Prisa Consulting helps Fulcrum on the road to profitability

Aug. 1, 2012 - PRLog -- Prisa Consulting (www.prisaconsulting.com), the business process and technology consulting firm, announced that it has helped UK gas and utilities company, Fulcrum, to achieve its medium term goal of streamlining its business processes, resulting in improved productivity across the organisation.  

Prisa Consulting was engaged by the new management team at Fulcrum to help realign its business processes. The company had just been acquired from National Grid and was going through major restructuring.

Since taking control, the new management team has returned the loss making company to profitability. This was achieved with the help and expertise of the Prisa consultants who worked on the process improvement programme.

Fulcrum was bought from National Grid in July 2010 and is listed on the Alternative Investment Market of the London Stock Exchange ("AIM").  It provides technical engineering, design, project management, consultancy and audit services across gas and multi-utility connections. As an energy connections provider, it makes the connections from the main grids into businesses and homes right across the UK.

Using process mapping and through a series of interviews and workshops with staff, Prisa Consulting, working with a small in-house team, charted ‘as is’ business processes, providing a clear, overall view of the company for the management team. In building the ‘to be’ processes, it identified a number of immediate savings, delivering measurable improvement for Fulcrum.

Prisa Consulting streamlined the customer quote process, which previously involved six departments and required five different sets of approvals. Now just two departments and one final approval are needed, thus ensuring faster response times for customers.

It also identified significant time savings that could be made in the initial construction design process. Prisa recommended a new business process that reduces the design time by 45%, through better categorisation and allocation of projects upfront.  

Prisa Consulting’s detailed process analysis also studied productivity, defects, bottlenecks, costs and supporting IS systems. From this, in collaboration with the Fulcrum team, it developed new integrated end-to-end business processes which are now in place.  The end result is that Fulcrum is a much more efficient organisation, which operates on a lower overhead base and has significantly improved customer service.

Gerard Egan, performance director, Fulcrum said, “Prisa Consulting appointed extremely experienced and knowledgeable senior consultants who integrated easily with our teams and worked alongside them to ensure they were involved and understood the change process.

“The result of Prisa Consulting’s work was visible immediately as they began to identify areas of cost reduction from day one. Prisa did exactly what they said they would do, on time and within budget, and left behind a very clean set of business processes. The project paid for itself within our financial year.”

John McCabe, CEO, Prisa Consulting commented, “We focus equally on the three pillars of people, technology and process.  Getting the business process right before anything else is critical, as process helps translate business strategy into reality.  It facilitates a technology solution to be deployed later which can bring significantly greater benefits. All of our consultants have real world experience and understand the real life impacts of decisions and therefore work closely with our clients to ensure the best long-term outcomes for the entire business.

“By simplifying and realigning the organisation to speed decision making and reduce excessive costs, Fulcrum has ultimately improved services for its customers. Technology change is currently happening and as it has put the appropriate business processes in place first, Fulcrum is assuring its long-term success.”


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About Prisa Consulting
Prisa is a mid-sized consulting firm that helps business and public sector clients transform the effectiveness of their people, processes and systems. It is focussed on helping clients in Ireland and the UK better serve their customers while also reducing overheads.  The company delivers consulting, strategy alignment, enterprise improvement, programme management and ICT services.  Prisa’s vision is to deliver change that is sustainable. www.prisaconsulting.com


About Fulcrum
Fulcrum is an energy solutions company operating across the whole of mainland UK. On average, Fulcrum completes around 13,000 domestic, industrial and commercial gas connections per year. Projects range from multi-million pound, technical development such as Heathrow Terminal 5, the new Heron Tower development in London and the 2014 Commonwealth Games Tolcross Aquatics Centre in Glasgow, through to the recent multi-utility installation on the Moon and Stars estate in Nottingham. The company leverages its expertise at each stage of the design, planning and delivery and has nationwide coverage to ensure there is local knowledge and expertise at the installation.

Fulcrum, an Independent Gas Transporter (iGT) and Utility Infrastructure Provider (UIP) boasts more than a dozen industry accreditations including WIRS, GIRS, NERS and MURS. It is also the first utility connections specialist to receive “Putting the Customer First” accreditation. www.fulcrum.co.uk


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