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ProfitAbility

 
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ProfitAbility Simulation Series
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Information about Wired For ProfitAbility®

 

Objectives

  • Understand the financial basis of success in the T&D business
  • Understand how accounts are used to measure success
  • Know what has and has not been important under regulation
  • Know what will drive success in the future
  • See how they personally contribute to that success

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Course Outline

Agenda Item Description
Moving Balance Sheet
  • A demonstration of basic financial concepts

Year One (regulated)

  • The business cycle, Income Statement & Balance Sheet
  • Why regulation was introduced, and the pros and cons of regulated monopolies
Year Two (regulated)
  • Reinforcing the business cycle, retained earnings, accounts
  • Ratio Analysis: ROR, CR, ROE, EPS
Year Three (regulated)
  • Running the business under your own steam
  • Regulation issues: the Rate Case, cost-plus pricing
  • Reregulation: what will happen to the T&D business
  • Keys to success: growing the business, service levels, cost reduction, marketing
  • Reregulation Rules introduced
Year Four (reregulation)
  • Improvement Programs
  • New Ventures
  • Share Price exercise 1
  • Strategic Planning
Year Five (reregulation)
  • Differentiation and Cost Leadership strategies
  • Budgeting and Cash Flow
  • What your company has done, and still needs to do, to compete
  • Effect of New Ventures Investments
Year six (reregulation)
  • Cost reductions pay off
  • Effect of cost reductions on profit and competitive position
  • Stock Price exercise 2
  • Break-up and Acquisition strategies for utilities
  • Break-Even analysis of the business
Action Planning
  • My job and how I affect the business
  • Operating figures from business unit
  • Summary of learning points
  • Action Planning: how I and my team can contribute to success

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How Does It Work?

Wired for Profitability® is an intensive 2-day program. Group sizes can range from 12 to 24 participants, preferably from the same business unit, but often of mixed level and job type.

To picture what experiencing the simulation is like, imagine yourself in a room with 12 to 24 other participants. You are seated with 2-4 team mates at a table with a game board representing the T&D business that you and your team members are going to run. There are 5 other teams in the same room each seated in front of their own game board. As the industry becomes reregulated, you will have the opportunity to compete with other companies in the New Ventures market. You can also implement cost reduction programs and pocket the savings. However in the new environment, you will not be allowed to automatically pass on your increase in costs or have consumers automatically pay for your investments.

Each year the participants fill out an Income Statement and Balance Sheet for the business, reinforcing their understanding of the basic financial concepts, and seeing how profit, leverage and shareholder's equity are affected by the performance of the business.

There are are short lectures and discussions about the challenges of deregulation, so that the events in the simulation can be related to the participants' own work. Participants calculate several financial ratios, and see how these change with the ups and downs of business. They also run a stock market on the industry, valuing each other's shares. This enables them to link their decisions, the financial results, and the stock prices.

Finally, a series of exercises and discussions helps each participant see how they contribute to the financial success of their real company, and how they can help it succeed in the future. A local manager presents the figures for their own operating units, in the roughly the same simple format used throughout the simulation, and leads to a discussion of their role in meeting the present challenges.

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Typical Participant Comments

  • Shows us how the market works now and in reregulation
  • Visual model helps our understanding
  • I think the model really drives home the point on reregulation
  • One of the best simulations and biggest learning by transferring what you see on the board to the income statement and balance sheet and building an understanding of what all the numbers mean.
  • See the big picture and its effect on the bottom line.
  • Visual experience of what you see on the board and what you put on your financial statement
  • Key to this is the process of learning, I think is an important 3-way method of understanding financial (1) hear, (2) see, (3) write it.
  • Key understanding of the change from regulation to reregulation
  • All employees need to understand that a 2% cost reduction makes a big difference in profits
  • Hands-on eye opener
  • We are all in this together - we need to pull together
  • Really simulates what we are going to be up against in a very short time

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