How Duquesne Light transformed finance operations to drive efficiency and smarter decisions - Huron

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The project team

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The Huron team behind DLC’s digital transformation

Rey Mendez

Rey Mendez

Managing Director

Rey is a digital strategy leader who helps energy, utilities, and other asset-intensive organizations turn enterprise transformation into measurable operating advantage. He connects practical AI to business outcomes that improve planning and execution. His programs accelerate financial close, improve capital planning, strengthen materials availability, and boost workforce productivity.

Bianka Shah

Bianka Shah

Managing Director

Bianka has more than 20 years of experience helping manufacturing, automotive and transportation, pulp and paper, pharmaceuticals, financial services, media, healthcare, chemical products, and nonprofit organizations develop comprehensive organizational change management strategies for large-scale business and IT transformation programs, strategic analysis, and executive sponsorship guidance.

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Whether you are in energy, utilities, or another capital-intensive industry — manufacturing, transportation, or infrastructure — Huron brings the industry knowledge, technology depth, and change management capability to help you get more from your systems and your people.

Duquesne Light Company (DLC) has kept the lights on for western Pennsylvania for more than a century and today serves more than 600,000 homes and businesses. Working with Huron, DLC replaced a patchwork of manual, spreadsheet-driven finance and supply chain processes with Program STREAM: a single, Oracle Cloud-based financial ecosystem.

With Phase 1 live, finance teams have cut month-end close time by nearly 30%, eliminated more than 125 disconnected planning spreadsheets, and redirected staff time from manual data-wrangling to the analysis that actually informs decisions. Upcoming releases will extend the same foundation to procurement, supply chain, inventory, and project management, positioning DLC to adopt AI on a foundation of clean, trustworthy data rather than rushing in ahead of it.

The case for a connected financial ecosystem

As a regulated electric utility, DLC operates in a capital-intensive, compliance-driven environment where financial precision, transparency, and timely reporting are essential. Like many organizations navigating decades of growth and system evolution, DLC recognized an opportunity to further unify and modernize its finance, procurement, and supply chain processes — building a foundation for even greater precision, transparency, and operational resilience.

DLC's leaders saw the opportunity to build something more than a patchwork of systems: a single, connected financial ecosystem that would strengthen controls, accelerate reporting, and equip the organization to make confident, data-driven capital decisions for decades to come.

That vision became Program STREAM.

“I feel like [Huron] really cares about us getting the system that we need instead of just implementing the tool... They’re really helping us set that foundation so even in the future, we will be able to continue to be successful.”

Sumedha Pradhan

— Manager, Financial Transformation, Duquesne Light Company

Program STREAM

There's a difference between choosing to modernize and being forced to. DLC chose, acting while conditions still allowed for a deliberate, well-resourced approach, rather than waiting until mounting friction made the decision for them.

The vision that emerged was not a system replacement. It was a connected financial ecosystem: one that would unify planning, close, procurement, and capital investment on a single platform, strengthen controls, improve regulatory reporting, and lay the architecture for the AI-enabled capabilities that the energy transition will demand. That vision became Program STREAM.

Program STREAM is built on Oracle Cloud and integrated with systems including Maximo and Copperleaf. It is designed to modernize finance, supply chain, inventory, and capital planning in phases, delivering measurable value at each release rather than asking the organization to wait years for a single go-live.

The challenge

When manual processes reached their limit

The pressure was real and specific. DLC's CFO, Matt Ankrum, asked a direct question: why was it taking so long to get the information he needed? The answer had nothing to do with effort and everything to do with architecture. Finance, procurement, and supply chain processes had evolved alongside decades of infrastructure investment, leaving manual workflows, disconnected systems, and spreadsheet-driven reconciliations in their wake. For a regulated utility, that gap isn't just an inconvenience. It's a credibility problem with regulators, the board, and the public the company serves.

Over one-third of finance team time went into manual journal entries, work the system should be capable of producing. There was no single source of truth: budgets, forecasts, and actuals each lived in their own spreadsheets, so teams often arrived at meetings with different numbers for the same metric. Tracing a discrepancy back to its source, or defending a number to a regulator, was harder than it should have been.

The approach

Transformation beyond the technology

A transformation of this scope, impacting finance, supply chain, procurement, and capital planning, and affecting DLC's entire workforce, including both union and non-union staff, required a partner who understood the utility business from day one. After evaluating its options, DLC selected Huron to lead the effort.

Huron paired Oracle Cloud delivery experience with utility-specific credentials: familiarity with rate-regulated environments, experience navigating union-represented workforces, and a track record of large-scale ERP transformations. DLC chose to work with a single firm that brought all the necessary expertise to the table, rather than coordinating across multiple providers. This decision kept accountability clear and let the program be designed as a connected whole rather than a sequence of handoffs.

“By doing a program end-to-end, we’re really able to think through what is the best process across the board, because everything eventually hits finance, and supply chain is always in the mix, and there’s always a piece of procurement in there... that was a really key component to why we’ve been so successful.”

