The McDonnell Group

Real-time maintenance strategies seen as key to achieving asset health goals

ATLANTA – July 12, 2011 – A survey of senior executives, IT managers, and engineering decision-makers drawn from the top 100  North American utilities concludes that advanced operations and maintenance strategies for critical infrastructure are at or near the top of their key priorities for ensuring future reliability and regulatory compliance.

Survey details are included in a new study released today, Optimizing Deployment of Next Generation Maintenance Strategies. The study focused on maintenance practices in substations in electric transmission and distribution systems. One study goal was to examine whether the convergence of lower cost monitoring devices and communication technologies provides an opportunity for utilities to expand online monitoring of distributed assets. The study was prepared by smart grid research and public relations specialist The McDonnell Group and commissioned by Ventyx, an ABB company.

Interviews sought participants’ opinions about current maintenance practices and what approaches they felt were necessary to achieve optimal asset health.  According to McDonnell Group principal strategy consultant Peter Manos, asset health optimization strategies were seen by many respondents as having great potential to manage future costs.

Said Manos, “There was strong agreement that real-time awareness of asset health, coupled with the right business intelligence and engineering tools, can form the basis for significant decision-making improvements in overall operations and maintenance and capital expenditures.  Virtually all respondents believed that eliminating organizational and technical boundaries between information and operational technologies (IT/OT) is imperative for reaching this level of awareness so they can manage asset costs in the years ahead.  I expect we’ll see most utilities gradually adopting asset health as a risk assessment strategy in the next several years.”