Course

0312018-10-12T09:13:09-04:00

031 – Business Essentials for Utility Engineers: Understanding and Influencing Financial Decision-Making

Date: October 7 – 18, 2019
Location: Houston, Texas USA
CEUs: 6.0

Registration Discount: $5,400 – You must Register 60 days in advance and payment must be Paid In Full 30 days prior to the start of class.

Course Overview

This course is designed to impact business basics central to financial decision-making in the utility industry. It’s one of the crucial courses for any regulator and others to overcome financial knowledge deficiencies as it relates to decision-making best practices.

Our goal is to develop knowledge and understanding on how corporate financial management requires the ability to analyze past performance of an organization while also being able to project the future economic consequences of the firm in financial terms. We will do this through review and discussion of methods and tactics in order to build core competencies that prepare participants to make sound decisions that lower cost, maximize shareholder value and provide efficient delivery of utilities with a minimum number of interruptions.

Course Objectives

The objective of this course is to enable utility management professionals to focus on operations and investment and the integration of financial principles into those areas. Through presentations, lectures, review of best practices and experiential exercises in the following key areas, the fundamentals of finance will be taught along with the skills needed to analyze and manipulate financial tools:
• Understanding the language and decision processes of the electric utility business
• Knowing key business concepts and the financial basis of decision-making
• Communicating effectively with finance executives about engineering matters
• Helping ensure that your utility’s decisions make good business sense and good engineering sense

Target audience

This course is designed for the following officials: Power system analysts and engineers, Generation and transmission planners, ISO/RTO technical staff, System operation supervisors, Regulators, Distribution system planners and operators, Managers, Senior technicians and Others needing a broader understanding of the financial basis of decision-making in today’s restructured utility industry

Course Outline

Module 1: Understanding Utilities
• Natural monopolies
• Utility regulation
• Utility rates
• Utility deregulation

Module 2: Accounting
• The basic accounting equation
• Accounting principles
• Financial statements

Module 3: Economics
• Supply and demand
• Market pricing
• Monopolistic pricing
• Business cycles

Module 4: Finance
• Time value of money
• Market efficiency
• Capital structure
• Bankruptcy

Module 5: Risk
• Probability and statistics
• Diversification
• Capital asset pricing model
• Financial and real options

Module 6: Financial Ratios
• Profitability ratios
• Leverage and liquidity ratios
• Market ratios
• Residual income and economic value added

Module 7: Ratemaking
• Regulatory goals
• Revenue requirements and the rate base
• Rate design, rate cases
• Rate base misconceptions

Module 8: Budgeting
• Top-down vs. bottom-up budgeting
• Project prioritization
• Business case justification
• Taking the correct approach to the Smart Grid

Module 9: Asset Management
• History of asset management
• Organizational functions
• Asset management process
Action Planning for Success

Tuition: $5,600

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