Copperleaf Wraps Up Successful Virtual Summit for Clients Globally
With over 300 virtual registrants from across the globe, the 2022 Copperleaf® Summit was once again the premiere place for experts from the energy, water, and transportation sectors to explore the latest trends, exchange best practices, and discover how to improve organizational performance through decision analytics.
I enjoy hearing about the Copperleaf roadmap and seeing how the product is evolving, but I get the most value in hearing real-world discussions and presentations on how Copperleaf is helping clients deliver their asset management objectives.
Kathryn Gillum
Investment Optimization Manager
Powerco
The Summit kicked off with CEO Judi Hess’ “State of the Nation” keynote where she shared Copperleaf’s vision for the future in “Three Dimensions: Decarbonized, Digitized, and Distributed”. She explained how major utilities, such as National Grid, are using technology, like the Copperleaf Decision Analytics Solution, to help make their electricity and natural gas networks cleaner, smarter, and more resilient while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
A highlight of the event is always our client case studies, where community members share their organizations’ journeys to improve their asset management and investment planning processes. We were fortunate to have two informative sessions that looked at the challenges and lessons learned from our clients.
Client Case Study: AES’s Journey to Enterprise-wide Implementation of Copperleaf
AJ Hall, Senior Manager, T&D Project & Investment Planning, at the AES Corporation, shared how his company is leveraging the Copperleaf solution across its international transmission, distribution, and generation groups. He described how the flexibility of the Copperleaf solution enabled AES to support different investment types and unique business drivers across departments and geographies—and align its capital planning processes globally. Approximately 8,000 users across AES now have a single source of truth for capital project submissions and approvals, resulting in better decisions and greater confidence in the plan.
We received feedback on our first planning cycle last year from our financial planning and analysis team, that it was the best budget submission they’d ever seen from our businesses. Why? Because they had all the way down to the investment level of detail and we had confidence in those investment plans, as well as the ability to easily show variances to our long-term forecast. All of those things were available in Copperleaf.
AJ Hall
Senior Manager, T&D Project & Investment Planning
AES Corporation
Client Case Study: Asset Program Planning at TasNetworks
Rhys Browning, Senior Network Planning Engineer, and Mo Jafari, Senior Asset Performance and Risk Engineer, led an interactive session on the inner workings of asset program planning at TasNetworks. They discussed the processes and tools used when designing and building successful asset programs, as well as some of the challenges faced and lessons learned.
Panel Discussion: Striking the Balance Between ESG and Business as Usual
Now more than ever, organizations managing critical infrastructure are being held accountable to deliver strong financial performance, while also allocating funds to advance progress towards their Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) commitments. The Summit featured two insightful panel discussions on the topic of ESG. Speakers highlighted the need for organizations to expand their assessment of project value to include both financial and ESG measures, and embed that expanded definition of value into decision-making systems and processes, in order to demonstrate that the best capital planning decisions are being made consistently and transparently.
Dawen Nozdryn-Plotnicki, Copperleaf’s Managing Director, Americas, led a discussion featuring Elyse Douglas, Senior Scholar, NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business; Maarten Noom, Manager of Asset Risk Management and Investment Planning, Enexis; and Tom Wasik, VP, Asset Management, Alectra. Maarten and Tom explained how the Copperleaf solution is helping their organizations ensure relevant ESG criteria are accounted for, used in business cases, and valued consistently—to strike a balance between sustainability and affordability in their investment decisions.
What Alectra has found is that by expanding the [Copperleaf] Value Framework, we capture the full range of the investment value over the entire useful life of that particular investment. Expanding the time frame, when you do that, you realize that higher upfront costs that may come with more efficient and sustainable solutions, do really pay out better in the long term.
Tom Wasik
Vice President, Asset Management
Alectra
The Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ) panel was moderated by Paul Sakrzewski, Copperleaf President, and included Gina Pavlovic, Manager, Sustainability and Environment, Endeavour Energy; Claudia Salem, AICD, SID, Advisor and Non-executive Director; and Edey Suresh, Board Member and Johor State Director, UN Global Compact Network Malaysia & Brunei.
Helping to Invest in our Planet
Spearheaded by the Copperleaf team in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, we organized the Copperleaf Summit Fun Run for our clients and friends in the Copperleaf Community. Participants chose their distance of either 5 km or 10 km and completed their walk/run anywhere in the world to support One Tree Planted—a non-profit focused on global reforestation that plants one tree for every dollar donated. Doing our part in our local communities is a fundamental part of Copperleaf’s culture and we were happy to support such a worthy cause.
Thank you to our clients, partners, and team members for making the 2022 Copperleaf Summit such a success. We’re grateful to our community members for sharing their ideas to help make our solutions and services even better, and look forward to our regional in-person Summits coming up later this year!
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