ADMS benefits all areas of the enterprise and lines of businesses (LOBs), from making the grid safer and more resilient to reducing outages and improving customer satisfaction with services. Deploying an ADMS is a multifaceted effort that requires coordination amongst several departments, cross-discipline considerations, and a well-thought-out plan. To take advantage of all that an ADMS offers, utilities will benefit from enlisting a trusted partner to help them plan and prepare for the implementation effort. As a vendor agnostic advisor, our sole objective is to help you implement ADMS in the most strategic way for your organization.
UDC provides the insurance policy on your ADMS and related digital investments by helping your organization navigate all stages of the planning and implementation processes. We help you maximize your ADMS deployment to leverage current technologies and optimize future technology advancements.
Get more out of your ADMS investment. Go beyond management and make greater progress towards grid automation from start to finish.
Understanding ADMS for Your Enterprise
Prior to undertaking this large-scale enterprise transformation, we make sure our clients understand what is commercially available to their organizations in the ADMS space, the business impacts of deploying the model, and the implementation process itself. Understanding these foundational concepts empowers you to be an active participant in your own transformation, enabling you to help drive the project scope, make informed implementation decisions, and build a plan that meets your organization’s unique grid modernization goals. Insight into the process also sets realistic expectations with the technology capabilities as well as the pace for technology adoption throughout the enterprise. That way, there are no surprises come deployment.
UDC’s experience with ADMS consulting and our reputation as a high-integrity partner makes it possible for us to facilitate industry conversations between our clients who are beginning their ADMS journey and ones who are further along in implementing or building on their ADMS platforms. This provides real-world insight into the challenges and successes of implementing ADMS at the utility.
Coordinating amongst Lines of Businesses
Many times, the different LOBs are siloed within the utility. For a successful ADMS rollout across the enterprise, it is crucial to involve all stakeholders and impacted LOBs early in the planning process. Your overall implementation strategy should be largely based on this complete input as the ADMS data can be leveraged throughout the organization to support different types of operations.
We can help facilitate this cross-discipline coordination by conducting interviews with executives and stakeholders from different departments across the organization to pull together the project goals and objectives of each group. We then schedule and coordinate ADMS workshops involving all impacted stakeholder representatives in order to make sure everyone is on the same page and to discuss any concerns as a group.
Taking a Logical Approach
To get the most ROI for existing and future investments, we develop a business release deployment plan for our clients based on their priorities and specific grid modernization requirements. Our approach enables our clients to map their target system functionalities in multiple, iterative releases where they can continually refine the functionality requirements as the integrations are deployed. This allows for more flexibility and the ability for the organization to make informed decisions throughout the implementation.
Most utilities want to deploy the highest value ADMS applications first, without building a strong foundation for the ADMS or addressing functionality. Through our process of establishing the foundation first, the automation is built progressively, permitting our clients to fully harness all ADMS applications instead of a select few. This approach also prevents power disruptions and safety risks as the ADMS is verified before operating the independent automations.
The resulting business release schedule and accompanying high-level budgets and roadmap milestones can be leveraged by your utility to drive vendor selection and as a basis for building future RFP requirements.
Harnessing Data for Advanced Applications
Low data fidelity is one of the leading causes of ADMS implementation failures industry wide. The ADMS requires current and accurate data to power the advanced applications. Without these data requirements, your utility will be unable to maximize the full benefits of your ADMS. Most ADMS models have at least four systems of record (SORs) that need to be kept current. The need for zero data latency introduces two sets of data governance into the SOR – at the design and as-built stages.
UDC can help your organization achieve and maintain zero data latency, ensuring your model is current with all proposed and as-built network model changes. Leveraging our GIS expertise, in-depth understanding of the utility data lifecycle, and data accelerators and tools, we can perform the manual and automated data cleanup tasks as required by the ADMS model.
We can additionally put ADMS data governance measures in place to ensure high data fidelity and completeness is maintained in the future.
Accelerating Your ADMS Transformation
UDC’s reference enterprise solution architectures supply another layer to your grid management program by demonstrating what your utility’s current capabilities are in the ADMS model and how you can reach advanced functionality for the entire enterprise through maximizing your technology and GIS investments. Our models include applicable utility workflows that are used to drive the required business activity flows and power a steady-state data flow diagram for key technology systems and integrations and can be fine-tuned based on your organization’s specific needs and priorities.
Key Technology Systems and Integrations:
- GIS
- Mobile GIS (mGIS)
- Outage Management System (OMS)
- Energy Management System (EMS)
- Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA)
- Mobile Workforce Management (MWM)
- Automated Meter Infrastructure/Meter Data Management System (AMI/MDMS)
- Demand Response Management System (DRMS)
- Switching Requests
- Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)
- Distribution Planning System (DPS)
- Weather Feeds
Our reference solution architecture tool, based on peer utility experience, includes a set of technology dependent implementation business releases organized into six distinct businesses that will be used to drive your ADMS implementation roadmap based on your priorities.
We also provide our Smart Grid Data Repository reference architecture which supports the ADMS model in addition to substation automation (SA), distribution automation (DA), AMI, and human collected information regarding asset conditions and the operating status of the power system grid.
Choosing the Right Vendor for You
Developing the RFP and selecting your ADMS vendor are important steps in the ADMS deployment process. Your RFP needs to accurately define capabilities, functionalities, and services required not only at the time of initial deployment but to meet the goals of long-term and future ADMS implementations. Our jointly developed business release roadmap can be leveraged to streamline the vendor selection process and generate your RFP requirements.
UDC can assist in choosing the vendor that best fulfills your utility’s system requirements and one that will be your partner for the long-term. We can also support your ADMS implementation by providing implementation oversight to ensure requirements are fully addressed by your vendor.