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Disaster Management
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Data…The New Life Line for the Field!
Changing Business Environment
- Staff Reductions
In Aquilas’ ongoing bid to stay competitive we have made the business decision to close all
of our Service Point offices to the public and many of them altogether. In addition to these
closures came some ‘right sizing’ that drastically reduced our staff compliment leaving
virtual no administrative help for our lineman. We had to leverage mobile technology giving
the field full access to all data, if we were going to continue to operate successfully and
survive.
- Customer Expectations
In this new business environment customers insist on new or improved levels of service.
Now with deregulation if a company does not meet the customer’s expectation, the
customer can chose to use another electric service provider and you lose their business.
This has put a whole new perspective onto customer service. Electric Utilities are now being
a far greater emphasis on customer retention and service.
Municipalities have taken their expectations even one step further. They have negotiated
service levels into their new Franchise Agreements. These Franchise Agreement include
financial penalties when specific service levels are not met. Again, this has forced Electric
Utilities to be a far greater emphasis on achieving these service levels. Not only to avoid the
financial penalties but just as important to keep the Municipalities happy and wanting to
continue to do business with the Electric Utility. The field staff must be able to quickly and
easily show the maintenance work required such as Street Light repairs. To manage their
work effectively and document when the work is completed. This gives Aquila the records of
when we have or have not met these service level agreements. Allowing us to show the
Municipalities the exact level of service they are receiving and actually pay the penalties
when the service levels are not met.
- Centralized Maintenance
Another major shift is the way in which Aquila is handling the Maintenance functions for all
our Distribution facilities. This Maintenance work has been centralized into an Asset
Management department within the head office. This has given the Maintenance Planners
an overall view of all maintenance activities within the corporation. In the past Aquila would
have had one person from each of the 58 service points, all put together their requests for
maintenance dollars for the next year. These would seldom have any concrete facts or
evidence supporting the need for these maintenance dollars other then the word of the field
person submitting the request. These maintenance requests would be sent in to the five
regional Senior Engineers. These five regional Senior Engineers were given a budget of
maintenance dollars for the next year. Based on these budget dollars the regional Senior
Engineer would evaluate the requests and make a decision on each request to approve or
not. This method would evenly split the budgeted dollars not only between the 5 regions but
generally between the 58 service Points as well. Although, this process on the surface
seemed as fair and equitable as possible. It could not possibly ensure that the limited
maintenance budget dollars each year are spent in the areas that required them the most or
where the distribution facilities are in the worst condition. Today, we have three
Maintenance Planners that manage all of our maintenance budget dollars for the year. They
receive information from all of our 200 Customer Service Linemen in the field on
maintenance work required, this gives them visibility to the entire service territory not just a
region. This is not the only criterion for determining what work should proceed. They also,
have outage statistics and momentary trips for each of our 450 circuits. Our limited
maintenance budget dollars are put towards the 15 worst performing feeders each year.
This not only ensures constant improvement in our system and more importantly our
customer services. It means our limited budget dollars are spent where they are most
required.
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