CIO — Nobody at Lakehead Pipe Line Partners knew it, but a motor at one of its sites was about to go on the fritz. If the malfunction could be caught in time, if the motor could be fixed before it needed to be replaced, it would save Lakehead, a Duluth, Minn.-based pumping company, a lot of time, money and grief. But how could Lakehead know?how could anyone know?that a motor was about to malfunction?
Enter Nordic Electric.
Reviewing Lakehead’s bills, Nordic, a 5-year-old Ann Arbor, Mich.-based independent power supplier, noticed that one of Lakehead’s plants was consuming more energy than usual. Putting two and two together, Nordic called Lakehead and informed it that there was a problem at that specific plant?most likely a motor about to fail.
"They were surprised that we were able to diagnose stuff like that," says Richard Polich, vice president of operations and regulatory affairs at Nordic. "At first they wanted to know why we were even calling them."
In another case, Nordic’s system noticed that Martin Marietta Materials, a Raleigh, N.C.-based chemical and construction material supplier, had a power spike every morning when employees switched on all the equipment at the same time. Nordic suggested that by staggering the times for turning on the machines, Martin Marietta Materials could save 20 percent on its electric bill.
"This is a partnership," Polich says. "Our desire is not to have a customer for just one year."
Nordic, which uses a CRM system from Alpharetta, Ga.-based Peace Software to cull its customers’ bills in order to provide these types of services, is symbolic of a new world order: power suppliers emerging in deregulated markets to challenge the traditional gas and electric monopolies. Armed with the latest technologies and offering advanced Web-based applications, they are cropping up in most metropolitan markets. But whereas utilities in England, Canada and Australia are old hands at using IT to compete in deregulated markets, many U.S. utilities are still wrapped in stifling monopolistic shrouds (see "Let There Be Competition," Page 149). They’re wrestling with new supply-and-demand paradigms that have pushed companies like Pacific Gas & Electric in Rosemead, Calif., into bankruptcy. They’re reluctant to make investments in CRM technology even as a new breed of providers begins picking off their most lucrative customers.
As the old monopolies are beginning to discover, competing in this new deregulated, customer-centric world is not just a matter of acquiring and implementing new technology; it demands dramatic and profound philosophical shifts.
