Helping the Tennessee Valley Authority

Smart is...
Gaining the insight to predict resource requirements and respond to changing energy requirements with agility and speed.

By managing their fleets as single entities rather than separate organizations, utility companies like TVA are realizing enormous improvements in efficiency and associated cost savings. New insight into operational trends and performance enables these organizations to better predict and plan for resource needs across plants. Standardized processes help ensure flexibility in a rapidly changing and highly regulated market.

Smarter Energy: Optimizing asset utilization to increase business agility

• Instrumented: Asset, maintenance and inventory information is captured and tracked from a single system; metered data provides condition-based monitoring
• Interconnected: Integrates work management, corrective action, financial and supply chain systems and processes across entire enterprise
• Intelligent: Global view of operations enables staff to better plan and predict resource requirements across the fleet

For utility companies today, better managing their infrastructures is becoming a high priority as they work to support an ever-increasing demand for power and constant pressure to keep rates affordable.

Consider IBM client Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the largest public power company in the United States. Established in 1933 by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” the TVA generates electricity for approximately nine million people in Tennessee and portions of six other contiguous states. It consists of six nuclear units on three sites—these supply 30 percent of TVA’s power supply—plus 29 hydroelectric dams, 11 coal-fired plants, nine combustion-turbine sites, three combined Cycle sites, a pumped-storage hydropower plant, and 19 green-power sites that employ wind turbines, methane gas, biomass and solar panels.

For companies like TVA, standardizing and streamlining work across power generating plants is critical. Standalone business processing systems, independent tracking mechanisms and manually intensive processes increase operational costs. Additionally, with increasing regulatory requirements and oversight of how utilities manage their operations, these companies needed greater flexibility in tracking work and maintenance for audits.

Transforming operations

One of the foundational pillars in helping companies fundamentally transform their operations to achieve sustainable performance improvements is the ability to manage work and operate fleets enterprise wide. For example, IBM helped TVA to integrate its work management, preventive maintenance, and financial and supply chain systems and processes. This facilitated day-to-day maintenance across TVA’s fleet of more than 70 power-generating plants. It is also helping staff gain greater insight into operations, which is critical in enabling the company to attain top quartile benchmark performance in the industry.

In delivering the solution, IBM® Global Business Services® used IBM Maximo® Asset Management software to integrate more than 24 legacy applications, standardize asset management processes and eliminate 70 legacy systems. With 2 million asset records and over 550,000 inventory units under management, the implementation represents the largest deployment of IBM Maximo in the utilities industry.

Through this deployment, IBM helped TVA staff implement a process with a single entry point to request work, manage inventory, and track both planned and unplanned work from initiation to completion. Integration with the company’s scheduling, human resources, financial and time-entry systems enables staff to identify the skills required, assign resources based on availability, and make certain that the right parts are available at the right location when needed. It also provides comprehensive visibility into the total time and cost for work conducted. Business rules in the system automatically dispatch preventive maintenance work orders based on time elapsed or ‘on demand’ such as plant outages. Data from meters on many assets are also fed into IBM Maximo software for condition-based monitoring and maintenance (e.g., IBM Maximo records that set parameters on meters allow workers to see acceptable high and low boundaries for Measurement Points during inspections.).

Any supporting documentation needed to complete work (such as instruction manuals, engineering drawings, purchase and maintenance records, safety manuals, etc.) can be accessed through the main portal from the company’s document management repository and “associated” to the implementing work order.

With the supply chain and operation organizations in one system, TVA can better plan and utilize resources across the fleet. As a result, if maintenance personnel observe a faulty bearing in a motor, they can input a service request, check any related warranty information and confirm parts availability from a single interface.

As part of TVA’s implementation, data from IBM Maximo software is extracted into the company’s enterprise data warehouse and combined with historical information and cost data for use in comparative analysis and reporting. IBM Cognos® software helps staff analyze trends and track key performance indicators (KPIs). Hundreds of KPIs are currently monitored including the response time on high priority work orders, the percentage of planned versus unplanned activities and work completion times. For example, with this insight, staff can quickly assess if a process is taking more time at one facility than another and provide training to reduce any delays.

Lowering operational costs with improved efficiency

By standardizing processes fleet wide, organizations like TVA have the advanced technologies and processes to meet the changing requirements in the utilities industry—confirming compliance, planning shutdowns, addressing complex supply chain demands, facilitating continuous improvement, and improving organizational learning and knowledge transfer as employees change roles or retire. The result is increased operational efficiency and lower costs across their power-generating facilities. And as organizations shift operations to meet the world’s requirement for cleaner energy sources, they can confidently leverage industry best practices to accelerate their transition.

Business benefits:

• Increases operational efficiency and optimizes asset utilization enterprise wide
• Helps organizations achieve sustainable performance improvements
• Reduces operating costs
• Improves organizational learning and knowledge transfer
• Provides flexibility to more quickly address new regulatory requirements

Solution components:

Software

• IBM® Cognos® 8 Business Intelligence
• IBM Maximo® Asset Management

Services

• IBM Global Business Services®

For more information

To learn more about how IBM can help you transform your business, please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner.

Visit us at: ibm.com/tivoli