Utilities are spending more money than ever on operations and maintenance (O&M). According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), distribution utilities spent $14.6 billion on O&M in 2019 for everything from overhead line maintenance to vegetation management and storm-related repairs. According to the EIA, transmission system O&M is also on the rise, with utilities devoting $16.5 billion to maintenance and repairs in 2019, an increase of 7% compared to 2018.
This is not surprising. Utilities must pay attention to speedy and effective maintenance of their existing systems because so much of the infrastructure is becoming worn and outdated. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ most recent Infrastructure Report Card gave the energy system a C-, largely due to the fact that a significant portion of equipment has exceeded its 50-year life expectancy.
Customers have little patience for outages, and regulators are not shy about issuing fines to utilities that have unnecessary blackouts. Efficient O&M is essential if utilities want to reduce the frequency and duration of power outages.
Valuable information trapped in stacks of paper
Utilities will always have to devote resources to O&M, but many are also looking for ways to improve O&M effectiveness while simultaneously reducing cost. Scott Baur is a solutions engineer for HSI, a company that develops and implements training programs for a wide range of industries, including the power sector. According to Baur, the utility clients he works with “are actively looking to save time and money through technology and better processes” because it can directly improve their bottom line.
Many utilities recognize there is significant room for improvement, and they are increasingly focusing attention on ways to leverage technology and process improvement to improve safety and maintenance practices.
Why is that?
They often rely on manual, paper-based systems to record and monitor everything from equipment repairs to safety incidents. “I’ve walked into a safety manager’s office, looked in the corner and seen a three-foot-high stack of paper,” recalled Baur. The stack was a stack of vehicle inspections that had not been reviewed.
In most cases, potentially valuable information in all those stacks of paper is eventually entered into a spreadsheet or database, at the cost of lots of time and labor. This added expense limits the utility’s ability to analyze the information they’ve collected, making it impossible to prioritize actions or identify trends. “Maybe there’s a vehicle that constantly gets into rear-end accidents during certain kinds of weather. Or maybe there is a piece of equipment you have to send someone out to repair frequently that really should be replaced,” Baur said. “That information may be trapped in all that paper.”
Efficiency and transparency in Arizona
Pinal County Electrical District No. 3 (ED3) in Maricopa, Arizona recognized the need to improve its operational efficiency and transparency. ED3 field staff was documenting inspections, incidents, and other observations using paper forms and freehand notes. This information would then have to be transcribed and recorded in spreadsheets, adding additional workload. This process was ripe for improvement.
To transition from a manual, paper-based, approach, ED3 implemented the HSI EHS Platform, which provides a scalable and customizable digital system for recording everything from safety incidents and maintenance requests to work orders and job completions.
“They came to us with a clear vision of their needs, one of which included their end user experience,” Baur said. “The field workers already used technology like mobile devices and computers to do a lot of other things. They wanted to use those same devices to eliminate all the paper they were using.”
That’s exactly what the EHS platform allowed. For example, before implementing its new system it could take a week just to start a work order. If an ED3 employee found a problem while reading a meter, they would write a paper report, take photos, and then enter everything into a spreadsheet. Workers could spend up to two hours a day on these tasks, and there was plenty of opportunity for error. The job coordinators would then go through all the reports and prioritize work orders, potentially revisit the site, and order parts. Once all these steps were complete, work could finally begin.
After the EHS platform was implemented, response times were reduced by giving the employees the right tools to upload information directly from the field. Coordinators could then leverage the technology to work with the information in real time, eliminating many additional steps. “Because the information from inspections goes directly into the EHS platform, our inspectors spend less time on data entry and more time on field inspections or other important tasks,” said Joshua Reilly, ED3’s safety specialist and field asset inspector. Similar efficiencies and benefits have been seen in how ED3 maintains equipment and complies with safety regulations.
After a year of use, ED3 says the EHS platform saves hundreds of work hours each month. Work order times have been cut in half, and much more time can be devoted to analyzing data rather than entering it. “We’re to the point now where we have enough data in the EHS platform to do analysis on incidents and track trends to see what we’re doing well and where we can improve,” Reilly said.
Utilities will always have O&M challenges. Whether it’s diagnosing safety and operations issues or updating technology and equipment, organizations now have technological options at their disposal.