Electric Utilities have invested in Outage Management Systems (OMS) over the years to better manage outage events and communicate with their customers about the situation affecting them. Gas utilities on the other hand, have not invested in automation of their outage processes. Gas outages are manually managed by the utility response team. While these teams do use outputs from automated systems to generate information, it is not a system providing the capability for overall management and communication of the outage.
Building Pressure for Gas OMS
One factor contributing to the lack of Gas OMS, is the general lack of an off-the-shelf automated solution. This lack of offerings is probably also linked to the fact gas outages are typically small and many of the outages are initiated by the gas company itself. While this may be the norm, there are other pressures such as the occurence of major incidents in the past decade, increasing population, regulatory oversight and customer expectations that are dictating the need for a better approach and tools as well as a complete Gas OMS solution.
Gas utilities already have the technology to support a gas outage system
A Gas OMS can be built by integrating technologies that gas utilities have already invested in. Gas OMS is an integrated solution that simply leverages previous investments and provides additional value by having current systems talk to each other.
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a perfect technology to form the foundation for a Gas OMS. Operators can visualize the events in the Outage Process from declaring an outage to shutting down and restoring an outage. Visualization is much more effective than spreadsheets and provides the required mapping for the process.
The utility GIS can exchange and display information with other systems and bring a variety of information together to display in managing the outage. This would include information regarding gas assets and models and from systems such as Customer information Systems, SCADA Historian, Work Management and mobile systems.
Structuring Gas Outage Management – Visual Capability Requirements
For effective outage management, the following capabilities would be performed by the Gas OMS in a visual manner:
- Recognition of boundaries and affected customers and assets
- Declaring an Outage Event as a named Outage
- Updating Estimated Time to Restore by both Field and Back Office
- Provide immediate status from mobile crews
- Generate Affected Customer List for shutoff, Field Red Tag List and Punch List for Restoration
- Dispatch and Perform Tag-Outs
- Dispatch and Perform System Reconfigurations
- Dispatch and Perform Leak Survey Rechecks
- Dispatch and Perform Relight
- Tracking and reporting the progress of an Outage
- External communication via web to customers reporting time to restore
- Knowing when an Outage is completed
- Historical playback and documentation of Outage
Gas OMS Business Case
There are a multitude of benefits and ROI’s that can be realized by utilities implementing a complete Gas OMS solution. The primary business case includes:
- Capability to manage outages in a structured automated process based on required information – saves time and increases effectiveness and productivity of Response Team through enhanced tools
- Provides the capability to address larger and more complex events
- Enhances the restoration process
- Lowers the risk of errors and regulatory non-compliance
- Gives capability to communicate status internally and to the public
- Provides the capability for documentation of playback of an event and response
- Enhances customer interaction and relationship increasing customer satisfaction
- Provides the capability to effectively and quickly engage response crews from other utilities and contractors by providing immediate mobile information and assignments via a field device and mobile log on
- Understanding of Outage boundaries and affected customers and system prevents turning off unaffected customers and the difficulties that occur in that scenario
Building a Complete Solution
UDC’s Gas Outage Management application constructed on Esri ArcGIS Server provides a complete Gas OMS which will deliver the capability to manage an outage from start to finish. The application has the integrations to key asset systems like Synergi and provides the capability to integrate each company’s key systems such as customer information, mobile or work management. The UDC application includes an Esri mobile application. Within the UDC application resides the required workflow processes for each aspect of an outage. This includes communication to the field and back and capability to monitor and report on status.
The requirements for the UDC Gas Outage Management application have been driven by input received from the member utilities of the Northeast Gas Association who provide Gas response.
We would look forward to discussing the application in more detail if you are interested – contact us to learn more.