Elevating operations practices to be best in class
Jim S. Tracey and E.K. Mayfield
Introduction
'The Flight to Technology'
Distribution Operations has recently become a primary area of emphasis for the application of
new technologies. While over the last decade there have been technological advances in areas
such as field equipment and telecommunications equipment, the basic processes of distribution
operations relating to outage management, network management, and power quality are still
predominately supported by manual or semi-automated processes. In some cases, there have
been some significant levels of automation where home-grown utility applications have been
implemented to support the operational needs, but they often are standalone solutions that do not
keep up with the growing and ever-changing demands of the utility they support.
This is especially true where there is a need to interface with other processes outside of
distribution operations such as asset management or accounting.
Over the last several years, there has been a tremendous increase in the demand for technology
that can automate and improve operational processes. This "flight to technology" and the
emphasis on automation has been slowly evolving as a result of changes over the last 10 years in
the utility environment. The past and current emphasis on reducing costs has reduced the number
and experience of operations personnel while, at the same time, utility infrastructures have
grown in size and age. Due to these factors, utilities are looking to technology to help deal with
the loss of resources and experience. However, the introduction of technology in distribution
operations has proven to be much more challenging than in other business areas of the utility
such as customer service, call centers and even engineering. The high demand for reliability,
performance, and usability has resulted in many project failures where the technology did not
live up to expectations. Why is this?
Usability is probably the one key reason (performance and reliability are outright demanded and
expected). In many cases, the functional goals of proposed technology solutions are not linked to
the benefits that were originally identified in the business case. Nor are they specific enough so
that they can be proven later on. For example, some typical benefits identified in business cases
for an outage management system are:
-
Reduce service unavailability (SAIDI)
-
Improve customer care
-
Reduce operational costs
-
Improve operational efficiency
Sound familiar? Who can argue with them? The big problem with the general nature of these
goals is that unless there is a complete and detailed understanding of the real deficiencies of the
current processes, the application of technology fails to address the core problems. Although
end-users may be given new tools that change their entire workflow, if the underlying process
problems were never identified, the tools can not help them-or the utility-to achieve the
original goals.