Bianka Shah

Managing Director, Huron

Huron led project management, change management, and technical delivery as one unified team throughout an engagement structured as a phased approach from the start. A roadmap assessment grounded the program in DLC's current state and shaped a sequenced release plan that let teams realize the value of each phase before the next began. Each release followed the same structured path:

Assessment
Configuration
Pilots
System integration and user acceptance testing
Cutover planning
Hypercare support

Change management built for a union workforce

Technology alone doesn't drive adoption; trust, governance, and active engagement do. Program STREAM incorporated a formal change management strategy to:

Provide clear, consistent communication
Equip leaders and change champions
Deliver targeted training for impacted users
Minimize business disruption during the transition

The clearest test of that strategy was how DLC engaged its union workforce, which makes up a significant share of the company. Across the utility industry, union engagement in major technology transformations has often been treated as a late-stage communications exercise rather than a design input — handled only after key decisions had already been made, which tends to produce resistance at go-live and a workforce that feels change is happening to them rather than with them. DLC and Huron saw an opportunity to do this differently: engage the union workforce as a design partner from day one.

The Digital Transformation Partnership Committee, established at the start of the program, brought union and non-union leadership together every other week to review decisions, discuss what was changing and why, and participate in testing. Union expertise shaped the design of the system itself. The result: no surprises at go-live.

The same approach extended to how different audiences, including field workers, project managers, and finance teams, received information, each on a cadence and in a format suited to their role. Huron's change management team worked alongside DLC's own change leads to build that capability internally, rather than leave DLC dependent on an outside firm going forward.

The results

A single, standardized environment

With Phase 1 going live, the Oracle Enterprise Planning implementation brought budgeting, forecasting, and workforce planning into a single, standardized environment. Actuals, forecasts, and budgets now live in the same place. Version control is no longer a recurring problem. Teams that used to spend the first part of every meeting reconciling which numbers were current now start from a shared foundation.

Delivering results at this scale depended on being intentional about:

Sequencing value deliberately, rather than waiting years for a single go-live
Integrated governance and cross-functional collaboration
Early stakeholder engagement, including the union workforce
Building a single, unified data foundation
Creating a deliberate path toward AI-enabled insight, rather than rushing in ahead of it

Because each release is scoped and delivered in phases rather than as one large program, DLC can adopt Oracle's quarterly updates incrementally, capturing value now while avoiding the costly rework a single, multi-year build would have required once AI capabilities matured.

Before:

Planning lived across more than 125 Excel spreadsheets.
The annual budgeting process consumed roughly 150 days out of the year.
Month-end close averaged seven days.
More than $332 million in manual adjustments were processed monthly.
Approximately 5,200 journal entries (26% of the total) were entered manually each month.
The annual budgeting process stretched to nearly five months.

After:

Clean data provides a structured, data-driven way to evaluate capital investment decisions and allocate capital dollars.
A month-end close that's nearly 30% faster, giving leadership closer to real-time visibility into performance instead of numbers from a prior cycle.
FP&A team time previously spent gathering and reconciling conflicting data is now redirected to analysis and cost center support.

“...one of the most powerful [results of this project] I would say is the ability that they see things enterprise-wide and quickly and be able to make decisions faster... I actually just received a note this week from one of my colleagues that said, this is awesome, this would have taken me days and it took me an hour.”

Ashley Nayden

Managing Director, Transformation, Duquesne Light Company

Oracle Customer Excellence Award: CFO/Finance Team of the Year (North America)

Duquesne Light Company was named the 2026 Oracle Customer Excellence Award winner for “CFO/Finance Team of the Year” in North America, recognized for reimagining how finance operates through automation, intelligent analytics, and enterprise connectivity.

The award honors finance organizations that have delivered measurable, enterprise-wide impact by accelerating close processes, improving forecast accuracy, and strengthening decision support.

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The future

What comes next

Upcoming Oracle Cloud releases will modernize procurement, supply chain, inventory, and project management within the same environment, extending the foundation that Phase 1 put in place.

That foundation is built for the people who use it every day. Field crews will spend less time working around inventory systems. Project managers will spend less time chasing version-controlled spreadsheets. The finance team will spend less time on manual close activities and more time on analysis that informs better decisions.

As later phases are implemented, DLC expects additional gains, including:

Continuous close enablement
Improved GAAP and FERC reporting transparency
Optimized capital prioritization
Unified operational reporting
Reduced reconciliation time and manual effort
Field crews connected to the same system finance uses to improve materials visibility and inventory accuracy
Integrated artificial intelligence (AI) and automation

“The completion of the implementation work we’re doing is really the beginning. As you look at cloud providers, they are continuously innovating, and from a quarter-to-quarter perspective, there’s new capabilities being released.”

Rey Mendez

Managing Director, Huron

A foundation for AI that starts with clean data

Oracle's platform includes more than 400 AI capabilities, and the temptation to adopt all of them at once was significant. DLC chose restraint instead: automation is designed to augment, not replace, human judgment, freeing teams from repetitive tasks and enabling deeper analytical focus.

Although Program STREAM's primary focus is modernization, its architectural decisions have intentionally prepared DLC for intelligent automation and AI-enabled insights. The priority was getting the data right first — establishing a single source of truth and building the controls that make AI outputs trustworthy, rather than simply fast.

The AI capabilities DLC has intentionally built toward will become available as the data foundation matures: real-time insight, automation of repetitive finance processes, and scenario modeling that informs capital investment decisions faster and with more confidence.

Program STREAM continues through 2027, with each new release building on the same foundation. But the groundwork for a more connected, automated, and insight-driven future is already in place — one where DLC's workforce has better tools and clearer data to serve its customers.