Sep 3, 2014
Powerco is New Zealand's second largest electricity distributor, with a 30,000 kilometer distribution network, serving over 320,000 electricity customers. Powerco also serves over 100,000 gas customers. Powerco has been an OSI customer since 2008, utilizing OSI's state-of-the-art monarch™ platform for real-time monitoring and control. Operating in a regulated environment, Powerco works with independent customer-facing energy retailers and contracted service providers to respond to customer outages.
In an initiative aimed at improving the service provided to customers, Powerco engaged OSI to develop a new distributed architecture that could track detailed outage information and support commercial agreements between the Company and its service providers. The OSI OMS solution provides high levels of security while providing access to different types of users in the control center, on the corporate network and from outside Powerco.
Based on Big Data and web technologies, the OMS system includes advanced functionality for Distribution Modeling and Management, Contact Management, Outage Analysis, Work Management and Outage Information System software modules, with interfaces to GIS and IVR. The integrated nature of the OSI OMS streamlines SCADA and manual operations in one consolidated data model and user interface. In the future, Powerco will utilize the solution to manage gas network incidents and dispatch gas jobs as well as other non-outage jobs.
"Powerco was in need of a modern integrated and secure OMS to support new Electricity Field Services Agreements and to replace disparate legacy systems," said Dean Stevenson, Acting Network Operations Manager of Powerco. "Our prior experience with OSI made them a natural choice for providing us the new outage management capabilities we need today, as well as expanding into DMS in the future."
Powerco (www.powerco.co.nz) is New Zealand's second largest electricity and gas distribution company. Their network area spreads across the upper central and lower central North Island, servicing more than 420,000 consumers, representing 40% of gas connections and 16% of electricity connections in New Zealand.
OSI (www.osii.com) provides open, state-of-the-art and high-performance automation solutions to utilities worldwide. These solutions include Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, Network Management Systems (NMS), Energy Management Systems (EMS), Distribution Management Systems (DMS), Outage Management Systems (OMS), Generation Management Systems (GMS), Substation Automation Systems (SA); Data Warehousing and Historians, as well as individual software and hardware products and Smart Grid solutions for utility operations. OSI is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
For additional information regarding this news release please contact news@osii.com.
