Contributed by Hari Vasudevan (PE) | Founder and CEO, KYRO AI; Mythili Chaganti (PE) | Director of high voltage delivery, CenterPoint Energy, and VP of chapters and membership, Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Power & Energy Society (PES); Eric Easton (PhD, PE) | VP of grid transformation and investment strategy, CenterPoint Energy; and Wes Paxton | Director of substation operations, CenterPoint Energy
Houston, Texas-based utility CenterPoint Energy turned scattered scheduling, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, field and contractor data, spreadsheets, and more into a real-time command center for its more than $3 billion resilience program. This mega-scale program will elevate more than 99% of substations above the 500-year floodplain and upgrade or rebuild more than 2,200 transmission structures.
A program of this scale, however, presents an operational challenge: a lack of defined metrics to benchmark success and access to reliable data to measure them. This crucial pillar dictates whether projects move forward successfully or derail.
Here’s the balanced metrics-first playbook that other utilities can adapt to provide a reliable and resilient electric grid that remains affordable for ratepayers while meeting regulators’ and ratepayers’ demand for measurable outcomes.
CenterPoint Energy’s leadership had no consolidated view of field data, schedule performance, financial variance, contractor accountability, or quality metrics across five execution phases and hundreds of concurrent projects.
Most utility programs hit the same structural roadblock when moving from managing dozens of projects to hundreds. Weekly status reports that sporadically trickle up to project managers and eventually leadership, haphazardly assembled and collected data, and reports that trail on-the-ground realities by weeks are the unfortunate norm.
In multimillion-dollar or billion-dollar buildouts, these seemingly minor inefficiencies snowball into nine-digit expenses. And utilities in the $1.4 trillion race to meet the demands of the AI boom face ever-mounting stakes, besides increasing ratepayer and regulatory pressure to justify buildout investments.
The instinctive first step is to build a dashboard, but CenterPoint Energy defined the metrics first, because a dashboard without a deliberate metrics framework is just another reporting tool. Well-defined metrics help create a powerful management platform that leadership can use to identify risks, hold contractors and suppliers accountable, and proactively intervene before problems arise.
CenterPoint Energy’s framework was grounded in three established bodies of standards, applied specifically to utility capital program delivery:
- Safety performance metrics derived from Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) standards that track leading indicators rather than rely on lagging indicators, like recordable incidents. This helps prevent incidents of high-risk work.
- Project schedule and cost metrics built on the Project Management Institute (PMI) Earned Value Management (EVM) methodology, specifically the Cost Performance Index. This helps track projects that are burning cash faster than progress, and which projects are quietly slipping months behind.
- Quality and productivity metrics, drawn from Lean Six Sigma Principles and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001 framework, focused on process consistency and defect reduction. This enabled leadership to intervene before defects and issues hit projects and customers.
With these three pillar metrics, CenterPoint Energy embedded regulatory baseline practices into real-time visibility and adopted greater proactive quality management. In an environment with multiple contractors operating across distinct project phases, quality metrics make it feasible to identify those with isolated issues and those with accumulating problems before they appear in cost and schedule data.
For other utilities, the lesson is simple: do not start with tools. Start by defining the handful of safety, cost/schedule, and quality metrics that, if visible in real time, would change decisions in the control room and the boardroom.
CenterPoint Energy deliberately integrated systems rather than replacing them. The balanced scorecard pulls data from each system into a single visibility point without disrupting existing workflows. The framework leans on agentic architecture that functions alongside project managers, field crews, and coordinators, embedding AI capabilities directly into the operational workflows that feed the KPI platform. Data definitions and KPI ownership remained with existing business and engineering owners, so the scorecard reinforced established controls.
In financial operations, AI-driven validation flags billing discrepancies by analyzing submitted timesheets against rate cards and equipment allocations alongside invoices. In field operations, an AI agent ensures consistent data entry by guiding teams through form completion, task creation, and document submission.
Human judgment and decision-making remain central throughout. The dashboard is the authoritative view, with AI working upstream to enhance data quality, speed, and consistency, and downstream to help leaders identify patterns, generate insights, and respond faster.
A few integration decisions proved particularly consequential. Milestone logic had to account for projects spanning multiple fiscal years, requiring classification rules that tied to project constraint dates. Canceled projects were filtered from the active portfolio view since leaving them in would skew utilization, financial, and schedule metrics. Finally, historical data had to be backfilled. Meaningful trend analysis via the platform calls for longitudinal depth, not just a current-state snapshot. Coordinating the backfill of 2024 historical records was time-intensive, but the absence of that data would have made the command center useful for only point-in-time reporting.
CenterPoint Energy has successfully leveraged field data collection for almost a decade. For the KPI command center, instead of deploying the dashboard across the full portfolio immediately, CenterPoint Energy selected two pilot projects to validate the approach before scaling. The pilot served three purposes:
- Confirm that data from each source system aligns correctly and that milestone logic, financial calculations, and contractor metrics produce accurate outputs.
- Provide end users with a structured opportunity to interact with the dashboards and identify problems before the system is populated with hundreds of projects.
- Build organizational trust in the platform before introducing it to the entire capital project and program portfolio.
The ensuing feedback cycles produced changes that wouldn’t have been visible in any design review, enabling cleaner and smoother financial reporting. Program labels were updated from SRP/Non-SRP labels to “Resiliency/Non-Resiliency Projects.” Variance logic was inverted to frame metrics positively—showing projects within a 10% variance threshold rather than over it, changing how leadership read the data at a glance. Financial figures were aligned between the portfolio-level KPI view and the individual project summary view, eliminating confusing discrepancies. Dynamic color coding was added to financial and variance metrics, and change orders were separated from additional funding to improve processing.
Every change stemmed from front-line feedback—project managers, supervisors, and coordinators who would be using the platform daily. This meant a platform that reflects the realities of the project and program management mindset of CenterPoint Energy’s High Voltage Delivery team.
For utilities hesitant to roll out another enterprise platform, piloting three to five representative projects and iterating with front-line feedback is the fastest path to credibility and adoption.
The command center and an easily adoptable field data collection system bridged the operations-engineering communication gap, giving CenterPoint Energy’s leadership continuous visibility into a 600-project portfolio across engineering, design, construction, and on-time delivery performance.
The framework has proven financial metrics: 99.56% of invoices are received and processed within the 90-day threshold from task completion to payment. On construction costs, bid contracts are running at 100% estimate-to-actuals. Time and Equipment (T&E) contracts are tracking at approximately 85% against a 93% target.
That visibility between leadership, project managers, and field crews gives utilities the financial accountability and execution strength to navigate the years ahead. CenterPoint Energy has shown how. As utilities race to build resilience and meet rising energy demand, the gap between playing catch-up and staying ahead isn’t operations, engineering, or technology—it’s well-defined, balanced metrics.
