Technology Planning to
Maximize Your Investment
By Power System Engineering, Inc. (PSE)
Introduction
With a Technology Work Plan
in place, utilities can rest
assured that their
decisions are based on
a conscientiously
developed strategy.
It does not take much of a miscue on a technology project—such as a
less than optimal design, the wrong choice of technology or vendor, or
ineffective contracting—to quickly waste substantial dollars, time, and
resources. These miscues often happen in the early stages of the planning
process, when sometimes utilities elect to deploy a given technology
because of the industry hype, board mandates, or because of a good sales
pitch from a vendor. There is, of course, a better approach.
Power System Engineering, Inc. (PSE) has developed a strategic planning
process that identifies the applications and technologies that will provide
the best value and from there develop an implementation plan that
ensures success, which we call a Technology Work Plan (TWP). With a
TWP in place, utilities can rest assured that their decisions are based on a
conscientiously developed strategy.
Benefits of Developing a TWP
n
Mitigate Risk and Gain
Substantial Savings
n
Set Priorities
PSE’s technology recommendations are based on our
considerable experience with procurement and
implementation, which helps utilities avoid costly
mistakes and gain substantial savings.
The final plan recommends the order in which you
should implement different technologies. For
example, the TWP illustrates the pros and cons of
deploying an outage management system (OMS)
prior to advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) or
geographic information system (GIS).
© 2013 Power System Engineering, Inc. (PSE)
•
n
Identify Your Budget
A budget will be presented for each application and may include
cost justification or feasibility level business case that forecasts the
financial outcome of a program. These financial analyses can
clarify year-end budgeting and help secure budget approval.
n
Foster Staff and Management Consensus
PSE’s process involves seeking staff and management team
“buy-in” for the overall plan.
n
Learn How to Integrate Existing and
Future Systems
Integration is a key aspect of any technology plan to ensure you
experience the full functionality of your systems.
www.powersystem.org
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Creating the Technology Work Plan
A TWP is a five-year roadmap
that defines the best mix of
technologies and integrations
to deploy each year.
Step 1: Evaluate Your Utility’s Present State
Step 2: Define Your Desired Future State
Step 3: Assess Gaps
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The final TWP arises from clearly identifying the gaps between
your utility’s present and desired future states. Only with a clear
understanding of which applications and technologies will best fill
those gaps can utilities then begin to map out all the elements of the
TWP, including deployment priorities, integration strategies, and
budgetary calculations. The chart below illustrates this process.
The TWP starts by looking at the present state of the utility. As you
look inward, consider some of the following questions: What systems
are currently in place? Are they functioning properly, or do they need to
be replaced? Are you getting the most from the existing technologies, or
do they need to be better integrated into other systems? What are your
current staffing resources, and do you expect changes in the future?
Once a clear picture of the present state is drawn, it is important to then
review your existing business goals and determine your utility’s desired
future state. While ensuring future technologies fit well with current
technologies and with an eye toward scalability for the future, this
step will help establish a list of technologies or programs that may be
deployed in the future.
Once you have uncovered the present and future state, assess the
gaps. Gaps might consist of new technology/programs that need to be
deployed, staffing needs, better integrations between technologies, and
implementation of enabling technologies such as communications to be
able to get the most from each new deployment.
© 2013 Power System Engineering, Inc. (PSE)
Learn About New Technologies
Education on
available technologies
is key to
establishing
stakeholder buy-in.
Education on available technologies is key to establishing stakeholder
buy-in, especially when all departments are educated on the available
technologies. There may be more than one way to fill a gap. With
proper education, you can ensure that purchasing decisions are based on
a clear understanding of all the available options.
Each utility has different needs, but it is important to keep each
technology or program on the table in the beginning stages. Possible
applications to investigate include:
l
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA)
l
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)
l
Load Management and new Demand Response (DR) opportunities
l
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
l
Automated Staking
l
Outage Management Systems (OMS)
l
Customer Information System (CIS) and
Financial Information System (FIS)
l
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
l
Mobile Workforce Management (MWM)
l
Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL)
Evaluate Needs
l
Meter Data Management (MDM)
It is typical in many utilities that each functional
group (engineering, operations, customer service, etc.)
implements the technologies that meet its needs only.
However, this approach creates silos in the organization
which prevents utility-wide information sharing and the
full utilization of assets. In these cases, utilities often
discover they have wasted significant time and money
duplicating efforts from department to department.
l
Distribution Automation (DA)
l
Substation Automation
l
Asset Management
l
Prepaid Metering
l
Mobile Voice and/or Mobile Data Communications
To prevent this kind of isolation, it is important that all
the utility’s functional groups sit together to discuss
needs. These discussions tend to yield a more unified
understanding of which needs are the most critical.
l
Fixed Data Communications (e.g., wireless solutions,
fiber optic, satellite, power line carrier, BPL)
As you are completing the TWP steps, there are many
things to consider. You will want to make sure you have
completed your due diligence in the following areas.
Selecting applications and technologies that meet the
needs of multiple departments at once gives your utility
more bang for its buck. And this unified needs gathering
process establishes greater buy-in from all groups,
ensuring that the selected technology is ultimately better
utilized across the utility.
