Utilities
Electrical Outage

A major utility company in Pennsylvania was facing an undesirable rate of electrical outages and customer impact. Daniel Penn Associates was called in to do an assessment of the utility's electrical event processes which included the following:

		Capital Project Process
		Corrective Maintenance Process
		Event Process
		Preventative Maintenance Process
		Improvement Process

The utility wanted to reduce relay outage events and customer impact. The focus was to define the "gap" between where the organization is relative to these processes versus where it needs to be to meet current and future goals to reduce relay event occurrences. The study was to identify the issues and prioritize a corrective action plan that would move the operation to a higher level of performance.

After completing the process assessment, DPA concluded that the utility could make significant improvement in outages and customer impact reduction by embarking on process improvement in two sub-processes and by starting process improvement.

By careful focusing, DPA identified two out of 26 sub-processes for redesign. These were identified as providing major impact on the business problems. Improvements were identified in all sub-processes and were prioritized for future redesign.

The Bottom Line

The utility has established task forces in each of the identified
sub-processes that will redesign those two sub-processes with a
target of 30% reduction in outages and customer impact.

DPA . . .   Articles  |  Case Studies  |  News Releases