Helping utilities companies to meet and exceed the performance targets set by the regulatory bodies such as Ofgem and Ofwat is a major focus for Atos Origin. Regulation can be a key catalyst for business transformation, helping to accelerate the modernisation of utilities businesses and IT infrastructures to improve performance and minimise risk.
Like many organisations with a strong engineering heritage, utilities companies were historically divided into discrete and separate functional units. However, this approach doesn’t serve the needs of the modern market or help to meet regulatory compliance targets. Utility companies are looking to take a more holistic view of their businesses and adopting the type of web-based IT practices that are yielding significant benefits in other industries.
Atos Origin can help utilities through this change management while enabling them to capitalise on their historic investment in legacy applications and leverage the value of their vast stores of data. The development of an IT strategy can be instrumental in helping to address the challenges thrown up by regulatory reviews. As part of this a quality risk management programme can be developed to for risk reduction and better compliance processes.
Asset risk management
For a utility network operator, asset risk management raises a number of challenges. The first is to obtain an accurate, enterprise-wide view of the assets that have been installed and the extent to which those assets have been, or can be, standardised. The second challenge lies in acquiring the performance data needed to identify:
- Which assets are failing most and need to be replaced earlier?
- Which assets are failing least and can be ‘sweated’ more without impacting operational performance?
UK utility network operators have made great advances in both these areas.
However, there is a third challenge, still to be addressed of cultural acceptance. The operational, engineering and maintenance culture in many utilities is that of ‘gold plating’, in which solutions are deliberately over-engineered. The motivations for this are impossible to fault – safety for staff and customers and high availability of service.
Extending asset life, which may seem to increase the risk of failure, can thus be a cause of concern for operational, engineering and maintenance staff who are measured by different performance criteria to those engaged with planning and managing business operations. Instead of focusing on the business issues, an organisation can find itself allocating a great deal of resource to concerns that are not necessarily critical to the business.
Utilities therefore need to ensure that all asset information is closely aligned to actual business needs. Multiple asset repositories need to be replaced with a single, centralised asset repository that enables corporate-wide standards for data capture. Tools to analyse asset performance in field conditions and to fully model ‘what-if’ scenarios will be required to assemble a properly evidenced investment case that will ensure that the organisation’s processes meet and exceed the compliance targets set by the regulator.