Benefits of Automating Damage Assessment
Automating damage assessment would pay tremendous dividends for electric utilities. Not only would it reduce costs, but it would also likely reduce average restoration times.
Current Approach to Damage Assessment
Historically, utilities have utilized a very manual approach for damage assessment. The process typically involves printing maps, assigning work tickets to employees, hand-writing findings, and manually updating outage management systems (OMS).
The manual approach is inefficient and error-prone, and is full of time-wasters that can dramatically slow down productivity, such as:
- Difficulty reading or interpreting handwritten communications due to sloppiness or illegibility.
- Lack of accurate information to efficiently dispatch crews and resources.
- The manual printing of items and inputting of data.
Anything that can reduce these time-wasters should improve outage restoration times.
Automating Damage Assessment
Although automating damage assessment is not easy, in the long run it is clearly an investment worth making. There are many ways to automate the process, so the chosen automation approach is going to be very company-specific. But in general, here are a few examples of automation:
- Assessors use tablets to receive maps in real time, avoiding the time needed to manually print them.
- Assessors input their notes into the tablet, which automatically integrates with OMS to avoid manual data entry.
- OMS automatically creates work orders based on the inputted assessor data, and distributes them to field workers in real time.
According to this article, restoration typically costs $2k-$3k per day per full time equivalent (FTE). If we assume a typical restoration would require 1,000 FTEs, at an average cost per day of $2,500, we can surmise that a typical restoration might cost a utility $2.5 million per day.
If automating damage assessment can shorten the total restoration time across all storms in a year by just two days, that’s a $5 million annual savings and implies a payback period relative to the technology investment of only a few years.
