Outage management systems: surviving the implementation

Electric utilities are looking for better ways to manage operations and satisfy customers. To this end, many electric utilities are actively installing or are considering installing an outage management system (OMS) for their electric distribution operations. While these systems are costly, they provide superb capabilities for swift and accurate dispatching of restoration resources as well as the ability to manage nearly overwhelming amounts of data in an organized manner. While the technical challenges of installing such a system are significant, there are also nontechnical issues that impact the success of the new system. This presentation identifies some of these key issues that are critical to ensure successful implementation of the new system