The Challenge
In the utilities sector, managing the health and longevity of critical infrastructure assets is a significant challenge. Utility companies must balance regulatory compliance, risk management, and resource allocation while ensuring uninterrupted service. For one of the largest utility companies in the southwest, achieving this balance meant realizing a board-level commitment to digitize asset management as part of a 5-year strategic roadmap. The utility needed to implement a predictive asset management solution that could integrate data across the enterprise and provide actionable insights on their highest cost and risk assets.
The Opportunity
Point B partnered with the utility to transform their asset management capabilities with a solution that could predict asset failures, optimize maintenance schedules, and prioritize investments based on real-time data. This presented an opportunity to deploy a digital twin of the utility’s assets, leveraging advanced data science techniques to model risk, failure, and maintenance scenarios.
Our Approach
Point B led a multi-year, enterprise-level initiative to transform asset management through digital innovation. We began by facilitating collaboration between the utility’s digital transformation team, IT department, and business stakeholders. Using agile methodology, we deployed a sophisticated data model that incorporated over 20 unique asset types across transmission, distribution, substation, solar, and fossil energy generation systems.
Using this data model, our customer could analyze cost, risk, failure, decision, and outage data, enabling the creation of a digital twin—a comprehensive visualization of the entire asset ecosystem. This digital twin provided a holistic view of asset health, allowing our customer to forecast failures, optimize maintenance, and strategically allocate resources.
Addressing organizational roadblocks, including fostering awareness of the need for a robust data strategy and governance framework was key to our success. We worked closely with the IT department to automate data integration with a leading customer relationship management software provider, ensuring real-time, contiguous information synching across the enterprise.
This digital twin provided a holistic view of asset health, allowing our customer to forecast failures, optimize maintenance, and strategically allocate resources.
Project Results
The digital twin was a groundbreaking success. Our customer was able to visualize the health of over 1.5 million assets, resulting in informed financial decision-making and prioritization of maintenance activities. The model's predictive capabilities allowed the utility to lower maintenance costs and streamline interventions, improving grid reliability.
This innovative project did not go unnoticed. Our customer was nominated for an award by The Association of Edison Illumination Companies (AEIC) due to the bleeding-edge nature of the technology and its successful deployment—a first in the utility industry.
The solution’s scalability has been demonstrated beyond initial business groups, with plans to incorporate all enterprise assets into the data model. The project’s success ensures that our customer can manage operational costs and grid exposure more effectively today, and into the future.
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