Outage Management Systems Real-Time Dashboard Assessment Study

Electric distribution companies are faced with increased pressure from customers, the media and regulators to provide accurate outage information that is very timely and essentially in real-time. Distribution owners/operators turn to new technology in the form of Dashboards, Business Intelligence and Outage Management Systems (OMS) to help address these demands. Under ever increasing pressure to improve reliability of electric supply, operations needs to perform restoration faster and more efficiently, driving internal demands for the detailed restoration information to be available in real-time as well. The needs of these internal operational users are typically even more detailed and complex. In addition, regulators are providing financial incentives or penalties based upon reliability goals or Key Performance Indicators (KPI)s. Management is demanding that accurate calculation of progress towards meeting these goals be provided daily or weekly rather than monthly or quarterly. This presentation covers the results of a study into the needs of existing outage management systems users and what they need in a real-time dashboard to meet these new business challenges.