Ellipse Conference:
19th May 2010, Welcombe Hotel, Stratford-apon-Avon
On Wednesday 19th May AMT-SYBEX hosted its annual Ellipse Conference at the Welcombe Hotel in Stratford-apon-Avon. This year saw over 40 attendees from 18 different clients across a wide range of industries attending the event.
The agenda for the day saw clients, visitors and AMT-SYBEX consultants provide insights into the some of the most important issues facing Essential Industries today.
Click here for the Agenda
Mike Duggan managed the day’s proceedings and set the socio-economic context outlining the challenging environment in which we and all our customers were now operating, stressing the importance of organisations being “in control” during this period.
The first speaker was Eddie Hamilton, the Network Investment Manager from Electricity North West (ENW). After summarising ENW’s history and role in the Utility Sector, a ‘pure-play’ Distribution Network Operator in the North West of England, he began to talk about the challenges set by Ofgem for DPCR5. For the first time, Ofgem has mandated the production of more tangible outputs for the regulatory period – to measure results against their submitted investment plan. An Industry Framework, based on a scale of asset condition (with a variable scale that could be used by different companies) will now form the mechanism for regulatory reporting. Ofgem is also keen for Companies to explain any changes to their plans (data, methodology, prioritisation or overall performance) through regular annual reviews during the period. ENW saw this as a risk as well as an opportunity.
For ENW, this change to the operating environment highlighted the importance moving forwards of asset, business data and reporting. The production of reports to support their DPCR5 submission was a significant undertaking involving 15-20 people for 3 months and relied heavily on ENW’s Condition Risk Based Management methodology that produces an Asset Health Index. This approach allows ENW to capture and analyse Condition, Performance and Risk, providing a relatively simple, transparent process linked to recent, historic performance information. All reports and decisions are based on the availability and accessibility of fact-based asset condition information – this makes the business data the essential factor in remaining ‘in control’ to manage investment, maintenance plans and policies.
Eddie closed his presentation by focussing on the importance of systems, most notably Ellipse for ENW, and data for the compliance to and outperforming of the Regulatory ‘contract’.
(Image showing David Harmsworth and Richard Williams)
Following Eddie was David Harmsworth, a Programme Manager from EDF Energy, who talked about their journey to improve their maintenance. David talked about Project SAS (Single Asset Solution) which delivered Ellipse for asset and work management, Field Data Capture System (FDCS®) for data collection and, Mincom Ellipse Reporting (MER) for reporting and the overall business vision for having “a single source of data and truth”. Following the initial project delivery, subsequent work was undertaken to assess how the solution was being used in the business and importantly why key data was not always being returned to the Ellipse system. Through a detailed Root Cause Analysis exercise which looked at IT, People. Process and Data, David and his team were able to determine that the actual IT solution was working as planned and that the real issue lay with the People, Process and Data elements of the project.
A year-long embedding phase was then carried out to address the change management delivered during the project concentrating on more targeted, role-specific training and the elimination of ‘silo’ working. The result of this initiative has been the that the solution is now actively being used across the geographically diverse EDF Energy region with real business ‘ownership’ being achieved and critically, a substantial improvement to maintenance through the quality of the data being returned. EDF Energy has maintained this ‘continuous improvement’ initiative and are soon to introduce an advanced Reporting Estate built on MER that optimises the quality data collected in the field.
Our own Senior Consultant Richard Williams brought the morning’s proceedings to a close and continued the theme of the ‘importance of data’ by giving a very interesting presentation - Identifying Critical Data. Richard talked of how data in organisations operating in a Regulatory governed environment was one of their most significant assets. Richard suggested that data was increasingly becoming the crucial issue for our clients as Regulators (in the various sectors) were now introducing penalties for poor data.
Richard commented on the need for organisations to understand the importance of data and how it linked with their business vision and performance, as it now represented a huge commercial value – with an estimate of something in the region of 20-25% of total OPEX and CAPEX costs being associated with Data Management. Richard pointed out that in his recent experience with a leading UK Water Company it was essential not only to recognise the key data but also to create ownership of this in the business, and incentivise the workforce to improve this.
Neil Canby, Program Manager, Western Power Perth Australia, gave delegates an insight into Western Power’s journey ‘In Search of Operational Excellence’.
Western Power face a massive geographical challenge providing an electricity transmission and distribution business to 1 million homes across a section of Western Australia measuring 322 000 square kilometres. Other challenges for them include a rapidly growing economy, temperatures hitting 40 degrees Celsius in the summer, limited access to workforce who can earn more in the mining industry, and all this on ageing infrastructure.
Western Power, through Operational Excellence, is striving to deliver quality, price, ease of purchase and use to its customers. Essentially to supply electricity well! In order to achieve this Western Power is transforming the core of the business through people and culture changes, an operational excellence programme, regulatory excellence, safety and health, future positioning and IT.
Neil is confident that if the strategy around transforming the core and investing the time on people and the right Business Strategy, IT systems will underlay all this hard work and provide Western Power with the Operational Excellence they have set out to achieve.
To finish the day Alan Scott, Principal Consultant, enlightened the delegates with a short presentation on GIS (Geographic Information System) and integration to Ellipse.
Mincom has developed an open interface between Ellipse and GIS called Mincom Geospatial Integration. This allows Ellipse to be used as a virtual GIS data store and layers of geographic information to be built over one another related to the geographical area of where assets reside.
Mincom has bridged the gap between standard asset management data and allowing this information to be displayed in GIS relative to geographic location. Using the Ellipse Map and GIS, users can now view the asset management information against the GIS background.
PRESENTATIONS FROM THE DAY
Eddie Hamilton
David Harmsworth
Richard Williams
Neil Canby
Alan Scott