WALNUT CREEK, Calif. — Environmental engineering and construction firm Brown and Caldwell launched BC:Opta™, its unique approach to utility optimization for a more effective future.   

Faced with challenges from aging assets, drought, storm surges, and increasing regulations to replacing skills of a retiring workforce and budget limitations, improving utility performance for short- and long-term success is an ongoing prospect for utilities.

The BC:Opta approach encompasses a three-part framework: people+technology+adoption, beginning with Brown and Caldwell’s deep subject matter expertise and, if applicable, employing proven or innovative technologies. The key step involves empowering a utility’s lasting adoption of an optimized solution to fully realize immediate impacts and improved performance.

Powered by process and utility performance expertise — and often supported by advanced analytics, automation technologies, and digital twins — BC:Opta outcomes include:

• Operational performance: Reduced energy and chemical usage; better process strategies; enhanced resource utilization; expanded plant capacities; and cost-effective, sustainable performance improvements across operations.
• Infrastructure strategy: Comprehensive asset and maintenance management; capital program delivery; and enhanced data management strategies to achieve improved asset life and cost of ownership at risk levels acceptable to customers, communities, and regulators.    
• Enterprise resiliency: Improved business processes and employee skills development, integrated planning across utility functions and management strategy, and accelerated knowledge retention.

By embracing BC:Opta, utilities have a unique opportunity to enhance processes, shift expenditures, better align staff resources, and meet evolving customer.

“As an industry, we know we need to get better, but how should we do it?” asked Jeff Theerman, utility performance practice lead, Brown and Caldwell. “It’s not that we must do more with less; it’s that we must do more with the same capital, operating budgets, and staff. The answer is in optimization.”