When the current budget leadership team joined EBMUD, they inherited a process where the expense side of the capital program lived in one set of files and the revenue picture lived in a completely separate file managed by someone else in finance. Budget decisions emerged from informal negotiations — adjusting debt issuance and revenue assumptions back and forth until the numbers roughly reconciled.

Project prioritization was equally informal. A Capital Steering Committee of executives would review the high-level CIP and identify large projects to defer or cancel — based on judgment rather than data. There was no scoring framework, no cross-departmental ranked list, and no way to visually show leadership what the tradeoffs actually looked like. Their plan before Invizion: score 500+ projects in spreadsheets and sort the list manually.

EBMUD encountered Invizion through a professional network connection at the CIP Forum. The timing was tight: the Board approved the contract in August, and a preliminary CIP presentation was due in November — leaving just three months to get the system configured, staff trained, and data loaded. Invizion’s implementation team trained key individuals in three to four two-hour sessions. Within weeks, the system was live and actively being used in the budget cycle.

The configuration gave EBMUD a single platform where project data, priority scores, schedule, and revenue constraints all coexisted — eliminating the silo between the expense and revenue views of the CIP for the first time. Department contacts for water and wastewater were each given responsibility for their respective systems.

Department leads for water and wastewater now independently manage their respective systems. This includes full ownership over their separate budgets to deliver a balanced CIP within their individual revenue limits.

For the first time, all 500+ water and wastewater projects received a numeric priority score. The prior approach — an executive committee making judgment calls about which projects to defer — was replaced by a fact-based ranking that could be shown, defended, and iterated on in real time. Invizion’s multi-axis chart, contrasting fixed and flexible project spending against the revenue constraint line, became the team’s most powerful executive communication tool.

With Invizion handling the analytical complexity, EBMUD extended its capital plan from a 5-year to a 10-year outlook — a first in the agency’s 100-year history.

EBMUD now operates with a single, unified view of its capital program — expense and revenue in the same platform, 500+ projects scored and ranked, and a planning horizon that stretches a full decade into the future.

Timing: Implement Before Budget Season. The biggest efficiency gain comes when Invizion is fully configured before data collection begins. EBMUD went live mid-cycle, which meant some data had already been gathered in a format that didn’t align with the new process — a small but avoidable friction point. If you’re committing to the solution, get it approved and ready before budget development starts.

Alignment: Get Leadership Across the Chain. Support from the GM or CEO matters — but the teams who actually submit and score projects need to hear the mandate from their own direct leadership. Where that alignment existed, Invizion adoption was smooth and self-directed. Building alignment across the full executive chain before go-live removes the biggest adoption barrier.

EBMUD is loading its current adopted CIP into Invizion and plans to have both water and wastewater department contacts take greater ownership of their own updates during the next budget development cycle. The central budget team will shift further toward review and oversight — with Invizion handling the analytical complexity that previously required hands-on central involvement.