At EPC Factor, management consulting is not an exercise in theory — it’s the art of applied experience. With more than four decades of insight into the infrastructure and utility sectors, we know how institutions think, how they grow, and where they need to evolve.
Leading this practice is Erika Pagán, our Management Consulting Director, whose eight years at Accenture in New York City took her around the world reengineering organizations to make them more agile, accessible, and future-ready. Erika brings a rare blend of analytical rigor, human-centered leadership, and a deep understanding of how technology — especially AI and experience design — can reshape the way institutions operate and connect.
At EPC Factor, we don’t just advise — we embed ourselves within your mission, aligning culture, purpose, and performance. We know management. We know transformation. And we know how to make it last.
Public and private utilities regularly engage in significant transactions that are highly scrutinized by key stakeholders, regulators and the public. Engaging in these transactions is critical to the development and financing of the infrastructure that makes a community able to attract and retain the workforce and the companies that make it alive. In order to professionally manage the risk involved, our team of professionals provides these services.
Financial planning is at the heart of any enterprise that must withstand the test of time. Utilities do not have the luxury of failing at their core mission of sustaining life as we know and expect. This is the reason our professionals tirelessly assist our clients to evaluate, develop and redevelop their financial planning and assure they are leaving no stone unturned and using industry best practices from every perspective. The long-term financial lifecycle of our clients business is affected by many issues that must be factored into their multi-year financial projections; from the changing demographics of their customer base, the cost of providing them a service to the age distribution of their workforce and retirement funding.
Capital Improvement Planning is one of the key components to assure a Utility will be able to provide its community with life-sustaining services for the foreseeable future. Multi-year funding of a Capital Improvement Program is usually one of the most difficult commitments to ask from a board, given the day-to-day pressures of running an enterprise. Our professionals have the experience navigating the planning process to provide an unbiased technical opinion of the funding requirements of Capital Improvements and the industry knowledge to uphold it.
Utility rates and fee structures must be designed to recover the cost to provide service to the community it serves by collecting fairly from its users. As these rates and fees must be approved by a public service commission, they are subject are public scrutiny and debate. Insuring that the way they are designed takes into account the consumption patterns of different customer classes as well as revenue sufficient to cover operations & maintenance, capital improvements and debt repayment. Our professionals have the experience to utilize the best practices in rate and fee design and accomplish outstanding results for the communities we serve.
Every utility has valuable infrastructure to operate every day and night. Managing these complex systems is beyond any single person and requires a team supported by the best resources available. Each one of our clients has developed a system to manage its assets, from the very pragmatic and simple to the cutting edge of technology. Our team of professionals helps its clients assess their Asset Management Programs to validate the way priorities are set, work is programmed, budgets are assigned and whether conforms to industry standards. Based on this assessment, our professionals can discover needs, propose solutions and guide through the implementation of improvements.
Every organization is unique as the people who compose it. Each individual brings different elements to each role. As a generation starts to move into retirement a new generation begins to take on responsibility of our organizations. Our paradigm of the workplace and the best way to manage work, career paths, succession planning and formulating strategy are rapidly changing. Our team includes top level executives who have managed through these changes and can provide advice not only on how to diagnose your organization but how to plan and implement strategies to ensure success for the long term.
In an age of instant communication, the right message to the right people can mean the success or defeat of an initiative. Utilities have stakeholders with different needs, intentions and sensitivities. Whether a utility wants to convey the need of emergency funding to a board of commissioners or wants to communicate the success of an initiative to the broader community, the right channel, timing and message are key. Our team has the experience to guide utility directors through the maze of options including public relations, traditional media outlets and social media.
Every utility faces the same challenges as any business when it comes to insuring business processes are meeting the needs of all stakeholders. Thanks to technology, great improvements have happened in procurement, metering, billing and account management, among many others. These changes in technology may “short-circuit” some of the business processes in place for a very long time. Organizations have a tendency to resist change. Our professionals can give an impartial evaluation of how the business processes are serving the institution and propose improvements.
Customer data is at the heart of any utility as it provides the basic inputs for demand capacity planning, operations and maintenance budgets, rates and fees, capital improvement budgets, etc. Confidence that this data is accurate is key to the organization. Through audits of this customer data, our teams can verify its integrity, provide feedback on the data collection methods and also provide in-depth analysis to identify trends and provide new tools for decision making.