Southern Company implements automated crew callout at its four regional electric utilities Think of all the hours a utility company spends in Better manage business complexities one year dispatching crews during outages. Beneath the easy-to-use interface is a sophisticated Now multiply that by four companies responsi- rules-based engine built to address crew callout com-ble for four million customers over a 120,000- plexities. It’s this ability to manage the details that sep-square-mile territory. arates ARCOS from other solutions. Whereas alternative What you end up with are months of man-hours solutions simply make calls from a roster, ARCOS makes spent manually working the phones—instead of focus- calls based on business rules, roster rotations, and con-ing on more critical outage management tasks. siders schedule exceptions such as overtime and sick Imagine if you could automate the process and time. It’s especially valuable for following employee achieve the following results: contract agreements. • 30% more time spent analyzing and resolving outages “Our contract requires our trouble men to meet a • Accepts-per-attempts improvement of 10% certain percentage of callouts in a year,” says Herring. • Crews responding 20% faster “Now, we can produce a detailed report of each call • SAIDI improved by 10% that was accepted or declined.” In the first year, the number of accepts-per-call attempts improved by 10% and crew response time dropped by 20%.
Reducing outage duration “In looking at what we did prior to our ARCOS implementation and where we are today, we were able to document a 10% reduction in our SAIDI numbers,” Herring says. While ARCOS is not solely responsible for that decrease, it contributed significantly to the factors that affect the number. Another significant benefit was the one-year pay-back. A typical system might achieve a return in three to four years. ARCOS paid for itself in 12 months and produced an additional $30,000 in savings. Other utilities join the call to automate Since the Alabama Power implementation, ARCOS has been adopted by the other three Southern Company utilities. It has also spread beyond just power transmission and distribution. Herring and his team employed ARCOS at one of Alabama Power’s generation facilities for emergency situations and to fill shifts. “If we had not been successful,” says Herring of the first implementation, “this product would never have been rolled out to our other operating companies.”
This is the reality for Alabama Power, one of the four utilities owned by Southern Company, a super-regional energy supplier in the Southeast. The solution Alabama Power and its sister utilities use is ARCOS, a hosted system that automates the entire crew callout process and manages the related business rules.
In 2001, Alabama Power decided to explore how to improve crew callout through automation. “We spent an enormous amount of time physically dialing phones,” says Clyde B. Herring, Power Delivery, Methods and Systems at Alabama Power. “We decided an Application Service Provider would provide us with all the phone lines, maintenance, and staff that it takes to run a callout system so we wouldn’t have to use our internal resources.”
Of all the solutions Herring and his team reviewed, only one fully addressed their needs: ARCOS.
First introduced in 1996, ARCOS is used today by many of the leading power companies in North America. It’s a hosted solution available via the Internet. Operators log in through a Web browser from anywhere and can dispatch crewmembers with a few mouse clicks. The system immediately begins calling names—handling accepts, declines, no answers and skips—and records all events. It can leave messages, call pagers, and simultaneously manage multiple calls so requests are never overfilled.
For more information about ARCOS, contact Mark Furst, Director of Marketing and Sales, at 614-396-5116 or info@rostermonster.com or read about ARCOS at www. rostermonser.com
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