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When teams spend less time managing internal processes, they can spend more time advancing projects.
Utility capital expenditure investments are growing at an unprecedented pace. Investor-owned utilities are expected to spend at least $1.4 trillion on CapEx projects over the next five years, driven by rising demand from data centers and other large load developers, the push toward electrification and a need for infrastructure hardening. Meanwhile, engineering headcount isn’t keeping pace with that spending. As a result, throughput is becoming a significant bottleneck for transmission and distribution projects.
Much of that constraint traces back to disconnected workflows that have Computer-Aided Design (CAD), Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Bill of Materials (BOM) data scattered across different systems rather than tied to a single source of truth.
The solution is a more connected way of working: one where teams spend less time managing the limits of their internal processes and more time advancing projects — reducing rework, strengthening capex defensibility and unlocking the engineering volume utilities need.
Engineering backlog is not just a productivity problem
Capital project queues are growing faster than utilities can staff them. At the same time, retirements and labor market pressures are shrinking the workforce. For many utilities, the instinct is to close the gap by making each engineer more productive, but that alone won’t solve the backlog issue.
“You can’t make an engineer 190% productive,” said SBS CEO Al Eliasen at SBS, an AI-enabled utility design and engineering software firm recently acquired by Enverus. “There are only so many experienced engineers available, so labor productivity can’t be the only lever you pull."
The real constraint is throughput: how much capital program work a finite engineering staff can manage. Stretch too few engineers across too many projects and the bottleneck puts the whole capital investment portfolio at risk. Design timelines expand and cost overruns follow, which can lead to additional regulatory scrutiny. The more projects competing for the same limited engineering capacity, the more that risk compounds.
Disconnected data, compounding delays
Disconnected workflows are a leading contributor to both productivity and throughput bottlenecks. When CAD, GIS and BOM systems don't talk to each other, manual workarounds can introduce errors that slow the entire process down and result in costly rework.
Traditionally, an engineer starting a new project must pull the correct parts information from the utility's enterprise resource planning system. They must also pull existing infrastructure data that sits in GIS. That manual cross-referencing leaves room for error. For example, an engineer working from outdated or incomplete data could specify standard wood poles or conventional wire in a wildfire-prone region, instead of the fire-resistant materials the area actually requires.
Likewise, engineers in a manual world typically manage multiple spreadsheets for a single distribution line — one for sag calculations, one for pulling tension, one for guy wires and so on. Move a single pole and all of them have to be recalculated by hand.
Automation shrinks cycle times
"Utilities have spent a century building standards that power millions of homes and businesses safely and reliably every day. The question we hear is whether automation can be trusted to apply those standards correctly,” added Eliasen. “Our answer is that a connected system applies them the same way every time and frees engineering teams to focus their expertise on more complex issues.”
Eliasen notes that many steps in the traditional engineering process are needlessly time-consuming. Connecting and automating those steps reduces the number of hours engineers must spend designing each project, freeing them to focus on tasks that add real value.
By changing what moves through the bottleneck, not just how fast it moves, utilities can accelerate cycle times with the teams they have today.
Connected workflows also make it easier to bring in outside engineering capacity without sacrificing quality. When design standards are built into a shared template, a utility can hand that template to a contractor with minimal onboarding, cutting down on the kind of basic errors — mismatched title blocks, missed calculations — that can cause external designs to fail review.
As Trevor Fulks, Senior Manager of Strategy, Innovation and Partnership at PG&E, put it at a recent industry event, “When you get the Van Gogh of prints every time, that is going to have a program-level impact on the efficiency of your construction.”
Automation builds the audit trail
Design standards can be highly specific and vary by application. A buried gas line, for instance, requires particular materials to meet longevity requirements. Building those requirements into the design process itself means the correct materials are applied automatically as the design is drawn, reducing the chance that a detailed rule gets missed.
That enforcement produces something else valuable: a record. Every completed design shows exactly which standards were applied and validated, creating documentation as a byproduct of the design process itself, rather than something compiled separately after the fact.
Design documentation increasingly serves as an evidentiary record in rate cases and prudency reviews, where state public utility commissions (PUCs) examine whether costs were reasonably incurred. A connected workflow that automatically enforces and documents compliance gives utilities a built-in audit trail — and helps avoid PUC kickbacks because designs fall short. A manual process that works can still struggle to prove it worked. A connected, automated process documents compliance by default, giving utilities a stronger foundation for rate cases and prudency reviews.
Breaking the bottleneck
Utilities are being asked to do something genuinely difficult: expand infrastructure at historic scale while keeping costs defensible to ratepayers and regulators. The pressure to move faster doesn't eliminate the obligation to move carefully.
But the assumption that the current process is the reliable one deserves examination. Manual workflows depend on individual engineers applying the right standards from memory or documentation and catching their own errors before a design moves to construction. An automated workflow that enforces the same standards every time is a more consistent application of rigor, not a departure from it.
Software solutions, such as the design and automation tools developed by SBS, unify CAD, GIS and BOM data, automate and validate standards and give utilities the throughput to grow capital programs without growing headcount.
The numbers back this up. Utilities using SBS’ connected, automated design workflows have reported:
- Labor savings of 75% to 80% on design time.
- 60% to 75% reductions in rework because errors are caught upfront rather than surfacing late in construction.
- Up to 80% reduction in training program costs because standards are enforced automatically.
- Savings of 5% or more on construction costs, with some customers reporting savings as high as 17%.
For utilities facing a shrinking engineering workforce and a growing capital backlog, that kind of efficiency isn't incremental — it's transformational.
Contact SBS, a part of Enverus, to learn how design automation can solve your throughput challenges.
