Enterprise Asset Management
Utility Industry Customer Success Story
How a major utility enhanced operational excellence by standardizing nuclear applications
and processes across an entire fleet
Customer Challenge and Goals
A major North American utility with substantial nuclear generation
capabilities sought to enhance its business performance by
lowering production costs, as well as to ensure consistent and
safe operation of its fleet. The nuclear fleet was committed to
operational excellence in order to deliver a plentiful supply of
dependable electricity, within a culture of safety, and outstanding
customer service while maintaining fiscal responsibility. By
concentrating on establishing best business practice models with
a focus on continuous improvement to streamline work processes,
optimize asset accountability, and increase visibility throughout all
work practices, the nuclear operator was able to:
–– Support equipment reliability improvement initiatives by
managing and optimizing maintenance activities and
supporting robust implementation of work week and outage
planning activities;
–– Improve configuration management by streamlining the design,
approval and engineering change processes;
–– Optimize work management by ensuring a balance between
the critical work required to optimize plant performance, and
available resources consistent with plant operating status;
–– Enable effective business planning by incorporating all of the
key decision criteria for planning work in its plants and allowing
for a multi-year outage planning horizon that can easily change
to accommodate its changing needs and priorities;
–– Enable an integrated, process-centric, intuitive user experience
across the nuclear business process while ensuring regulatory
compliance;
–– Support corrective action by enabling workflows integrated
with the work and task assignment process to support its
safety conscious work environment – identifying and correcting
potential problems, along with maintaining the associated
documentation and audit trail; and
–– Ensure a safety culture for its workers and the environment.
The Solution
Recognizing the need to integrate its enterprise asset
management (EAM) with plant operations and maintenance
applications used across the fleet, the utility sought to identify
a trusted advisor to partner with that had deep mission-critical
industry expertise, a proven nuclear generation software portfolio,
and a legacy of safety.
By selecting ABB’s nuclear generation software portfolio, the
utility was able to optimize critical business processes, provide a
model for continuous improvement across its nuclear fleets, and
ensure safety for its workers and the environment. This process
improvement required a flexible, extensible, integrated software
solution and technical infrastructure that takes advantage of
current technologies, as well as the scalability and robustness to
address the needs of 10,000+ users.
Steeped in decades of experience in managing nuclear plants
around the world, ABB’s generation portfolio was selected and
installed. The upgrade included:
applications for work and asset management
equipment reliability
operator logs and rounds
clearances
supply chain
long-term asset planning, and
plant health analysis.
Customer Results
“Our mission in nuclear generation is to produce electricity safely,
reliably and cost-efficiently while protecting public health and
safety. Providing a common foundation of business processes
for over 10,000 users – based on ABB’s time-tested solution set
which is used effectively by nuclear facilities around the world – is
helping ensure that we achieve this mission.”
- Senior Executive, Major North American Utility
The utility selected the Enterprise Software Product Group within
ABB because it recognized the power of ABB’s generation
solution portfolio and our commitment to safety and reliability. Not
only does the portfolio span the breadth of processes that were
previously handled by many separate applications, it also provides
inherent integration – further lowering the utility’s IT costs and
boosting business results.
As a result of implementing ABB’s generation suite, including
Asset Suite, eSOMS, ER Suite products and leveraging Connected
Asset Lifecycle Management (CALM), the utility has standardized
work management practices across its fleet and greatly reduced
the number of applications being supported for nuclear operations.
ABB’s solution drives best practices in big ticket areas such as
an integrated work order package preparation and supply chain.
By improving work package preparation in terms of quality and
speed, the utility was able to hit its cost reduction targets, while
being responsive to maintenance needs and mitigating delays and
errors. With a special focus on supply chain processes, especially
those relating to purchase requisition approval, award and
purchase order transmission nuclear operations reduced inventory
and streamlined spending, by increasing the level of automation in
the supply chain for consumables and q-level 3 and 4 materials.
With ABB’s CALM approach supporting its solution, the operator
is set up to realize additional benefits such as process efficiency,
effectiveness, and integration gains that can be recognized
through a review and optimization of business processes.
Examples of this are PdM/PM processes, action tracking
consolidation and document verification for use.
The Enterprise Software Group: Mission critical
ABB serves as a strategic partner to the nuclear industry with
performance-based asset management strategies that have been
in place for decades. We specialize in nuclear software and have
the largest customer base – with over 98% of all Nuclear Power
Plants in North America running ABB enterprise software – and
over 50% worldwide. In fact, IDC Energy Insights positioned ABB
as a leader in its Worldwide EAM Software for Power Generation
Vendor Assessment. As such, ABB continues to invest in and
evolve its portfolio to drive value in Nuclear Power Generation.
ABB provides complete and total support for the strategic goals of
nuclear operators, including:
––
Safety
––
Operational Excellence
––
Long Term Asset Management
––
Proud and Professional Workforce
––
Cost Effective Operations
––
Regulatory and Stakeholder Confidence
ABB’s heritage is grounded in creating solutions with the most
robust functionality in the EAM marketplace. This utility leveraged
the full suite of fully integrated solutions to support a processcentric, holistic view of its business: Asset and Work Management,
Materials and Procurement, and Safety and Compliance. The
solution supports the entire lifecycle via a webservices architecture
featuring optional cloud delivery that facilitates the integration to
complementary applications. We extend EAM with the equipment
reliability, operations management and integrated complementary
solutions to asset-intensive enterprises, such as this nuclear
operator, striving for operational excellence.
Tap the power and productivity of ABB for a better world today
Given the current business realities facing utilities with decreased
budgets, aging workforce, higher demands, intense competition,
increased pressures from regulators and aging plants – nuclear
fleets must ensure that the processes in place, along with the
systems to support them, will allow the company to continue as a
world-class utility.
“Our ability to support the operation of one of the largest fleets
in North America positions us well to replicate this success
across the many nuclear operators around the world that need
to optimize processes across their plants while maintaining the
utmost safety.”
– Claudio Facchin, President, ABB Power Systems Division
Customer Success Story | Enterprise Software Group
About the Enterprise Software Group
We provide industry leading software and deep domain expertise
to help the world’s most asset intensive industries such as
energy, utilities and mining solve their biggest challenges,
from plant level, to regional network scale, to global fleet-wide
operations.
Our enterprise software portfolio offers an unparalleled range of
solutions for asset performance management, operations and
workforce management, network control and energy portfolio
management to help customers reach new levels of efficiency,
reliability, safety and sustainability. We are constantly researching
and incorporating the latest technology innovations in areas such
as mobility, analytics and cloud computing.
We provide unmatched capabilities to integrate information
technologies (IT) and operational technologies (OT) to provide
complete solutions to our customers’ business problems.
For more information please contact
The Enterprise Software Group
Americas:
+1 678 825 1458
+1 800 868 0497 from US and Canada
Europe, Middle East, Africa:
+44 1483 794080
Asia Pacific:
+61 7 3303 3333
www.abb.com/enterprise-software
info.pges@abb.com
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