6. How did American Water’s data warehouse improve operations and management decision making? American Water, founded in 1886, is the largest public water utility in the United States. Headquartered in Voorhees, N.J., the company employs more than 7,000 dedicated professionals who provide drinking water, wastewater and other related services to approximately 16 million people in 35 states, as well as Ontario and Manitoba, Canada. Most of American Water’s services support locally-managed utility subsidiaries that are regulated by the U.S. state in which each operates as well as the federal government.

American Water also owns subsidiaries that manage municipal drinking water and wastewater systems under contract and others that supply businesses and residential communities with water management products and services.

Until recently, American water’s systems and business processes were very localized, and many of these processes were manual. Over time, this information environment became increasingly difficult to manage. Many systems were not integrated, so that running any type of report that had to provide information about more than one region was a heavily manual process. Data had to be extracted from the systems supporting each region and then combined manually to create the desired output. When the company was preparing to hold an initial public offering of its stock in 2006, its software systems could not handle the required regulatory controls, so roughly 80 percent of this work had to be performed manually. It was close to a nightmare.