Midwestern U.S. Based Utility
Digital transformation saves midwestern U.S. based utility 9,000 hours and provides proactive outage investigation.
The Challenge
Our utility client wanted to turn outage investigation from a lagging into a leading indicator when looking at outage data relative to tree failure. Often minimal data was collected and outages were investigated late, resulting in inconclusive information and reduced ability to identify trends.
The utility was also interested in a more streamlined customer ticket and reporting system. The current paper system required an email to 20 regional offices, followed by field review, addition of notes, and manual entry into the system.
The Solution
Davey Resource Group (DRG) worked closely with the utility to design a more efficient outage investigation program tailored to their business needs. It included experienced DRG personnel to investigate outages promptly to preserve evidence and findings. Outage investigation details are logged into DRG’s Rover data collection system for timely analysis. Rover also became the central tool to track customer tickets.
In addition to improving the utility’s outage investigation process, DRG developed a collaborative work document and dashboard reporting system that made information sharing easy and streamlined the process for the client.
The Results
Proactive outage investigation yielded surprising results - the majority of outages were not caused by the suspected trees. The outage reporting and statistics were then used to guide the Storm Hardening Program and has increased reliability and improved key outage SAIFI and CMI indices.
Digital ticket entry has resulted in a savings of nearly 9,000 hours for the client, in addition to robust tracking ability for future business insight.
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