Many utilities are experiencing the same problem: there’s a gap between the projects they approve and the work that actually gets done. That gap is where capital value can quietly slip away.

This happens the same way almost everywhere. A small team inside the utility plans the work, puts together job packages, and sends them out, while contractors and service providers handle the actual construction. Every year, tens of thousands of jobs move through this process — line extensions, transformer upgrades, main extensions, and service connections. This is the daily work that keeps the grid running for the communities that rely on it.

Capital leaders aren’t asking for anything unusual. They want design tools that let them work without switching between different apps, dozens of phone calls and real-time financial visibility instead of end-of-month spreadsheets. Most know exactly what they’ve committed to. Very few know what’s happening in the field right now.

At the same time, utilities across electric, gas, water, and municipal service all face ever-increasing pressure to modernize aging infrastructure — just with different faces on the same problem. On the electric side, DER interconnection queues already exceed 1,350 gigawatts — more than the entire U.S. grid — and data center demand is expected to jump from 25 gigawatts to over 100 gigawatts by 2035. Gas and water utilities carry their own version of the same pressure: aging main replacement, lead service line mandates, and capacity expansion competing for the same crews and budgets. Municipalities running electric, water, gas, and public works departments under one roof feel it hardest of all, coordinating capital work across every service with a fraction of the staff a single investor-owned utility would have.

Whatever the service, the story is the same: utilities need to add more capacity, faster, but with the same teams and resources they had five years ago. More spreadsheets and phone calls won’t solve this. The real answer is closing the gap between planning and building.

The challenge shows up in two main ways. First, coordination is hard when not everyone works in-house: handoffs happen through emails and spreadsheets, and status is only as current as the last person who updated it. Second, people outside the process — customers waiting on service connections, or executives checking on progress — rarely get real-time answers unless they ask.

That’s why we created our newest solution, Construction Project Management.  It’s built into the same Single Face of Work® platform your teams and contractors already use, so programs, projects, budgets, and stage gates are all managed on the same system as compatible units, work packages, contractor assignments, and field completions.

The key isn’t just the project layer — it’s the foundation underneath. Construction Work Management gave us a shared definition of work: the compatible unit. This unit carries  engineering specs, materials, labor standards, regulatory details, and location, all in one record. Engineers design with it. Operations releases work from it, and in most utilities, operations handles most of the work. Contractors bid and get paid against it. Finance reconciles accounts and manages fixed assets with it. Crews close out jobs in the field with it. It is one definition of work, one language, from first estimate to finished job.

This foundation works across the whole portfolio. The same foundation supports everything, from a simple residential service connection to a multi-year substation project, including any change orders and the maintenance that comes after. It covers both linear and facility assets, down to the smallest components. And when a crew finishes a job, the operating asset is created directly from the construction record, with all the specs, hierarchy, and warranty details included, instead of being pieced together months later.

This is the advantage of bringing enterprise asset management, field service management, and construction work management onto one platform: decisions are made using up-to-date information, not last week’s data, and more work delivered with the teams and contractors you already have.

We built this solution the same way we build everything at KloudGin — with our utility operators involved every step of the way. It is available to every utility customer on our platform. That’s our approach: we work together, and get it right the first time.

If you’d like to see how this works with your own capital projects, our team can arrange a working session with your engineering, operations, and finance leaders. We will also cover Construction Project Management at this quarter’s customer briefing.

Vikram Takru
Co-founder & CEO, KloudGin