Established and Scaled Enhanced Inspection Program to Mitigate Risk
R&A served as key and essential contributors, including lead operations consulting partner, in an engagement to develop and end-to-end capabilities for an Investor-Owned Utility to establish, scale, and optimize a dedicated Aerial Inspections program. The project’s goal was to identify and mitigate wildfire risk on overhead electric equipment. At that time, the program grew from a novel technology use case to the largest, sustained end-to-end program of its kind in the United States at over $40M and 200k+ assets per year.
Situation
A large utility with 5M+ customers, 55k square miles of service territory, and 1.5M assets faced an unprecedented wildfire risk due to a combination of factors, including an aging electrical grid and an unprecedented wildfire risk changing climate conditions. The client needed to increase volume, throughput, and quality of risk-informed asset inspections to meet strict risk and regulatory requirements, maintain public safety, and mitigate financial risk.
Objective
Incorporate and scale aerial sensing technology to supplement legacy inspection methods and remove blind spots at the tops of utility poles where significant unidentified risks/ issues could exist. Aerial sensing technology became a staple to drive regulatory risk-based inspections to meet high-volume annual regulatory commitments.
Evaluate and select a digital workflow platform that offered value through off-the-shelf accelerators with the ability to customize to the utility’s complex backend. Once selected, implement the platform across inspections programs against a roadmap of use cases that mitigated risk to current operations.
Solution
Design Aerial Inspections Program and Define Requirements: Partnered with a cross-functional Incident Management Team (IMT) to a) define a technology roadmap that exceeded regulatory requirements and b) set the data standards to enable scaled collection of high-quality data on schedule and on budget.
Acquire and Implement Initial Operating Capabilities: Scouted, technically qualified, and procured services from drone and helicopter vendors on an annual basis.
Evaluate Digital Platform Options and Develop Product Roadmap: Led facilitation of Executive workshops that produced digital roadmap opportunities; led current state assessment to develop product roadmap and implementation schedule for digital workflow platform. As a Product Owner, advised throughout critical implementation phases to support integration and solution optimization.
Optimize and Scale Program Field and Data Operations for Sustainability: Refined program and project management processes for the deployment of aerial technology to enable continuous improvement over 3 annual collections cycles and balance scope, schedule, cost, risk, and quality. Developed and implemented data management standards to reduce risks associated with aging, unstructured data and maximize data use across services.
Results
Successfully established, scaled, and transitioned management of a multi-faceted aerial inspection program that exceeded annual regulatory and corporate goals leveraging drones and helicopters for collection, cloud for storage, and digital workflow and analytics for analysis.
Successfully completed current state assessment, product and implementation release roadmap, and end user stories and performed lead Product Owner role to enable implementation of 3 platform capability releases.
-
Supported leadership in building out a team of 15 full-time and over 200 contract employees to support daily program activities; trained full-time personnel and transitioned critical tasks for day-to-day management.
-
Formalized and implemented 20+ critical business processes across three functional areas to enable repeatable results, minimize operational waste, and measure program success. Annually collected and inspected 200k+ assets.
-
Introduced new technology solutions for data collection, data storage, workflow management, and analytics to best support the program’s goals, enhance the workforce, and enable new use cases.
-
Led design of the program’s governance and operating model to align all 5 program functions and personnel to strategic and operational objectives; identified KPIs for each function and position to support performance management. Performed gap analysis and developed roadmap.
-
Led multiple change campaigns (e.g., digital workflow and GIS optimization) to drive stakeholder technology adoption and move away from inefficient legacy methods. Drove culture shift from stance of reactive to proactive asset management.