Energy
Safer operations through clarity and focus
A large and established power generator with a combination of nuclear, wind, natural gas, and coal plants acknowledged that the energy industry is changing — quickly. Their energy services needed to be delivered as efficiently as possible in order to remain competitive. Even beyond lowering costs, they needed to continue to find new ways to improve upon the safety of their plants and the security of the infrastructure. Plant operations and maintenance had always been their specialty, but growth meant adding more resources to scale a labor-intensive set of processes.
The set of tools that they already had in place provided solutions for only parts of their needs and didn’t scale. Additionally, they were handcuffed to costly vendor solutions running aging technologies that required manual workarounds and inconvenient processes to share information across the organization.
They needed a way to codify their deep experience and lessons learned to increase efficiency and free their staff from demoralizing and tedious tasks to focus on proactive management of their plants.
“We need an innovative way to ensure that our power plants are operating efficiently, safely, and securely. We keep encountering issues that could have been identified and resolved before they became real problems. All of the disparate technologies we are using only address parts of our challenges.”
Solution
The answer was to reimagine their business process and streamline their work by eliminating workarounds that had lingered long enough to become standards. The resulting solution was an integrated monitoring portal that would focus the contextual information available at operator fingertips to support their decision making.
The system is able to leverage a rich history of data to analyze and codify trends and present those as nimble alerts that allow resources to focus on emerging problems rather than a flood of false positives. The solution becomes the central location for operator’s information — open issues, items to watch for, and action plans for common problems — all within an intuitive user experience that allows operators to spend more time solving problems rather than fighting with their tools.
- Microservices based architecture that horizontally scales to support growth over time.
- Seamless integration of existing enterprise assets to eliminate context switching and duplication of data.
- Industry leading security measures to ensure safe operations in both the human and cyber realm.
- High-performance processing of mass volumes of streaming time-series device data identifying key events and alarms.
- The ability to schedule regular reports and generate ad hoc reporting as needed.
Impact
Streamlined operation that reduces outages and allows the team to work smarter.
Safer and improved operational efficiency
- Operators are enabled to use their strengths and expertise to ensure efficient functioning of plants without performing laborious manual workarounds.
- Reduction of operational overhead and maintenance costs for hardware and software by consolidating many technologies into one lean platform.
- Proactive identification of plant issues based on analytics and key information to drive controlled maintenance, avoiding costly replacements and outages and greatly reducing the risk of an incident at the plant.
Increased ability to innovate
- Enables further automation and other new value-add opportunities with a modular technology platform that can evolve and continue delivering efficiency at scale.
Drastic increase in staff productivity
- More efficient use of personnel thanks to reduced back office administrative time.
- Lower maintenance overhead and reduced impact from unplanned outages.
CONNECTED CAPABILITIES:
