Blog

Pictured is City Utilities of Springfield Maintenance Supervisor Frederick Johnson at his desk inside the John Twitty. Energy Center reviewing an automated work roster in the ARCOS Callout and Scheduling solution.

Willy Haffecke, David Nelson, Frederick Johnson, Tracy Carter, Carol Jordan and Sherri Baxter aren’t widely known beyond City Utilities of Springfield (Missouri). But they’ve saved their utility hundreds of hours of work annually and ensured CU is able to communicate emergencies in seconds, not minutes or hours.

In 2016, Haffecke, the director of Power Generation, and Nelson, an outage planner/scheduler, along with their coworkers implemented the ARCOS^® Callout and Scheduling solution at CU’s John Twitty Energy Center, James River Power Station, Noble Hill Landfill Renewable Energy Center and McCartney Generation Station to automate the forecasting, planning and call out of electrical, mechanical and operations personnel.

As a power plant supervisor earlier in his career, Nelson knew the pain of trying to get people on site for overtime, holdovers or emergent work.

“You’d spend time on the phone, in the middle of the night, going down a list trying to get the right craft and combo of crafts to come to the site; sometimes you’d spend an hour or more,” recalls Nelson. “That’s time as a supervisor you can use to go out to the job, verify the necessary tagging is in place and prep for repairs.”

According to Nelson, when Haffecke came from CU’s electric department to become director of Power Generation, he brought with him knowledge of the ARCOS system in place for City Utilities’ linemen. Haffecke and Nelson compared notes and analyzed the situation.

Johnson, a supervisor for power station maintenance, Carter, the operations supervisor, Jordan, an office administrator during the implementation, and Baxter, an office administrator, quickly got behind the effort when they saw it was something that would make things right for CU. For example, with ARCOS supervisors can launch a callout from home, which speeds up the process of getting workers into the plant for emergency or routine work. If an environmental issue arises and CU needs all-hands on deck, or has to relay critical information, the ARCOS emergency notification feature can fire off a news bulletin to everyone in seconds.

As the team rolled out the ARCOS solution, they made use of CU’s “Thursday tailgates” to explain the benefit to workers.

“There was apprehension because some people don’t like change,” says Nelson. “But we can now let the software takeover by getting personnel on-site based on the craft needed, their position on the overtime list, and qualifications, so supervisors can go back to overseeing our plants.

“We tailored it to meet our needs in Power Production to be fair, equitable, and we have the ability to make changes as needed,” adds Nelson.

Between January 2017 and March 2018, CU has launched 249 callouts, which would have required hundreds of hours of supervisors’ time to complete manually.

Utility workers often go unnoticed. When something breaks, the spotlight shines on workers who restore service. But the industry is also filled with heroes, like those from CU, who make things right not in response to an emergency, but because they simply see a better way.

After Irma, we did a little digging into the impact automated damage assessment can have on a utility. After a string of Nor’easters we are reminded again of the impact effective damage assessment has on restoration efforts.

A recent conversation with executives of five, top North American utilities revealed that, on average, during a major event, a full-time equivalent (FTE) for restoration costs roughly $2,500 per day, including meals and lodging.

The first nor’easter hit on March 2.  According to ABC News, on March 9, 500,000 people were still without power. While utilities conduct assessment and restoration in tandem, reducing restoration by just one day can have a big impact on sending out the right crews to fix damage faster.

Let’s say that a utility required 1,000 more FTEs to help with restoration at a cost of $2,500 per day, which would tally roughly $2.5 million per day.

Many utilities still conduct damage assessments manually. Here’s what’s involved in what we call an “Open Loop Damage Assessment Process.” 

1. Printing of maps
2. Assigning damage tickets and maps to assessors
3. Assessors collect and report damage by hand, on printed maps
4. Driving back to the storm center with maps notating damage
5. Aggregating all the notations on each map to a) make sense of it, and b) determine a game plan for repair
6. Someone else manually entering the status of the damage ticket in the Outage Management System and creating a work ticket
7. Beginning the routing process for work tickets

You can get rid of all of the “Open Loop Damage Assessment Process” using automated damage assessment, which means:

• electronically sending maps and damage tickets to the field; and
• having assessors in the field electronically note damage and send via wireless communication their reports back to the storm center as they are completed.

As these reports come in, they could automatically update the Outage Management System, which would trigger a work ticket sent electronically to a repair crew that would start restoring power.  

