Challenge
For over 180 years, Consolidated Edison, Inc. has provided the energy and infrastructure needed to serve metropolitan New York, one world’s most dynamic and demanding marketplaces. The project that we executed grew out of a major incident that happened to Con Edison years ago – a power failure occurred, and power was out for a number of days, severely affecting the public perception of Con Edison. They received an excess of negative attention for the length of time needed to fully restore power.
As a result, Con Edison realized that they urgently needed take steps to reduce power restoration time. From a technology perspective, they needed tools to improve communication, reduce errors, and streamline their workflows by taking out the manual processes whenever possible and automating them.
Solution
The solution was to implement an enterprise wide, web-based system, to enable electronic communication between various groups involved in the process of restoring power in the event of an outage. The system would also record historical data that could later be used to analyze incidents, along with improving overall communication. Highlights of the system include:
- Web-based application for managing work orders and sending them to crews out in the field
- Mobile application, along with printers, installed into company vehicles used by crews in the field
- Electronic notifications and alerts to users of the system when a new feeder goes out of service.
- Portal to provider higher level system view and job progress to upper management
- Electronic records for auditing and legal purposes
Results
The results of this effort were resoundingly successful. Once in place the system was able to:
- reduce the average restoration time from 36 down to 14.2 hours.
- cut communication errors by 92%
- save the company tens of millions of dollars each year since it’s implementation
- provide historical data for analysis during several emergency events that have taken place in recent years
