system cost and reliability performance evaluation
- Performance Based Regulation (PBR) and incentive regulation of power plants
- Productivity trend analysis of utility or power plant
Benchmarking enables a utility or regulator to compare utility performance relative to a given sample. Ways that benchmarking can be used are:
- Determine whether current operating strategy is producing results or is in need of modification.
- Pinpoint operational areas where potential improvements show the most promise.
- Set challenging yet achievable goals.
- Identify industry best practices.
- Set employee bonuses tied to specific utility performance targets.
- Assess utility performance relative to sample.
- Set allowed rate escalation in multi-year rate plans.
- Evaluate terms of outsourcing contracts.
Advanced Approaches — Accurate Assessments
PSE employs the most advanced approaches in benchmarking to provide decision makers with an accurate assessment of performance. Modeling techniques are used to adjust for the specific operating circumstances of each sampled utility, providing for a true “apples to apples” comparison. These adjustments allow for fair comparisons among utilities facing dissimilar external conditions, greatly enhancing the accuracy of the performance measurement. Accurate performance measures provide decision makers with valuable information in making recommendations and conclusions based on the analysis.