At an estimated cost of $2.5 million per day, reducing restoration by just one day represents a remarkable saving for the utility. It also puts the community back online and back to work and gives customer satisfaction a boost.

Want to know more?  Call us, so we can share how customers are using ARCOS Damage Assessment to improve efficiency and reduce restoration time. Check out our events page for our upcoming Damage Assessment web demos, too.

The Edison Electric Institute Response Awards were announced February 7th and we could not be prouder of the recipients!   EEI gave two types of awards – one to utilities that responded and one to utilities that assisted.  It truly takes a village, and investments in resilience and efficiency to effectively meet the industry’s mission to provide safe, reliable, and affordable service.   Congratulations to you all – and a special salute to the utilities that are members of the ARCOS family.   

Storm Snapshot: Honoring Excellence in Power Restoration

View the picture deck from T&D World

Want to learn more? Check out our latest series: The ARCOS Storm.  Our first installment focuses on the planning that has to take place for a major event and how technology can improve the planning process.  We’ve told the story through the eyes of an electric, gas and water utility.  Simply pick the industry that you want to learn more about.  Don’t forget to sign up for updates so we can alert for the next installment.

According to a recent article in The New York Times, Xcel and other power companies nationwide are rapidly and strategically positioning for wind turbines and solar panels that generate less costly energy than coal-fired plants. In fact, Xcel says it’s rapidly becoming cheaper to build (and generate energy from) wind farms and solar plants than rely on coal. As these renewable plants come online, how will utilities and their partners handle emergent work and assess damage in the wake of major events?

Industrial wind turbines, often in remote locations, can measure up to 100 meters tall. At the top of these turbines, in the nacelle and hub, is where maintenance and repairs most often occur. Whether a turbine goes offline due to a component failure, such as a pitch system, or severe weather causes external damage to rotors, plant owners must respond safely and swiftly because they are losing, on average, several thousand dollars per day per turbine. Getting workers and resources into position happens faster with automated callout and a closed-loop damage assessment process.

Imagine a scenario in which you can quickly assemble and dispatch assessors. Humans and drones then submit damage assessment reports, which a network delivers to a control center to view all completed jobs and a summary of collected damage (by turbine, component, etc.), while automatically generating a work packet and integrating with an OMS and WMS for field crew assignment.

The future is almost here. Is your callout and damage assessment strategy ready?

ARCOS is very proud of our history and glad to see our founder, Mitch McLeod, being recognized as a 2018 inductee to the Paul J. Hooker Center For Entrepreneurial Leadership Hall of Fame.  Mitch, along with other honorees, will be inducted into the hall of fame on April 18.

Bowling Green State University’s (BGSU) College of Business created the Paul J. Hooker Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership Hall of Fame in order to recognize the achievements of graduates, honorary degree holders, and members of the community for, “founding, leading or building a new business enterprise for five years or more. These individuals have demonstrated an entrepreneurial spirit that has helped shape our economies and improved our quality of life.”  ARCOS is honored to have a founder that has made such an impact in business, the industry, and for the employees that serve to maintain a standard of excellence everyday.

For information about the history of ARCOS, be sure to visit the “Our History” page.  Additional details about the Paul J. Hooker Hall of Fame and its current members can be found here.

We live in a time where a solution is available for every problem.

Sometimes it is difficult to find the right solution, to the right problem, at the right time – this is exacerbated when the options are spread far and wide, and might only address parts of the problem you are looking to solve.

So, ARCOS thought, how can we help utilities, from multiple industries, with unique problems they are individually facing, find what they need NOW? With this question in mind, we came up with a concept to illustrate an event that takes place across multiple utility types to show from start to finish how our solutions can address the full cycle of the most severe problems you may experience. That concept – The ARCOS Storm.

What is the ARCOS Storm?

ARCOS Storm is a full cycle storyline that describes how a massive storm event affects multiple industries – electric, gas, water.  Each industry storyline is split into 4 segments, Plan, Respond, Restore, Report, in order to highlight challenges that are faced and the associated solutions through the lifecycle of an unplanned event.

How do I access ARCOS Storm?

We have already begun releasing content for ARCOS Storm, beginning with our intro page and the Plan section for each industry (electric, gas, water).  Over the coming weeks, we will be adding additional sections to our industry pages where you can follow the progress and response to the event by specific industry.  Additional content, including blogs and videos may be released as well, so keep an eye out!

