Outage Management Systems Real-Time Dashboard Assessment Study
Electric distribution companies are faced with increased pressure from customers, the media and regulators to provide accurate outage information that is very timely and essentially in real-time. Distribution owners/operators turn to new technology in the form of Dashboards, Business Intelligence and Outage Management Systems (OMS) to help address these demands. Under ever increasing pressure to improve reliability of electric supply, operations needs to perform restoration faster and more efficiently, driving internal demands for the detailed restoration information to be available in real-time as well. The needs of these internal operational users are typically even more detailed and complex. In addition, regulators are providing financial incentives or penalties based upon reliability goals or Key Performance Indicators (KPI)s. Management is demanding that accurate calculation of progress towards meeting these goals be provided daily or weekly rather than monthly or quarterly. This presentation covers the results of a study into the needs of existing outage management systems users and what they need in a real-time dashboard to meet these new business challenges.
Outage management systems as integrated elements of the distribution enterprise
Customer service and reliability objectives have risen to the forefront of the distribution enterprise in light of evolving industry drivers that include performance-based regulation, guaranteed service contracts, an e-business economy, deregulation, competition, highly publicized outage events, enhanced customer awareness, and others. At the same time, meeting these objectives has become increasingly difficult as distribution systems continue to grow in size and complexity, existing equipment continues to age, and the operational knowledge base erodes as utilities reduce staff and seasoned employees retire. In pursuit of cost effective solutions, distribution owners/operators continue to turn to decision-making and process automation through information technology in the form of outage management systems (OMS). Robust OMS solutions provide the capability to model the distribution system and its distributed elements, integrate and apply all necessary real-time operations information, dynamically manage connectivity and supporting resources, monitor real-time performance, and communicate with an array of back office processes to enable faster service restoration and accurate reporting of outage information. This presentation provides an overview of outage management systems, their effective, efficient integration into the distribution enterprise, and a brief look to the future.
Model and product based integrated systems for utility operations
The main aspects of implementing model and product-based integrated systems supporting electric utility operations are described. Coordinated user environments for enhanced operations decision support are detailed. Utility information modeling and management supporting timely coordination of operations with existing systems and sources of information are described. Staged implementation to achieve ongoing accumulation of benefits is discussed.<<ETX>>