The Electric Utility Control and Quality Managment

The Purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the functional and dysfunctional control systems within the company that I work for. During this Overview I will also explain the criteria for the developing and evaluating these control systems. I am currently employed for a large Electric Utility in Chicago, Illinois. This Utility has gone through many changes in the last 10 years one of which is the transformation from a regulated industry to an unregulated one. In the past, prior to deregulation, our company was guaranteed a return or profit on investments. All of this was going to change. If our company was going to survive then we would need to come together and operate as one company instead of each region being there own little entity.

One of the largest and most successful functional controls within our company is the Work Control department. CONTROL SYSTEMS Formal target- setting, monitoring, evaluation, and feed- back systems that provide managers with information about how well the organiza- tion's strategy and structure are working. (Jones, Gareth.)

Its purpose is to provide a means to identify, schedule, prepare, and monitor the completion of identified maintenance, preventive maintenance, and projects. The formation of this control process allowed the company to control many aspects of the company's goals.

Our company is divided into 4 regions and each of these regions is managed by a Work Control Coordinator (WCC). Without going into great detail the work management process was centered on computerized programs that all work has to be put into. These computer programs are named Passport & PV. The program would be used to progress work through the many phases of the work control process. Then the next program that is utilized is a scheduling tool that we call PV. This program is used only for scheduling the work identified in passport. There are only a few people called schedulers that have access rights to this program and the reason for that will be seen later.

The progression of work would start with the planning process. Once a week a 15 week schedule is printed for review by the Planner. At 7 weeks prior to execution of the work all scheduled work must be planned or place on hold. Once the work is properly planned then the work task would be progressed to approve. At this stage all of the materials have been ordered, work instructions written and the estimated man hrs have been reviewed. The task is then considered to be approved and ready to review by the field supervisor. At this time, 7 to 4 weeks prior to execution, the prepared work package reviewed by the field supervisor to review and verify that the repairs can be made as planned.

This is a brief overview of the control process in use by our company. Now to ensure this process is being utilized there are reviews of milestones that have or have not been met and work that has or has not completed. Each week there is a review meeting that is attended by all work management and field employees. The first thing reviewed is what work did not complete and the reasons why. This is what we call schedule adherence. There is a goal for this and it is usually 85% meaning 85% of the work gets completed. Next to review is schedule adherence and this is the jobs in the schedule at 5 weeks and remained in the schedule all the way to completion. This goal is usually around 80%. Now the scheduler and PV needed to be kept as a stand alone tool that had limited access thus reducing the chances for manipulation of the numbers.

The work control system can be used in many ways to achieve the financial performance that our company desires in today's economy. As an example, recently our service area has been hit by numerous storms that have driven up the amount of emergency repairs to the system. To help in offsetting these costs our finance department has requested an increase in the amount of Capital work in the schedule. No problem, just a review of the Passport system for all capital works and put it in the schedule to be planned and reviewed. Work control also has the ability to bundle together as much maintenance work as possible by a review of data in Passport. As an example when taking a Transformer out of service that all identified repairs and Preventative maintenance (PM) is performed at the same time. PM's are a very important part of or business and is reportable to NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation). These PM's are scheduled and monitored for completion.

The Work management system also is also used to make sure that all of our new and existing customers needs are met. New customers can be either residential or commercial. When a customer makes an initial contact, for new service with our company, a Service Request (SR) is created and sent to engineering for review. Then there are times when an existing customer will need to upgrade or modify an existing service and again a SR is created for review. Once Engineering has reviewed the SR then a task is created in Passport for our field crews to execute the needed new service or service upgrade. There is a milestone for this type of work and it all is tied to what we call the Customer Need date. When the SR is created the customer will request that the new or upgraded service is completed by a certain date. Making the customer need date is a very important milestone that the Work management group must meet.

There are parts of our company that I would consider as a dysfunctional control system. The one that comes to mind first is our material supply department better known as the stores dept. They have adopted the JIT system, when an organization has a just-in-time inventory system, parts or supplies arrive at the organi- zation when they are needed, not before. (Jones, Gareth). Our company went to this system in order to save money on taxes that are charged on what we have in inventory. Another cost savings is in the reduction of the materials storage areas that were needed to house the extras or reserve amounts. One of the problem's with this type of system is that the vendors now are holding not only your emergency reserves but also the reserves of their other customers doing the same type of work. This issue became very evident recently when a sever storm hit out service area. This storm started in Nebraska and did a straight line to Pittsburg. That meant our vendors were short of the materials that we needed because the other utilities suffered the same fate from the storm as we did. The other issue comes from the fact of how reliable are these vendors to meet our material needs in a timely basis.

In the Electric industry our product is very hard to visualize so how do you produce a quality product? Normally our product is never seen, push a plug into an outlet or flip a switch to turn on the lights. The measure of