Enterprise Operation Systems (EOS)
Essential for survival in the dereguated marketplace
Responses
The re-structured Utilities, particularly in the UK, Australia and New Zealand where re-structuring is
further advanced, have utilised outsourcing, staff reduction and product and service diversification, as
strategies for success. In the United States, acquisition, merger and the increasing number of Investor
Owned Utilities (IOUs) appear to be the immediate response to enable the successful positioning of
organisations in the re-structured market.
Unfortunately, these strategies do not necessarily support all of the challenge faced. For example, staff
reduction will lower costs and (most likely) improve ROI, but will it improve, or even maintain, existing
service levels? Mergers and acquisitions promote the opportunity to diversify and potentially reduce costs,
but often create a larger (regulatory) reporting requirement than existed before. It is self evident that these
strategies can do little to reduce the number of service outages, customers impacted, and/or the duration of
outages that are now the new "measuring stick" in the re-structured market.
What Utilities such as Melbourne, Australia based Yarra Valley Water and Energy Australia (Sydney) have
realised is there is a need to be able to "work smarter". They have turned to Information Technology and
the provision of more data and information from hitherto unconnected systems to empower their staff to do
so.
Outage events
Known as an "outage", this key event dictates the level of service to a customer and therefore how
favourable regulatory reports such as SAIDI and CAIFI appear. An "outage" is any situation where
customers have lost supply due to a planned or unplanned interruption to the supply network.
A utility's performance is detrimentally impacted by the number of outages that take place in a specified
period, the number of customers affected by those outages and the duration of them, individually and as an
average.
In order to improve service performance, the utility must strive to reduce the:
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frequency of outages;
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number of customers that are impacted by an outage;
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duration of individual outages;
if it is to be viewed as a competitive service provider in comparison with other suppliers.
One way to reduce all aspects of outage occurrences may best be described as the "traditional" hands on
approach. Increasing network redundancy, the establishment of smaller shut off or isolation blocks,
increased network re-routing capabilities and more and multi skilled field maintenance crews will certainly
reduce all aspects of outage occurrences. The problem with this approach is that whilst it delivers one half
of the solution to the cost equation, in that it improves service, it negates the desired result by increasing the
cost required to deliver the service. This is particularly true in the area of increasing network redundancy
etc as many utilities' are already seen to be over capitalised.
With the more "traditional" approaches often being denied to utilities, they have turned to Information
Technology to provide the solution believing that, considering the significant investments already made in
it, IT should be able to solve the problem. Unfortunately, in many cases IT has not been able meet the
challenge anywhere near as well as expected, primarily due to the fact that operational level IT systems
(applications) often exist as "islands of technology", that is there is a lack of integration.
A high level analysis of an (unplanned) outage event quickly identifies why integration of operational IT
systems is essential if IT is solve the services to cost equation.
The figure below shows, at a high level, what procedures an organistaion will go through in the event of an
unplanned outage. The left most column summarises the business function while the columns on the right
show the Operational Level IT systems that will be utilised at some point in the process from start to finish.