© 2013 Power System Engineering, Inc. (PSE)
It is important to educate your utility on the various technology
applications and their relevance to your utility, vendors and their product
offerings, means of integration, etc. This can be done by inviting the
vendors to complete product demonstrations, talking to neighboring
utilities on their experiences, and bringing in an unbiased third party
who has worked with various vendors and utilities to share their lessons
learned. The more information that you have, the better prepared you will
be to make the right decisions.
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Complete a Feasibility Level
Business Case
Utilities that create a Strategic
Communications Plan up front have a
greater success in deploying planned
(and unplanned) applications.
Completing a feasibility level business case can be beneficial for the
decision-making process, but you do not need to complete one for every
type of technology. Usually, utilities will evaluate the business case for
AMI, demand-side management, and MWM, for example. But for other
technologies, it is sometimes more difficult to define improvement
benefits in financial terms or to reflect the benefit of replacing or
upgrading an aging technology with something newer. In those cases,
the decision to procure other technologies, such as SCADA and CIS,
for example, is better served by a detailed cost justification.
Develop a Strategic Communications Plan
Communications is an important part of any technology plan. Thus,
while on your way to a TWP, it is also a good idea to create a Strategic
Communications Plan (SCP). The SCP focuses on integrating
communications to leverage the infrastructure for present and future
applications. This step is crucial to implementing a Smart Grid; the
communications infrastructure is in fact the very foundation of the
Smart Grid.
Unfortunately, an SCP is often an afterthought once the application
technology has been procured or even deployed. However, utilities
that create an SCP up front have greater success in deploying
planned (and even unplanned) applications. These utilities have also
been able to justify more dynamic communications infrastructure
(and associated process improvements) because they are able to
spread the communications capital expenditure across multiple
applications. Similarly, utilities may be able to reduce overall recurring
communications costs by, for example, flowing multiple applications
through the same communications pipe versus paying monthly
telecommunications costs for separate AMI lines, SCADA lines, and
LMR backbone lines. Overall, an SCP extends the life of new and
existing investments.
A Note about the Smart Grid
TWPs integrate the concept of the Smart Grid to advance the level of
intelligence in a utility’s operation to include not only such programs
as AMI, demand response, and feeder automation, but also enterprise
systems and processes such as customer information system (CIS),
work management, rates, and other future applications.
Smart Grids vary in their level of sophistication and intelligence,
and are accordingly often referred to in terms of “smart,” “smarter,”
and “smartest.” Highly automated, integrated systems, capable of
self-healing, are ideal; nonetheless, more basic smart grids may be
possible and within reach of some smaller utilities. Thus, how the
Smart Grid applies to your utility is somewhat dependent on your
present infrastructure, application needs, and vision.
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© 2013 Power System Engineering, Inc. (PSE)
Develop an Integration Plan
At the conclusion of the TWP,
you will have an understanding
of the order in which you
should implement different
technologies and timeframes.
Some products may be more easily integrated with others, and the
viability of integrating multiple systems can be a critical deciding
factor in selecting a vendor’s product. Developing an integration plan
ensures that you are carefully considering which new applications must
integrate with which existing applications and to what degree. Then,
you can evaluate each vendor’s capability of meeting those needs.
Integration decisions must also be considered at the right time; thus,
defining a deployment schedule is critical. For example, one has to
have a plan for how an OMS would be integrated with the AMI prior to
selecting the OMS, IVR, and GIS vendors.
There are several approaches for integrating various applications.
While you are not selecting your vendor as part of the technology
planning process, it is important to consider your integration approach.
Some utilities elect to pursue a “best in class” vendor that focuses on
a technology for an application or two while others choose to pursue
one primary vendor for many applications. The choice depends on each
utility’s unique situation.
Finalize Your TWP
The final step is pulling all this information together into a
comprehensive plan. This includes creating a five-year deployment
schedule and budget. It is important to understand that this plan is ever
evolving because any number of changes at a utility can alter the plan.
Thus, think of the TWP as a living document, and update it each year.
Once the technology roadmap is in place, procurement, deployment,
and integration of the applications will be fairly straightforward.
Creating a Smart Grid is not particularly mysterious. It all comes down
to deploying technologies that best leverage communications, data, and
applications across all functional groups within the utility.
About the Author
Candice Roth
Practice Lead – Technology Planning and Automation
Candice leads PSE’s technology planning projects, which involve
automation, communications, engineering, and technology road
mapping. Candice has over 10 years of experience with these projects
and received a BS in Marketing from the University of Wisconsin –
Oshkosh.
Contact Candice at 608-268-3520 or [email protected] with any
questions you might have regarding PSE’s TWP capabilities.
© 2013 Power System Engineering, Inc. (PSE)
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Serving the utility industry since 1974
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consultants
PSE is a full-service consulting firm. Our team has extensive experience
in all facets of the utility industry, including communications, IT,
and automation planning and design; economics, rates, and business
planning; electrical engineering planning and design; and procurement,
contracts, and deployment.
We are employee-owned and independent,
which gives our clients confidence that we are
motivated to satisfy their needs and represent
their best interests.
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© 2013 Power System Engineering, Inc. (PSE)