Wintry times such as we have seen this December drive home the need for improved outage response. Utilities in Oklahoma, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri are still dealing with outages due to widespread ice storms, at one time affecting more than 500,000 customers. People said the tops of 30 foot trees were touching the ground and icy limbs were breaking off, bringing down power lines as they plummeted to the ground. Employees were sent home when the power failed at work only to find the power was out at home as well. Customers could have used better estimates of how long it would take to restore power to their homes and businesses. Should they stay home, go to a warming shelter, or attempt to travel somewhere that has power?

Utilities with outage management systems (OMS) integrated with mobile workforce management systems (WMS), meter data management (MDM) and smart metering are better equipped to respond to outages, all other things being equal. There are several obstacles to using back office systems to restore power more quickly, one of which is integration. A number of vendors are pre-integrating systems to reduce the cost and effort that utilities must devote to getting systems to pass along the right information to each other at the right time, which is especially important when responding to emergency situations. One such vendor is Oracle, a company that has invested in a suite of applications utilities use to operate more efficiently, including OMS, WMS, CIS and MDM.

Oracle is not alone in this regard. The degree of consolidation in the utility back office is increasing as more and more independent providers of software products are acquired by companies like Oracle, Itron, and ESCO Technologies. UtiliPoint believes consolidation is occurring due to the tremendous growth expected in sales in the next few years in smart metering, which has already contributed to a burst of investment activity in back office software.

This author was invited to attend the tremendously large Oracle user conference (OpenWorld) in San Francisco in November, a city very unlikely to ever see a wintery ice storm or outage due to a summer thunderstorm. It was clear from the outset that Oracle has many, many clients, all of whom seem to use a number of Oracle products. The expansive Moscone Conference Center was not large enough to accommodate the number of attendees and sessions—we hiked around downtown San Francisco to five different hotels to take in all the sessions we wanted to attend.

Even though California is on a mission to reduce energy use across the board (peak times and otherwise), this effort was not visible as we walked around the city. We were bombarded with flashing video signs, lights in every shop window, music and sound all driven by something plugged in somewhere. The contrast between California's public policy of conservation and the reality of marketing to OpenWorld attendees by California merchants was almost as great as the contrast between the pleasant sunny weather in California and icy mess in the Central Plains.

Utilities need to carefully respond during ice storms. Travel can be difficult —the roads are slick and temperatures very cold—they want to be sure to dispatch crews with the right equipment to repair downed lines to avoid delays and extra travel. Crews don't want to have to go back because they didn't realize there was more than one problem or because they didn't have the right equipment or people. Utilities would like to avoid calling someone at 3:00 a.m. to make sure power has been restored or ask people who have worked for 36 hours in a row to call back every customer who reported an outage. OpenWorld sessions on outage management, meter data management, and PG&E's rollout of smart metering were overflowing as utilities from around the world planned for what utilities in the Central Plains are struggling through to recover from the ice storms.

OMS and WMS are important systems in normal operations but become critical applications during widespread outages when power restoration can take anywhere from one to ten days, or even longer for ice storm recovery. Crews may been sent from other utilities to help out, making it even more important for crews to have frequent contact with central dispatchers. Smart metering and MDM systems successfully integrated with OMS and WMS offer a tremendous level of detail on who has power and who hasn't, allowing OMS systems to work with more complete and accurate information.

As presented by Oracle Utilities at OpenWorld, Oracle plans to provide help on integration by 1) devoting resources to understanding how different utilities (delineated by type of utility, size, and commodity) perform tasks that will be supported by the back office system; 2) setting up template processing plans for utilities to start with, and 3) helping utilities to modify the selected template so that the overall data flow mirrors the utility current process or the new process the utility wishes to adopt. The plans call for this to be provided without requiring custom programming, reducing the time and cost of integrating systems, even allowing utilities to configure their systems according to how they do business now or how they want to do business in the future.

One of the problems of working with one supplier for a suite of applications is that utilities may wish to use one or more applications provided by a different supplier. The plans for pre-integration of applications included in the Oracle Utilities suite are expected to influence utility decisions on which applications to implement due to the high cost of integration. Utilities will weigh the advantages of other applications, if any, against the additional costs of integration.

The ultimate result should be that more utilities will choose to use applications provided by one supplier, meaning that the initial sale into a utility could be followed by sales of other products in the supplier's suite, or that an application may be replaced with a competitor's product. As integration becomes less costly as we go forward, decisions to replace products will be easier to justify and several applications may be considered for replacement rather than just one. For example, utilities may replace their billing, WMS, and OMS systems simultaneously. Utilities will find it easier to grow back office functionality as their needs change.

Having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area, this author has only a limited understanding of what it's like to spend a week trying to stay warm without heat during and after an ice storm. UtiliPoint applauds the utility crews working around the clock and the hardiness of customers enduring the long, cold nights in the dark. UtiliPoint recommends that the first processes that Oracle lay out include mapping the extent of outages and restoration progress checks.

UtiliPoint's IssueAlert(SM) articles are compiled based on the independent analysis of UtiliPoint consultants. The opinions expressed in UtiliPoint's IssueAlert articles are not intended to predict financial performance of companies discussed, or to be the basis for investment decisions of any kind. UtiliPoint's sole purpose in publishing its IssueAlert articles is to offer an independent perspective regarding the key events occurring in the energy industry, based on its long-standing reputation as an expert on energy issues. © 2004, UtiliPoint International, Inc. All rights reserved. This article is protected by United States copyright and other intellectual property laws and may not be reproduced, rewritten, distributed, redisseminated, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast, directly or indirectly, in any medium without the prior written permission of UtiliPoint International, Inc.