A severe ice storm hit southern Ontario on December 22, 2013 knocking out electricity to thousands of homes and businesses. Heavy ice covered branches and winds gusting to 50 kilometres per hour caused branches to snap and fall on power lines. During this storm Kitchener-Wilmot Hydro had 22 feeders locked out affecting 25,000 customers, almost a third of their customers were without power in the City of Kitchener and the Township of Wilmot during one of the busiest times of the year. The phone lines were flooded with customer calls wanting to know when they could expect their power to be restored. Current outage management processes had call takers hand writing thousands of paper outage slips, which was the easy part; trying to make sense of all these pieces of paper and determine where to focus crew efforts was the real challenge. There has got to be a better way…

With the desire to improve outage management and armed with a mandate from the board of directors, Kitchener-Wilmot Hydro set their sights on an Outage Management System (OMS).

Before we could even think of talking to OMS vendors we decided it would be best to determine how we would like to see power outages handled at Kitchener-Wilmot Hydro Inc. In order to do that, we first identified our stakeholders. Since an OMS has a far reaching impact, it was important to include stakeholders from the Control Room, Customer Service, Engineering, Information Technology, and Operations.

With all the stakeholders together it was time to define what we wanted in an OMS. This started in the form of user stories, high level requirements, with each stakeholder describing what they felt outage management should look like at K-W Hydro. Some user stories were as simple as ‘An operating map of the distribution system that has full connectivity.’ While simple, this story was expanded into requirements, such as:

• The ability to display an accurate geographic representation of the distribution circuits and the underlying land base information
• The ability to graphically differentiate de-energized sections of circuits
• The ability to display a symbol indicating the location of an outage and customers who have initiated trouble calls
• Standard Pan and Zoom map capabilities

Over twenty requirements were defined from that single user story. Using this process, all the stories were fleshed out into requirements that supported the vision of outage management the stakeholder’s had shared. The completed requirements became the Compliance section of the RFP, where bidders demonstrate an understanding of the requirements, objectives, scope of work and deliverables. Bidders provided a numeric response, in the compliance section, based on the table below.

An OMS solution that fit our requirements would ensure the stakeholders’ vision of improving outage management procedures, enhance the outage response and tracking capabilities through a predictive OMS that interfaces with the current AMI system, SCADA system, GIS, our home grown CIS and Billing system. The system must be capable of interfacing with both inbound and outbound Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) systems, and be able to easily display outage information on the web.

Upon receiving the RFP responses, all responses were reviewed and information consolidated into a master report for the evaluation committee. The evaluation committee had representation from Customer Service, Operations, Engineering, the Control Room, and Information Technology. All committee members were stakeholders and part of the initial requirements team. All proposals were checked against mandatory criteria and assigned a scored for each category based on predefined criteria in the following categories:

[table]

During the initial evaluation all vendor names were hidden in order to eliminate any bias and focus was on requirements compliance, implementation price, annual maintenance fees and the availability of a DMS solution. The scores for the technical solution were determined by each vendor providing their compliance score for each requirement.

Using the above mentioned criteria the decision was made to eliminate four vendors, and focus on the top four with the best combination of price, maintenance fees, functionality, and available integrated Distribution Management System (DMS) solution. These four vendors were asked to provide a demonstration of their OMS solutions and were provided a script to follow. The evaluation committee was provided with score sheets containing evaluation criteria under the following categories: Bid Overview, OMS Demonstration, Crew Management, Communications, Reporting, and DMS overview. Each evaluator provided a score out of 10 by category, with high and low scores for each category ignored.

The two vendors who received the highest scores during the demonstrations have SCADA-based OMS solutions, an integrated DMS solution and represent a lower overall cost of ownership compared to the other vendors asked to provide a demonstration. Reference checks were conducted via site visits for the remaining two vendors.

The selected vendor represents a combination of the best evaluated bid considering price and the ability to meet K-W Hydro’s specifications, requirements, experience, customer references, and the capability of the bidder to provide the service. It was the unanimous recommendation from the OMS evaluation committee that we proceed with the purchase from Advanced Control Systems™ (ACS) for the ACS PRISM™ Real-Time OMS solution.

Throughout the OMS RFP evaluation process, ACS had consistently outperformed the competition. During the initial evaluation of the RFP, and vendor presentations this vendor scored the highest. The evaluation committee also scored the winner’s OMS solution the highest during the vendor presentations.

The following advantages were identified, compared to other vendor’s solutions:

• Provides a more advanced outage prediction engine that leverages time stamps, and is fully automated
• Provides an easy to use operator interface
• Provides a call taking application which supports both outage and service calls
• Has the ability to generate schematic representations
• Allows operator to perform both up and down stream traces
• Ability to update ETOR
• Create temporary cuts and jumpers
• Mobile crew solutions
• Executive dashboard solution
• Integrated DMS solution
• Optional mobile customer apps

While not the lowest bid (inclusive of procurement, license fee, implementation, maintenance, and support) they represent the lowest overall risk. By comparison the other finalist solution is still green, with many features and functions not yet developed or not working to the level necessary to meet our requirements.

With K-W Hydro’s plan to pursue self-healing networks, the new Distribution Management System is an industry leader. Having automated switching (FDIR) solutions implemented at other utilities presents a future opportunity for K-W Hydro to increase system reliability and take advantage of future grid automation. The full integration between the OMS, SCADA, and DMS will ensure all of our operators work from one pane of glass in the future, solidifying K-W Hydro’s outage management vision for improved customer communications and outage identification processes.

Kitchener-Wilmot Hydro Inc. is a local distribution company that is responsible for distributing electricity to more than 90,000 homes and businesses within the City of Kitchener and the Township of Wilmot. A wholly owned subsidiary of Kitchener Power Corporation, Kitchener-Wilmot Hydro Inc. is focused on providing a safe and reliable supply of electricity to its customers.
 

About the Author

As Project Manager Information Technology at Kitchener-Wilmot Hydro Inc. Matthew Ferraro is an accomplished leader, problem-solver, and communicator who has successfully implemented and directed projects from procurement, logistics, and operations perspectives for leading, global companies in a variety of industries – each with a focus on innovation and customer-driven success.