CALLOUT: Where once assets were assumed to be stationary, owned and contained within the organization and serviced locally, now they can be owned, operated and serviced by many constituents.
Electric utilities face an increasing barrage of challenges today. As rates increase, customer demands go up with them. And, new and increasingly complex regulations and cost pressures from a variety of stakeholders create constant pressure to continually increase operational excellence. Never before has the demand for operational excellence been greater in order to deliver reliable service at affordable rates and without breaking the bank on capital expenditures.
Meeting these increasing challenges requires electricity providers to do more than simply make step improvements in performance and efficiency. In order to survive and compete successfully,
utilities must revisit and rethink many of their existing business processes. In particular, critical areas such as customer service and asset maintenance and repair require significant change, and a new breed of solutions from technology vendors to empower this change.
The days of paper-based communication and manual processes are over, and a new era of automation and wireless communication has arrived.
One area where this change is especially striking is in the maintenance and repair of transmission and distribution assets. As populations grow and new businesses spring up in their service areas, electric utilities find themselves managing an ever-growing set of widely dispersed assets which are often associated with locations and customers. The growing trend of mergers and acquisitions places an added strain on utilities as they race to bring an even broader and more diverse multitude of T&D infrastructure within a common view. Major blackouts in the last few years, and the resulting regulatory changes, add yet additional focus on the effective maintenance and rapid repair of T&D assets.
Not surprisingly, electric utilities are realizing that a new breed of enterprise asset management (EAM) solutions are required to survive in this brave new world. New solutions are needed -- solutions which extend asset management and maintenance capabilities in order to help extend the life of the asset, as well as to increase the uptime and reliability of their infrastructure.
Mobile Asset Tracking is Key to Effective Service Management
Electric utilities face a unique set of challenges in managing the wealth of physical assets within their T&D infrastructure. For instance, like many other industries, they are confronted with the growing requirement to track and maintain mobile and dispersed assets. Assets such as meters, power lines and transformers are largely dispersed across various physical locations, including customer premises. Replacement parts for these assets provide an additional element of complexity, as they must be tracked from premises to premises in the trucks of numerous field service technicians.
Utilities have a critical need to track these mobile and dispersed assets in order to:
• Comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and other industry regulations, by maintaining a complete audit trail of assets.
• Increase customer loyalty and generate new revenue streams by transforming traditional service activities into integrated profit-making operations.
• Reduce costs by outsourcing non-core activities such as equipment maintenance and making service operations improvements.
• Extend best-practice maintenance approaches to assets dispersed outside normal organizational boundaries.
However, service providers to utilities have long struggled to adopt even the traditional work-management solutions precisely because their asset base includes numerous and diverse assets, much of which are not contained within the four walls of a plant or building. Managing assets that are so widely dispersed and frequently changed out for repair creates an intensive process to ensure that assets can be tracked. This struggle has come to the forefront for many utilities, because knowing exactly where assets are located -- not to mention their status and maintenance history -- is now required by new industry regulations and policies.
In order to meet these challenges, some utilities have turned to outsourcing the maintenance of infrastructure assets. This growing practice allows utilities to quickly scale resources while simultaneously reducing overhead, without disrupting or degrading key services to customers. However, outsourcing brings its own set of challenges. Outsourced service organizations require tools that enable them to analyze the reliability and performance of the assets they maintain. Similar to preventive and predictive maintenance approaches offered by traditional EAM software solutions such as Indus, solutions that analyze asset performance are a critical tool for these service providers.
Some service offerings include entitlements such as service calls and replacement parts for the assets these service providers maintain. These entitlements often are tied to service level agreements (SLAs) which require that service providers ensure assets maintain a certain level of uptime and/or performance. Therefore, in order to offer these services and remain profitable, these companies must closely track failure rates and causes against the assets. The ability to track performance and reliability of dispersed assets is not only important in meeting SLAs; it helps to set realistic SLA parameters in the first place. Therefore, understanding the life expectancy and reliability of an asset is an integral part of defining service coverage for the asset.
Know Thy Constituent(s)
One you have implemented a system that allows you to track the location of mobile assets, you are only part of the way there. As assets move from location to location, there will often be different permutations of asset owners, asset operators and asset service providers. Consequently, next-generation asset-tracking systems also need to allow the definition and association of multiple constituents.
