Stanley was one of my favorite employees during the time I worked for the power company. He was the area manager for transmission and distribution maintenance and operations. Before that, a former line worker, then crew chief. Now the boss. Tough and gruff. Took no crap from the union crew members. Yet, they loved him. He demanded excellence from them and he got it.
Every day for a month, he would strut into my office, to give me a briefing on status of the prior day’s work. On his way out, he would stop, turn around and say, “We gotta do something about that damn leaning pole.” In turns out that on his way to and from work, he would pass a pole that was leaning toward the street. It was driving him crazy. His crews could only replace broken poles that break during some emergency, like being hit by a car or felled during a storm. Replacing a leaning pole would require a capital authorization from downtown. From Stanley’s view, the engineers downtown didn’t have the deep knowledge of the grid he did. When Stanley would contact the engineering manager, he always seemed to get the standard answer - they would investigate it. Yet no work order appeared. He gave up calling.
I got tired of hearing about the stupid pole as well. I took a ride out of see exactly how bad the leaning pole really was. Stanley was right, it leaned quite a bit, but in my view, it did not represent an immediate hazard. That is unless we got a severe wind storm. Finally, Stanley pointed his figure at my nose, and warned me that we must do something about that pole. Fine, I told him, replace your damn pole. I had the authority to create an emergency capital improvement project. The next day Stanley walked into my office and was actually smiling. That was not his typical look. The pole was now as straight as an arrow.
A week later, we received a capital work order to do what we called “make ready work” on a section of line. Stanley’s section of line. “Make ready work: involved making the pole line ready for some new equipment, in this case a new fiber optic line. The work involved replacing the existing 40-foot poles with 45-foot poles to make room for the fiber optic cables. That meant that Stanley’s brand new shiny (poles are not shiny) pole would have to replaced under the new work order.
Wasted time, wasted money.
Why did this happen? Misalignment of desired outcomes.
Stanley only had his point of view. The engineers had theirs. The financial people had theirs. I detail this concept in a recent blog.
In effect Stanley was tying to perform asset management at a very micro level. He didn’t have the big picture. The engineers as well ignored Stanley’s concern from the field. To quote John Woodhouse, a leading thought leader on asset management:
"One of the biggest challenges in asset management is the injection of long-term thinking (strategic goals and sustainability) while under pressure to deliver short-term results.”
At a utility, there are many conflicting goals around asset management. Operations people focus on the immediate. Planning and engineering employees worry about the longer term. Finance is single-minded around business success or even survival. What do the assets have in common?
Location.
That’s why a modern GIS can provide the needed transparency among all stakeholders for effective asset management. In the old days, GIS was basically a system of record – documentation of what assets exist and where. Utilities would build a data base of their assets and print out maps every so often. The maps were mostly out of date. Today, GIS underpins nearly every aspect of asset management from long term planning to short term work order management to maintenance. A modern GIS includes a system of engagement. This provides real time collaboration of all stakeholders throughout the company. Further it provides that sharing of data on any device.
Had the planners and engineers used their GIS as a system of engagement, Stanley would have immediately understood when those poles were to be replaced. Sure, maybe the leaning pole needed to be replaced early, but it would have been with a taller pole, consistent with the longer-term plan. Had Stanley used the GIS as a system of engagement, he could have documented his concern about the leaning pole as well as other field issues that could have alerted the engineers to issues that may have been hidden to them.
Finally, a modern GIS is also a system of insight. Simon Sinek, the great thought leader states, “more information is better than less.” As utilities move from passive to a strategic asset management practice, they need as much information as possible at a much faster rate. Getting data from the field, from drones, from planners, from managers, from machine learning and from customers is essential. In this way, all stakeholders get a glimpse of what really is going on and what patterns and trends that had been invisible are uncovered.
Stanley was right in locking into what may have been a serious problem. Yet without a means of looking at the big picture in relation to the short-term issues, the outcome was less than ideal.
For more information on the use of GIS for Asset Management, visit our webpage.