Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Jim Likens - Hilliard Lyons.
Jim Likens - Hilliard Lyons
You guys have made quite a bit of improvement with O&M. I’m just wondering if you could give us an idea on what’s left with the business process improvements and maybe you could comment a little bit on how O&M as a percentage of margin will play out over the next year or so?
Thomas E. Skains
I’m going to let Dave answer that question in combination with Michael Yount, our Senior Vice President of Utility Operations.
David J. Dzuricky
We’ve had a lot of activity over the last couple of years and just to kind of go through the litany of what’s taken place at Piedmont during that time in terms of our O&M, we’ve had a management restructuring, we’ve installed automated meter reading of all of our roughly 1 million customer locations, we have had a consolidation of our business offices, we have had a consolidation of some of our call centers, we’ve redesigned the pension program for the company, and we’ve also initiated a health and wellness program that has paid dividends in our opinion in terms of holding the line on medical costs and insurance premiums. Obviously that is a lot of things that have been done to reconfigure the cost structures as it relates to O&M but we continue to move forward in other areas of the company. Let me just say that we’re not going to try to give you an idea of the trend of that for the next couple years as Tom mentioned in his remarks. We’ll be issuing our guidance in late October for 2009 and within that guidance will be all of our assumptions regarding how our O&M expense will behave next year. But with that let me turn it over to Michael to give you some background about what it is we’re looking at as we move into 2009 and beyond.
Michael H. Yount
In the operations area specifically we’re kind of focused on two areas of work. One is the service work that we do for our customers and the other is the construction and compliance work that we do. We’ve got ongoing projects in both of those areas that will help us in the way that we schedule, manage and measure that work and we expect those projects will continue to make us more efficient in the O&M area in operations especially during the next two years. As Dave said, with regard to specifics any improvements we make along the way we’ll build into our guidance in the time period in question.
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