Take for example a meter. As the asset owner, the utility essentially leases or loans the meter to a customer either on a home or a place of business. The home or business who uses the power that flows through the meter becomes the asset operator. When service is needed to repair or replace the meter, the utility may use an outsourced service provider to provide the repair service, making that company the service provider. Each of these constituents -- owner, operator, and service provider -- have activities, costs, and return on investment related to the asset. And, this information must be tracked, stored, and managed distinctly for each constituent based on their individual business and security needs. For this requirement to be met efficiently, any system tracking the asset must be able to dynamically recognize the constituents based on the assets’ location, type of work being performed, and other variables. The system must also be able to provide information on the asset performance, history and failure rates to assist the service provider in maximizing the life of the asset.
New Realities Require New Technology
Dealing with the new reality of multi-constituent, dispersed assets requires more than the traditional EAM approach to asset management.
It requires companies to change the way they perform, measure and optimize the delivery of services — the cornerstone of customer satisfaction and incremental service revenue. And, EAM technologies must evolve in kind to support the tracking of dispersed assets and enable dynamic functionality which intelligently reflects multiple locations and owners for each asset.
Many EAM solutions already offer a mobile capability, enabling field technicians to access work orders and related information from their laptop or PDA at the point of service and providing real-time update of work status. In addition, new technologies such as automated meter reading (AMR), radio frequency identification (RFID), and global positioning systems (GPS) are also becoming widely adopted so that asset tracking becomes immediate and automated, no longer requiring field technicians to manually inventory and verify assets at each location. Both local and global positioning systems can now support movement of assets, as well as
maintain a history of location and usage.
Next-generation EAM solutions must enable these advanced positioning and other mobile tracking technologies. They must also incorporate preventive and condition-based maintenance and integrate routing information, real-time inventory data and service requests. As a result, organizations will be able to track mobile and dispersed assets from one location to another, return the assets to inventory, and issue them directly to customers while also having multiple-party ownership, operation and service.
In Summary …
In the world of electric energy T&D, most assets are not confined to within the four walls of a plant, but extend out geographically to other parts of the country and to the customers that the organization serves. As utilities progress to meet the demand for management of dispersed assets, they need new tools to manage the asset lifecycle. These organizations should seek out solutions that offer location- or customer-based asset tracking, asset location history, stationary vs. moveable equipment, preventive and predictive capabilities, local and global positioning enablement for automated tracking of asset movement, and the definition of multiple ownership and constituents. They will find that the payback on these solutions will make them well worth the investment.
About the Author
Hart Levy is Director of EAM Products and Strategy for Indus International. Previously, he was Director of EAM Product Management at Oracle Corporation. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology and Business from Berry College.
Electric utilities face an increasing barrage of challenges today. As rates increase, customer demands go up with them. And, new and increasingly complex regulations and cost pressures from a variety of stakeholders create constant pressure to continually increase operational excellence. Never before has the demand for operational excellence been greater in order to deliver reliable service at affordable rates and without breaking the bank on capital expenditures.
Meeting these increasing challenges requires electricity providers to do more than simply make step improvements in performance and efficiency. In order to survive and compete successfully,
utilities must revisit and rethink many of their existing business processes. In particular, critical areas such as customer service and asset maintenance and repair require significant change, and a new breed of solutions from technology vendors to empower this change.
The days of paper-based communication and manual processes are over, and a new era of automation and wireless communication has arrived.
One area where this change is especially striking is in the maintenance and repair of transmission and distribution assets. As populations grow and new businesses spring up in their service areas, electric utilities find themselves managing an ever-growing set of widely dispersed assets which are often associated with locations and customers. The growing trend of mergers and acquisitions places an added strain on utilities as they race to bring an even broader and more diverse multitude of T&D infrastructure within a common view. Major blackouts in the last few years, and the resulting regulatory changes, add yet additional focus on the effective maintenance and rapid repair of T&D assets.
Not surprisingly, electric utilities are realizing that a new breed of enterprise asset management (EAM) solutions are required to survive in this brave new world. New solutions are needed -- solutions which extend asset management and maintenance capabilities in order to help extend the life of the asset, as well as to increase the uptime and reliability of their infrastructure.
Mobile Asset Tracking is Key to Effective Service Management
Electric utilities face a unique set of challenges in managing the wealth of physical assets within their T&D infrastructure. For instance, like many other industries, they are confronted with the growing requirement to track and maintain mobile and dispersed assets. Assets such as meters, power lines and transformers are largely dispersed across various physical locations, including customer premises. Replacement parts for these assets provide an additional element of complexity, as they must be tracked from premises to premises in the trucks of numerous field service technicians.
Utilities have a critical need to track these mobile and dispersed assets in order to:
• Comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and other industry regulations, by maintaining a complete audit trail of assets.
• Increase customer loyalty and generate new revenue streams by transforming traditional service activities into integrated profit-making operations.
