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CROW - Outage Coordinator

The CROW Outage Coordination module is an industry-leading software tool that supports the critical business process of scheduling planned outages.

Planned outages impact your grid reliability and capacity, and can affect your neighboring utilities. They are costly to implement and are costly to cancel or recall. Planned outages may also require the coordination with — and approvals from — internal departments, other control areas or asset owners, customers, and other stakeholders. Outage coordination is a complex and non-linear process which often involves numerous requests and changes, approvals and re-approvals, required notifications, and last-minute rescheduling.

The effectiveness of your outage coordination impacts your bottom line.

The CROW Outage Coordination module is a tool that—

• supports your outage coordinators through this complex, non-linear process by maintaining a controlled and auditable workflow while involving the necessary staff inside and outside the control room,
• is absolutely unique in its comprehensiveness and in its ability to integrate seamlessly with the control room operations logging processes,
• facilitates communication with external partners such ISO's/RTO's, Reliability Coordinators, and neighbouring utilities, and
• helps your team manage the process so they can concentrate on optimizing the planned outage schedule thus minimizing their cost and minimizing their impact on reliability.

Benefits of Integrating Outage Coordination with Control Room Logging:

Outage Coordinators, Field Maintenance, and Control Room Dispatchers spend valuable time and energy keeping each other apprised of the status of the planned outage schedule. Field requests, approvals, changes, re-approvals, even more changes, and finally implementations are often managed through countless emails and phone messages between the outage coordination team and the control room.

By integrating Outage Coordination with Control Room Logging, you can—

• enable seamless collaboration between all participants,
• streamline and strengthen your business process, and
• unlock powerful business analytics.

The CROW Outage Coordination tool is integrated with the CROW Operations Event Logging system used by the Control Room Operators in order to accomplish all of the above.

The Control Room Operators can see the planned outages, provide inputs and approvals using their logging tool, and no longer need to track countless individual communications between themselves, the Outage Coordinators, and the Field Maintenance Staff.

Once completed the planning/approval stage, the Outage Coordinator seamlessly hands off the planned outage to the Control Room Operator who then initiates the implementation and logs the actual outage with a simple mouse click.

It also maintains a complete revision history for all of the participants in the process so you can immediately recall the when, what, and why for all requests, approvals/denials, and changes.

By streamlining collaboration while maintaining control and auditability, you dramatically strengthen your business process.

The CROW Outage Coordination and CROW Operations Event Logging tools also further strengthen your business process by helping to ensure that planned outage optimization opportunities are not missed. CROW helps Outage Coordinators and Control Room Operators identify opportunities for planned or scheduled work to be performed under an unexpected forced outage. It also raises flags when separate outages are being approved on the same equipment and warns of overlapping outages on parallel circuits. These capabilities help grid operations reduce costs, improve reliability, and bolster availability statistics.

The Asset Management Advantage:

Effectively integrating these processes and unifying the operations data provides your Asset Management staff the ability to measure performance vs. plan for scheduled outages in specific regions or by specific field crews.

It can provide statistics on all forced and planned outages by region, equipment, equipment type thus enabling leading-edge predictive and detective Reliability Management practices.

Integrating these Operations processes unlocks the ability for your systems to move beyond being work-flow management systems. They become powerful decision-support systems that can help you make wise reliability investment choices and achieve the highest return.

You need CROW Outage Coordination. To find out more, or how to get it in your utility, click here.