Outage management systems as integrated elements of the distribution enterprise

Customer service and reliability objectives have risen to the forefront of the distribution enterprise in light of evolving industry drivers that include performance-based regulation, guaranteed service contracts, an e-business economy, deregulation, competition, highly publicized outage events, enhanced customer awareness, and others. At the same time, meeting these objectives has become increasingly difficult as distribution systems continue to grow in size and complexity, existing equipment continues to age, and the operational knowledge base erodes as utilities reduce staff and seasoned employees retire. In pursuit of cost effective solutions, distribution owners/operators continue to turn to decision-making and process automation through information technology in the form of outage management systems (OMS). Robust OMS solutions provide the capability to model the distribution system and its distributed elements, integrate and apply all necessary real-time operations information, dynamically manage connectivity and supporting resources, monitor real-time performance, and communicate with an array of back office processes to enable faster service restoration and accurate reporting of outage information. This presentation provides an overview of outage management systems, their effective, efficient integration into the distribution enterprise, and a brief look to the future.