• Reduce costs by outsourcing non-core activities such as equipment maintenance and making service operations improvements.
• Extend best-practice maintenance approaches to assets dispersed outside normal organizational boundaries.
However, service providers to utilities have long struggled to adopt even the traditional work-management solutions precisely because their asset base includes numerous and diverse assets, much of which are not contained within the four walls of a plant or building. Managing assets that are so widely dispersed and frequently changed out for repair creates an intensive process to ensure that assets can be tracked. This struggle has come to the forefront for many utilities, because knowing exactly where assets are located -- not to mention their status and maintenance history -- is now required by new industry regulations and policies.
In order to meet these challenges, some utilities have turned to outsourcing the maintenance of infrastructure assets. This growing practice allows utilities to quickly scale resources while simultaneously reducing overhead, without disrupting or degrading key services to customers. However, outsourcing brings its own set of challenges. Outsourced service organizations require tools that enable them to analyze the reliability and performance of the assets they maintain. Similar to preventive and predictive maintenance approaches offered by traditional EAM software solutions such as Indus, solutions that analyze asset performance are a critical tool for these service providers.
Some service offerings include entitlements such as service calls and replacement parts for the assets these service providers maintain. These entitlements often are tied to service level agreements (SLAs) which require that service providers ensure assets maintain a certain level of uptime and/or performance. Therefore, in order to offer these services and remain profitable, these companies must closely track failure rates and causes against the assets. The ability to track performance and reliability of dispersed assets is not only important in meeting SLAs; it helps to set realistic SLA parameters in the first place. Therefore, understanding the life expectancy and reliability of an asset is an integral part of defining service coverage for the asset.
Know Thy Constituent(s)
One you have implemented a system that allows you to track the location of mobile assets, you are only part of the way there. As assets move from location to location, there will often be different permutations of asset owners, asset operators and asset service providers. Consequently, next-generation asset-tracking systems also need to allow the definition and association of multiple constituents.
Take for example a meter. As the asset owner, the utility essentially leases or loans the meter to a customer either on a home or a place of business. The home or business who uses the power that flows through the meter becomes the asset operator. When service is needed to repair or replace the meter, the utility may use an outsourced service provider to provide the repair service, making that company the service provider. Each of these constituents -- owner, operator, and service provider -- have activities, costs, and return on investment related to the asset. And, this information must be tracked, stored, and managed distinctly for each constituent based on their individual business and security needs. For this requirement to be met efficiently, any system tracking the asset must be able to dynamically recognize the constituents based on the assets’ location, type of work being performed, and other variables. The system must also be able to provide information on the asset performance, history and failure rates to assist the service provider in maximizing the life of the asset.
New Realities Require New Technology
Dealing with the new reality of multi-constituent, dispersed assets requires more than the traditional EAM approach to asset management.
It requires companies to change the way they perform, measure and optimize the delivery of services — the cornerstone of customer satisfaction and incremental service revenue. And, EAM technologies must evolve in kind to support the tracking of dispersed assets and enable dynamic functionality which intelligently reflects multiple locations and owners for each asset.
Many EAM solutions already offer a mobile capability, enabling field technicians to access work orders and related information from their laptop or PDA at the point of service and providing real-time update of work status. In addition, new technologies such as automated meter reading (AMR), radio frequency identification (RFID), and global positioning systems (GPS) are also becoming widely adopted so that asset tracking becomes immediate and automated, no longer requiring field technicians to manually inventory and verify assets at each location. Both local and global positioning systems can now support movement of assets, as well as
maintain a history of location and usage.
Next-generation EAM solutions must enable these advanced positioning and other mobile tracking technologies. They must also incorporate preventive and condition-based maintenance and integrate routing information, real-time inventory data and service requests. As a result, organizations will be able to track mobile and dispersed assets from one location to another, return the assets to inventory, and issue them directly to customers while also having multiple-party ownership, operation and service.
In Summary …
In the world of electric energy T&D, most assets are not confined to within the four walls of a plant, but extend out geographically to other parts of the country and to the customers that the organization serves. As utilities progress to meet the demand for management of dispersed assets, they need new tools to manage the asset lifecycle. These organizations should seek out solutions that offer location- or customer-based asset tracking, asset location history, stationary vs. moveable equipment, preventive and predictive capabilities, local and global positioning enablement for automated tracking of asset movement, and the definition of multiple ownership and constituents. They will find that the payback on these solutions will make them well worth the investment.
About the Author
Hart Levy is Director of EAM Products and Strategy for Indus International. Previously, he was Director of EAM Product Management at Oracle Corporation. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology and Business from Berry College.
