Certa Service Reliability Solutions

Those in charge of distribution operations at utilities are faced with a number of pressures, including operating the network efficiently, maximizing availability, improving service reliability and quality, and efficiently managing the company’s response during outages while safeguarding workers and the public. At the same time, executives in charge of distribution planning and engineering are concerned with optimizing the company’s network operations to achieve the maximum financial and operational return on investment. Those in charge of commercial and customer care must optimize response to new service requests, bill accurately for services provided, and keep customers satisfied. And in the area of regulatory affairs, the company needs to improve the quality of information given to regulatory authorities.

CertaLogic’s Service Reliability Solution Suite, comprising Certa Outage Management System and Certa Service Reliability Analysis, helps utilities address these cross-functional issues on a daily and long-term basis. Designed specifically for utilities, these applications provide significant business value due to the unparalleled access to high-quality, reliable information delivered by the underlying Certa Platform.

Certa Outage Management System
Without access to accurate and timely information, utilities struggle to locate outages and restore service quickly. Call center representatives are inundated with inquiries – which they are often unable to satisfactorily answer. And when the company inadvertently bills for services that were not delivered, customers inevitably complain and the accounts receivable office is left to remedy the situation.

Certa OMS is a robust, integrated, and flexible software system that helps utilities improve the management of dispatch operations to reduce restoration time, improve operational efficiency, and safeguard workers and the public. The product leverages an accurate network information model to efficiently handle the entire dispatch process from trouble call entry and point of failure prediction to crew dispatch and claim resolution.

A number of unique features distinguish Certa OMS from others. Utilities can simultaneously manage multiple states of network objects, such as as-built and as-designed, and companies operating multiple utilities can even manage multiple networks in a single model. Symbology automatically changes when an object meets a user-defined condition, such as when a switch opens or closes. For audits, network events can be reconstructed with a detailed history of outage reports by region, substation, circuit, and consumer. The calculation of service quality indices takes into account network changes over time, enabling the generation of reliable reports and accurate performance metrics. And because Certa OMS considers the phase connectivity of the distribution network, utilities can trace by electrical phase. Ultimately, Certa OMS enables utilities to tap into new opportunities for improving service quality and productivity.

Certa Service Reliability Analysis
Many utilities lack the ability to accurately calculate and analyze service quality at the equipment level – a real barrier to optimizing network operations. While most key indicators of service quality – such as SAIFI and SAIDI – are time-based, companies lack a historical record of network changes, making accurate calculations impossible.
The result is that utilities over-compensate some customers – or compensate the wrong customers – for lack of service. Due to misunderstandings about causes of poor service reliability, organizations unnecessarily replace well-performing equipment and provide regulators with inaccurate data that cannot be audited.

Certa Service Reliability Analysis monitors levels and ensures the accuracy of service reliability levels through integration of existing network operational data with information from external systems, such as customer information systems and billing. The product includes analytical tools powered by Certa Business Analytics that enable utilities to easily perform outage calculations and KPI analysis. Utilities can evaluate the financial impact of service quality metrics at any desired level: by commercial branch, by customer, or by network device. With Certa Service Reliability Analysis, complex technical and engineering information is easily translated into new business value that helps utilities improve service reliability over time.

With Certa Service Reliability Solutions, employees throughout a utility can efficiently and effectively manage critical network-related issues on a daily and long-term basis.