Oshawa Power is proud to be this year’s winner of Hexagon SI’s 2018 Safety and Infrastructure’s Innovation Award for our Outage Management system.
Oshawa Power’s Outage Management System connects existing utility technology AMI, SCADA, CIS and GIS to identify outages, predict outages, and communicate outages. With the focus on improving reliability, reducing outage times and improving customer communications our team along with Hexagon’s collaborated together to provide the customers of Oshawa with better service and reliability. Part of this project is deploying Intelligent Switches, sectionalizing areas with defective equipment and restoring as many customers in many cases before 1 minute. Oshawa Power uses real data from AMI meter outage messages (outage/restore) timestamps as our benchmark for when the outage starts and ends.
This is a significant achievement, crew response time improved, dramatic increases in our reliability, notification from our OMS was accurate, and communicating the outages to our outage map, IVR system and social media was seamless all as a result of good engineering and system network analysis.
In 2017 we sent out approximately 250 tweets with power outage details and our social media audience grew 27% and 18% for Facebook and Twitter respectively as a result of informative outage notification posts. The predictive dialer called 42,000 customers in 2017 to inform them of power outages in their area.
Historically only 5%-10% of total outages would be planned. Planned outages are mainly to perform infrastructure maintenance and preventative upgrades to avoid any unplanned outages. Planned outages are preferred as the utility can plan their resources in a more efficient manner and the outage duration is kept to a minimum. Unplanned outages are time consuming as crews with the assistance of Operations have to patrol first to identify location and cause of the outage before being able to repair. In 2017 with the OMS fully functional we reported to have 61% planned outages and with the accuracy of the system unplanned outage duration was drastically reduced with the elimination of patrolling since the system can direct the crews to the device causing the outage.
These achievements were not done by investing in new technology platforms but by utilizing existing platforms and resources available and make them work for us to improve service and reliability for the customers of Oshawa. Currently we are the only utility that automatically dispatches crews based on the OMS without the involvement of an operator. This allows us to deliver more to our customers for the same cost. Oshawa Power is proud to be leading the industry with forward-thinking, customer-focused approaches!
About Hexagon
Hexagon is a leading global provider of information technologies that drive productivity and quality across geospatial and industrial enterprise applications. Hexagon’s solutions integrate sensors, software, domain knowledge and customer workflows into intelligent information ecosystems that deliver actionable information. They are used in a broad range of vital industries.
