Pinnacle West Process Improvement

Pinnacle West is an organization that provides energy, energy related services and products

to both residential and businesses in the state of Arizona. In the early 2000’s the organization

came to the realization that after being in business for over 120 years, its current processes

were no longer as efficient as they once had been. Essentially, a determination was made

that the company’s traditional functional model was costly and ineffective, and that a change

to a more process-oriented model would yield more impressive results in the coming years.

To be successful when implementing a process-oriented enterprise there are a number of

essential points that must occur to guarantee the process will be effective and efficient.

James Champy identified a number of these points in his article “People and Processes”.

According to Champy, some of the key ingredients for successful process transformation

include the following: high level executive engagement; groups of small teams with the best

people; initiate change quickly, ensuring the changes are thorough in both breadth and depth;

communicate with all persons impacted by the change; inspect the workplace regularly;

anticipate and plan for new skill requirements; and finally there needs to be a recognition that

change is a never ending occurrence. In order for Pinnacle West to successfully enforce the

changes from the traditional functional model to a process-oriented approach, they had to

satisfy each of these points.

As the Chief Information Officer (CIO), Denny Brown was dedicated to driving the change

throughout the company. He realized the company needed to urgently replace the aging

infrastructure and make more efficient improvements to better serve the predicted future

growth projected to peak at an approximate 60% increase in customer demand in the coming

quarter century. An increase this large would cause the old system to fail, unable to support

the new high levels of demand. These...