Features & Functionality

Work Management

POWER360AMS tracks work via service requests, work orders, inspections and projects. Service requests are used to track issues reported by citizens, customers, or internal staff. They can be generated in the office by call takers, come from Citizen Engagement apps in use by the organization, or via POWER’s own web reporting tool embedded in the organization’s website. 

Work orders are the primary tool for maintenance management. POWER360AMS provides a means to manage and track work orders, activities, tasks, costs, employees, and other information relating to work performed on assets.

Asset management involves two fundamental practices—reactive and preventative maintenance. Reactive maintenance occurs when someone interacts with or recognizes a problem with an asset. Preventative maintenance is often driven by general maintenance activities or recurring work schedules (weekly, monthly, and so on). POWER360AMS handles both scheduled and reactive maintenance.

Examples of reactive maintenance would be a citizen calling the local utility to report a downed power line, streetlight outage, leaning pole or damaged electric meter. Reactive issues typically begin with a service request. Examples of scheduled maintenance would be substation transformer PM, line patrols, infrared inspections and planned relocations.

Dynamically linked, work orders are directly associated with their respective asset in the geodatabase. In POWER360AMS, these types of work orders are called attached work orders. Unattached work orders are not associated with an asset feature, but they are associated to a feature type and a general location such as an address or intersection; they can later be attached to an asset. Attaching work to assets is essential for good asset management as it allows users to select assets and view all work performed, as well as to determine the actual costs in maintaining that asset, allowing for fact-based capital replacement decisions.

Inspection Programs

POWER360AMS provides a robust platform for setting up asset inspection programs. In POWER360AMS, an inspection is a recurring record of a feature or related object’s condition. Inspections track asset observations and/or test results. Assets often have several different types of inspections performed on them.  For example, power poles may have climbing inspections, aerial inspections and infrared tests.

Each inspection can be associated to a work order or can be created independent of the work order. POWER360AMS provides predefined inspection templates, or the organization can also create their own inspection templates with fields pertinent to their internal inspection processes.

Ad-hoc search tools can query the database for inspections based on field values or geographic location. Subsequent ad-hoc or summary reports can be created, and the data can be exported to Microsoft Excel. Like work orders, service requests, and cases, inspections can be represented spatially on the map.

One key aspect of inspections is the calculation of a condition score based on the captured observations. These conditions score can then feed into the solution’s Operational Insights module used to determine each asset’s operational risk, which in turn can drive financial decisions on refurbishment and replacement programs.

Vegetation Management

Vegetation management has always been an important activity within utilities, but with recent instances of fires caused by electric malfunctions, it is even more urgent that utilities have effective vegetation management programs in place. In POWER360AMS, the flexible work order and inspection forms allow for the planning, doing and auditing of the tree and trimming and brush clearing activities. Mobile activities can be completed on hand-held devices in the field.

Plant Maintenance

Operations and maintenance activities associated with vertical assets in plants can be completed in POWER360AMS. These activities could include reactive work, preventative work or inspections. Cost tracking functions allows costs for labor, materials, equipment, permits and contracted work. Whether your plant is modeled in the GIS as features, nongraphical objects, or in 3D, the platform allows users to view and manage work on the assets.

Engineering Design

POWER360AMS is not an engineering design application but it is an instrumental part of the process involved in planning, designing, and constructing changes to the power grid. The application has been linked to engineering design packages like Advanced Utility Design (AUD) and ArcFM Designer. The design applications handle the design of changes to the network and POWER360AMS tracks the project from its initial request through to design, construction, as-builts and financial reconciliation. The platform supports the use of both assemblies and warehouse stock parts and provides for estimated vs. actual construction cost tracking.

Outage Response

The POWER360AMS solution can also be linked to Outage Management Systems (OMS) such as Schneider Electric’s Responder. This allows for the automated creation and linking of remedial work orders back to outage events, thus providing a complete history of asset work within a single platform.

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