Case Study: Strategy and KPI Framework for a Consolidated Water Utility Company

This case study explains how a major water utility, formed by merging several independent operators, established unified KPI definitions and strategy standards using BSC Designer.

Company Profile: Consolidated Water Utility

This LATAM-based government-founded water utility serves more than 9 million customers across a large metropolitan area. It operates multiple treatment facilities, a complex distribution network, and customer service units employing several thousand people.

The present organization was formed by consolidating several previously independent water operators. As a result, the utility inherited:

• Different legacy KPI definitions for core operational and service indicators.
• Distinct SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) and regional reporting methods.
• Multiple technology environments combining legacy systems, spreadsheets, and newer IoT/SCADA components.

The Challenge: Strategy Consolidation Across Operators

The utility company initiated a multi-year transformation involving roughly 200 initiatives spanning production, distribution, customer service, asset management, and analytics. Leadership identified a central obstacle: regions were working with incompatible definitions, processes, and measurement practices inherited from the pre-merger structure.

We brought together several previously independent water operators, but each came with its own systems, processes, and legacy KPIs, which made alignment extremely challenging.

To operate as a unified enterprise, the organization needed a more reliable strategy architecture—a consistent internal logic explaining how objectives, KPIs, risks, initiatives, and stakeholder needs relate to one another. This was essential to:

• Normalize KPI definitions so performance meant the same across all regions.
• Establish a shared measurement standard with aligned formulas, thresholds, and data sources.
• Ensure transformation initiatives connected to measurable strategic outcomes.
• Provide clear governance for accountability, updates, and auditability.

Without this foundation, teams struggled to interpret performance consistently, compare outputs across regions, or validate benefits realization from the 200-initiative portfolio.

Leadership also anticipated growing water demand from large data centers, a trend requiring close coordination with regulators, energy providers, and local communities. This reinforced the need for a strategy architecture flexible enough to address multi-stakeholder scenarios and support future innovation in resource planning.

Implementation Approach: Establishing Strategy Standards

The first step was addressing the capability gap in strategic planning that became evident after the merger. Different operators interpreted and applied strategy concepts in incompatible ways:

• “KPI” meant different things depending on the operator—a goal, a raw number, or a mixture of leading and lagging indicators.
• Objectives were frequently vague or unquantified, limiting the ability to measure progress.
• Outputs were confused with outcomes, reducing visibility into real service improvements.

An onsite strategy architecture workshop provided shared terminology and clarified how objectives, KPIs, outcomes, outputs, initiatives, and risks should be structured. This became the conceptual foundation for the technical framework that followed.

The second step was establishing a cascading structure of scorecards that embedded these shared standards into the way the organization planned, measured, and communicated strategy:

• Corporate strategy scorecard – Defined the organization-wide strategic objectives and the standard KPI definitions to be used across the utility.
• Functional scorecards – Production, distribution, and customer-facing units applied these shared standards within their operational scope.
• Regional scorecards – Regions inherited KPI formulas and definitions through the sync scorecard function while retaining ownership of local targets and improvement initiatives.
• Stakeholder scorecards – Captured how operational metrics relate to expectations from regulators, customers, communities, and other external parties.
• Risk assessment scorecards – Structured the analysis of risk events and linked risk responses directly to strategic objectives and standardized KPIs.

To support this structure, a standardized KPI dictionary was created as a template scorecard, offering:

• Unified naming conventions and calculation logic.
• Clear data-source guidance for IoT and SCADA-driven metrics.
• Defined ownership and update cycles for each KPI.
• Common thresholds and scoring rules for consistent interpretation.

This dictionary became the enterprise’s single source of truth and enabled all transformation initiatives—approximately 200 in total—to be mapped to measurable, standardized outcomes.

Special Focus: Water Quality Score With Composite Scoring

In the water treatment sector, it is common to maintain a comprehensive Water Quality Score that aggregates hundreds of laboratory, operational, and compliance parameters. In this case, the utility company worked with a score composed of more than 600 metrics, each using its own calculation approach. BSC Designer enabled the organization to automate and standardize this complex structure through:

• Hierarchical structuring of parameters into sub-indicators and composite indices.
• Weighted scoring models directly embedded into KPI logic using weight for calculating performance.
• Support for non-linear performance functions commonly used in water-quality evaluation.
• Evidence attachments such as lab results, sampling logs, and certification documents (evidence-based KPIs).

This transformed a fragmented measurement approach into an auditable, standardized, enterprise-level quality metric.

Results: Unified KPI Definitions and Shared Strategy Logic

The implementation produced several important outcomes, strengthening consistency, transparency, and alignment across the organization.

1. A single source of truth for KPIs enabled by a synchronized, template-based dictionary.
2. A unified strategy architecture consistently applied across corporate, functional, regional, stakeholder, and continuous risk-analysis scorecards.
3. Clear oversight of 200 transformation initiatives with direct linkage to standardized KPIs.
4. Improved accountability and auditability through evidence tracking and version history, which was especially critical for the Water Quality Score used in reporting to governmental stakeholders.
5. Transparent performance interpretation supported by dashboards, strategy maps, and consistent KPI logic.

How to Consolidate Strategy of Multiple Operation Centers?

Across industries, organizations undergoing mergers or acquiring multiple operational entities face similar challenges: incompatible measurement systems, inconsistent strategic terminology, and fragmented performance logic. The experience of this utility company highlights practical steps that any organization can follow when unifying strategy across diverse operational centers:

• Establish a unified strategy architecture and distribute it using synchronized scorecards to ensure standardization.
• Create a shared KPI dictionary so all centers interpret performance metrics consistently.
• Link all initiatives to normalized KPIs so progress becomes measurable, comparable, and auditable.
• Use a professional platform such as BSC Designer to support normalization, cascading, and ongoing strategy execution.

From Case Study to Practice

Learn how to apply the BSC Designer platform in practice to build a robust strategy architecture, ensure strategic alignment, and enable effective performance monitoring.

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BSC Designer

BSC Designer is strategy execution software that enhances strategy formulation and execution through KPIs, strategy maps, and dashboards. Our proprietary strategy implementation system guides companies in practical application of strategic planning.