The following ASUG case study was authored in collaboration with KloudGin. It can be downloaded in full here.

For utilities, delivering a better customer experience depends on what happens behind the scenes.

At Puget Sound Energy (PSE), the largest electric and natural gas utility in Washington state, this realization helped launch one of the division’s most significant technology initiatives of the past decade: modernizing how thousands of customer construction projects are managed while creating a digital foundation for a transparent and connected customer experience.

PSE serves more than 1.2 million electric customers and nearly 900,000 natural gas customers across 10 counties. Within the utility, the Customer & System Projects (C&SP) organization manages customer construction requests for new or modified electric and gas services.

The organization handles approximately 20,000 customer requests annually. About half are field-ready jobs that can be sent directly to field crews. The remaining 10,000 are more complex projects requiring active oversight from project managers.

Managing these projects is a complex undertaking and involves coordinating tasks, permits, customer requirements, internal handoffs, construction activities, and other moving pieces. PSE determined project managers needed a better way to bring all of that activity together.

Asking the Right Questions

SAP has long played an important role in PSE’s operations. Project managers use SAP Notifications, Tasks, and Work Orders, with SAP serving as the system of record for relevant customer project information.

But having the information and managing the day-to-day workflow around that information are two different challenges. As a result, project managers needed to quickly answer the following questions:

• Which projects require attention today?
• Is a task overdue?
• Is a permit still pending?
• Is a project waiting on PSE or on the customer?
• What needs to happen before the project can move to its next phase?

Without a common project management layer, employees sometimes relied on individual spreadsheets, notes, folders, and other personal tracking methods to organize their work.

This disparate approach created challenges beyond individual productivity. When a project manager was unavailable, for example, another employee might have difficulty quickly understanding where a project stood and what needed to happen next.

PSE wanted a more standardized approach that could organize work at scale while providing greater visibility into project status, priorities, and handoffs.

A Broad Vision for Customer Construction

The project was part of a transformation that began roughly five years ago, when PSE senior leadership held a visioning session centered on providing a world-class customer experience. Four priorities soon emerged:

• Create an integrated training program
• Develop fuel-neutral teams capable of supporting both gas and electric projects
• Implement a modern project management tool
• Introduce a digital customer construction portal.

PSE has since made progress across all four areas.

The utility established an integrated training team, including a week-long boot camp for new employees. It also reorganized its regional hubs so teams can serve both gas and electric customers, an important change for customers whose projects involve both services.

The next major piece of the strategy puzzle was project management.

For that, PSE selected KloudGin, whose technology was already designed around utility work management and field execution. Rather than creating another stand-alone project management application, PSE could build on that foundation and connect it to its existing SAP environment.

Internally, the new solution is called BOLT, short for Business Operations & Logistics Tool.

Putting a New Layer on SAP

BOLT does not replace SAP. Instead, the two systems play complementary roles.

SAP remains PSE’s source of truth for customer project information, work orders, and notifications. BOLT sits on top of SAP and synchronizes with it in real time, providing project managers with a more intuitive way to organize their work and understand what requires attention.

The solution gives project managers and supervisors greater visibility into projects across the organization. They can see which projects require action, determine whether work is idle or waiting on a customer, assign tasks, monitor progress, and manage handoffs across departments.

This consistency is important for an organization like PSE, which handles thousands of complex construction projects every year.

So, instead of every project manager developing a personal method for organizing work, BOLT creates a more standardized process and a shared view of project activity.

It also improves continuity. If an employee is out of the office, another project manager can more easily understand the status of the work and step in when necessary.

More Time for Customers

PSE’s transformation is about more than improving internal efficiency; it’s about using better project management techniques as a way to improve the experience customers have with the utility.

Reducing manual administrative work can give project managers more time to focus on customers and apply their technical expertise to complex projects. At the same time, supervisors gain greater visibility into workloads, project status, and potential bottlenecks.

This creates smoother handoffs and more consistent service while helping PSE better understand how work is progressing across its customer construction organization.

Building Toward a Digital Customer Experience

BOLT is also laying the foundation for another piece of PSE’s original transformation vision: a customer construction portal, currently targeted for launch in 2027.

Today, customers typically submit PDF applications and rely on email or phone conversations with their project manager when they want to understand the status of a project.

The planned portal is designed to change that experience so customers will be able to apply online and access a dashboard showing their active construction projects. Instead of having to contact a project manager simply to ask where a project stands, customers will be able to view status information digitally.

The information displayed through the portal will come directly from BOLT, which extends the benefits of PSE’s internal transformation to the customer. The same project information helping employees coordinate work will ultimately help customers understand where they are in the process, what comes next, and how long different phases typically take.

Learn more about KloudGin Construction Project Portfolio Management 

Creating a Foundation for the Future

For PSE, implementing BOLT is one component of a larger effort to modernize customer construction rather than a stand-alone technology project.

Integrated training is helping employees develop common skills and processes. Fuel-neutral teams are breaking down organizational boundaries between electric and natural gas service. BOLT is providing a more consistent way to manage complex projects. And the forthcoming customer portal is expected to extend that visibility directly to customers.

Together, these initiatives represent a shift toward a more connected model for customer construction.

The transformation also illustrates how utilities can build on core enterprise systems such as SAP rather than replacing them. By keeping SAP as its system of record while adding KloudGin as a project management and workflow layer, PSE is connecting enterprise data with the day-to-day needs of employees managing customer projects.

For an organization processing approximately 20,000 customer construction requests every year, this type of visibility can have an impact well beyond individual productivity by creating more consistent processes, smoother handoffs, greater transparency, and ultimately a better experience for the customers waiting for their projects to move forward.

And as PSE prepares to bring real-time project information directly to customers through its planned portal, BOLT is helping establish the digital foundation for the next phase of that experience.