Quick tip: While going through the ARCOS Storm, we recommend visiting the other utility types and reading their story as well.  We have found that even with different operations, many readers have found other perspectives of the same event to be insightful and influential in how they think about event response.

And you think 2017 was tough?

Some statistics from 2017:

• According to NOAA/NEI – There were 16 billion-dollar disasters in the US totaling over $300 billion – a new record
• Per the World Economic Health Forum – Extreme weather is the #1 global risk in terms of likelihood for a second consecutive year

Yes, 2017 was a  quite a year for storms, fires, floods, winds, tornadoes – – you name it, North America got hit with it.  Each and every time our customers rallied to the challenge – defeating the endless challenges that prevented electric, gas and water service flowing.

We wanted to capture for you how our customers used technology to reduce restoration time, better deploy resources, and improve customer satisfaction.  But those of you in the industry know how it is.  After each event, there is so much reconciling of information – much of which is sensitive – which prevents our customer’s heroic stories from being told.

Introducing The ARCOS Storm

ARCOS Storm is a full cycle storyline that describes how a massive storm event affects multiple industries – electric, gas, water.  Each industry storyline is split into 4 segments, Plan, Respond, Restore, Report, in order to highlight challenges that are faced and the associated solutions through the lifecycle of an unplanned event.  We took the customer stories we learned about over several storm seasons and packaged them up into a storyline so that all utilities can learn from the experience of our customers. Our first installment focuses on the planning and how utilities in the electic, gas and water segments use technology to help them plan better for unplanned events.  

Have a story you want to share? Let us know and we’ll incorporate it into our storm series.

Distributech 2018 be in San Antonio this year January 23-25th at the Convention center and will host over 300 utilities and 13,000 attendees.  With more than a dozen session tracks there’s something for everyone. If you have to prioritize your sessions at Distributech 2018, be sure to put Brad Baugh’s session at the top of your list.

After Major Events, Utilities Assess Damage to Gauge What’s Needed for Repairs. Alabama Power’s new Mobile Damage Assessment Tool Cuts the Process From Days to Hours, Using GIS, Smartphones and Tablets

Brad Baugh, Alabama Power
Room: 210A
Thursday, January 25, 2018: 8:00 AM – 9:30 AM
Mobile Solutions track

Utilities can considerably improve restoration time by automating the damage assessment process – eliminating the paper maps alone can help utilities get work in the hands of accessors at lightning speed – and returned back to the storm center in real time…which means repair crews and be dispatched faster to improve restoration times.  There’s a host of other benefits which we’re sure Brad will cover and you won’t want to miss.

The ARCOS team will be on site too and if you’re attending, please let us know so we can meet you and introduce you to other ARCOS customers.  We’ll also be at booth #2763 if you need us.

Two days ago, Maine’s regulators ordered power companies to complete a storm report detailing their response to the October windstorm that knocked out power in the Northeast to half a million people. The regulators want a report within 30 days describing the daily outages as well as contractor-specific dates, times, locations, equipment and number of crews during restoration. The utilities also need to report in detail about mutual assistance and how they coordinated with state and local officials during restoration.

In addition to detailing the costs incurred to restore, the commission wants details on all external resources used, including contractors and utilities, and how they coordinated with state and local officials during restoration.

How many hours – or days – would it take your utility to pull this together?

Moving this timeline bar forward or back provides a snapshot of the status and distribution of crews at any given time. All information can be exported to a CSV or Excel file.

Resource Management solutions from ARCOS are cloud-based and designed specifically to help all utilities (Gas, Electric and Water) automatically capture this type of data, so it’s available to submit the moment regulators or utility executives request it.  Many of our utility customers also use the data to hone their own process for continuous improvement and performance management. As a utility, if you could respond in a few hours to this request with accurate and detailed information (even maps for historical visualization) — your utility would be a hero.  That’s what we set out to do every day – make our customers heroes.  There’s a reason why 70% of electric utilities use ARCOS solutions to respond, restore and REPORT for both ‘blue sky’ and storm events.

For the complete story, please see the article by Lori Valigra at Bangor Daily News

ARCOS® LLC has implemented its Software-as-a-Service ARCOS CallOut® and Scheduling solution at the Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Tennessee American Water to automate how the utility’s distribution department responds to customer emergencies. For Tennessee American Water, a subsidiary of American Water, responding to emergencies includes making calls to the utility’s employees to locate available crews to restore water main breaks and shut off meters during after-hours, unplanned events.