Scott Cisel is Utilities Industry insight lead for Accenture in North America, and Bill Ernzen is a managing director in Accenture Smart Grid Services.
While current national and regional mutual aid processes historically have been effective, the magnitude of Superstorm Sandy exposed issues that industry executives recognize they must address. Predictions for the increased frequency and magnitude of these superstorms have brought new focus on issues affecting the industry’s ability to respond. Recognizing that the next set of Sandy-type storms need to be addressed differently, utility executives are rethinking manpower strategies and the associated enabling technology to optimize utilization and scheduling of incoming craft-skilled manpower.
During isolated events, manpower generally is readily available, as nearby resources can be brought in from peer utilities. But a superstorm event spans a wide geographic area, and raises manpower needs across potentially multiple states and jurisdictions, with different work procedures and protocols. In these situations, utilities still count on other utilities as well as contractors for assistance, but the scale, reach, and complexity increases. It takes more time to identify support, transport resources, address state-by-state traveling issues, and then quickly orient and dispatch crews.
Superstorm Sandy showed that when it comes to manpower today, resources to execute normal operations are becoming scarcer, and even more than ever, utilities in these broad catastrophes lack the skilled craftspeople necessary to coordinate work and execute restoration the way they did in the past.
Thus, a strategic issue facing every utility is determining what its manpower staffing approach should be – especially for these types of events, and this part of the workforce. From there, a plan to achieve that goal needs to be developed.
Finding skilled craft workers and then keeping them is a challenge. One potential source of recruits are people who have served in the military, many of whom already possess desirable technical skills and work habits. Other possibilities include integrating contractors and vendors as part of an extended workforce. Industries with similar craft-talent challenges are using techniques like talent supply mapping to pinpoint geographic locations with pools of targeted skills.
Given that every utility is dependent on the ability to share resources, enabling better integration is another issue to address. Once a utility understands the projected effect of the event and what utilities to contact for aid, technology can play a key role in giving utilities what they need to know to drive restoration. Specifically, they need to know how many crews are coming and when they will arrive. Once crews arrive, the host utility needs an effective mechanism to actually get the work to the crews, and to obtain restoration completion details. They also need a way to get damage assessment reports quickly, to update the outage model. After the event, the hosting utility needs an accurate and efficient approach to handling the financial reconciliation. Better integration of processes and technologies – using existing infrastructure – can offset some of the costs incurred.
As utilities face the challenge of fewer craftspeople available in the industry, building a resource strategy that includes in-house manpower, contractor resources, and mutual aid availability will be important to plan for both day-to-day operations and catastrophic events, as those become more frequent. Leveraging both an enhanced industry model and technology integration can make the mutual aid process a more predictable and timely solution for restoring customers when a major event occurs.
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