One Company, One Culture—Citizens’ Consolidated Planning Approach to Maintain Pipeline Integrity

One of the top challenges of today’s pipeline industry is maintaining pipeline integrity with aging infrastructure and budgetary constraints. Effective planning is essential to optimize financial resources and maintain pipeline integrity. Citizens Energy Group provides natural gas, steam, chilled water, water, and wastewater services to about 800,000 people and thousands of businesses in the Indianapolis area. To achieve Citizens’ mission, it is critical to Citizens to provide safe, reliable services while maintaining the lowest possible rates by maintaining pipeline integrity. Historically, the capital planning processes for each business unit differed on their approaches to terminology, schedules, cost estimating, content, planning horizon, prioritization, and project selection. In addition, the planning methodology for each business unit used different terminology, formats, and strengths. In 2019, Citizens embarked on an initiative to consolidate the planning under one trust-wide approach and format. This resulted in a consolidated approach to resource management and equipped leaders with information to make future business decisions in a centralized location while optimizing financial resources. Benefits include more thorough documentation of short- and long-term capital needs, enhanced coordination and collaboration between groups, transparency and knowledge management, and project planning memos and metrics for cost and schedule adherence. The consolidated planning supported identification of best practices and opportunities for improvement. This presentation will describe the new consolidated planning process and how it supports maintaining pipeline integrity.