In order to better measure and validate organizational and industry performance, electric utilities should use benchmarking and best practices to a much greater degree, participants were told at EUCG’s spring 2007 workshop in Savannah, GA in late March.

“Electric utilities must become creative to continually improve operational efficiency,” said Stephen Saunders, EUCG president and Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) general manager of benchmarking. “Developing a ‘benchmarking culture’ is one way to do that. Benchmarking can act as a proxy to competition, if utilized correctly, and identifies the performance gap that should be closed.”

A “benchmarking culture” is achieved by continually encouraging the use of benchmarking data and best practices sharing to genuinely solve performance problems, not just to compare yourself to others, said Douglas Dale, strategic manager for Detroit Edison, who provided the workshop’s keynote address. “It’s easy to use benchmarking as a means to an end by saying ‘I’m better’ or ‘worse’ than my peers. The real value is when you use the data to develop new processes, to determine different decision-making criteria, or to drive real change that leads to performance improvement in an organization or even an entire industry.”

Dale challenged the EUCG membership to consider benchmarking with other industries to learn from those whose competitive landscape and performance drivers are markedly different. “The process that an oil refinery goes through to perform routine maintenance or manage an outage is similar to our industry. I’m sure we could learn from each other,” said Dale. “Though the differences in processes may be subtle, the outcomes of understanding and implementing these differences could have a huge impact on performance.”

The 170 workshop participants from more than 50 different utilities, including five foreign countries, also tackled other talking points for the industry within committees. The Transmission & Distribution (T&D) Committee discussed the successes and challenges of adopting new technologies, such as distribution automation and automated metering.

“Our industry is leveraging new technology at a very rapid pace. It presents both opportunities and issues for each company. Our members are sharing best practices that lead to more successful use of these new tools,” said Joe Martucci, T&D Committee chairperson, of Public Service Enterprise Group.

The Information Technology (IT) Committee reviewed its newly developed IT data model and mapped out a plan to begin collecting benchmarking data from EUCG member companies.

“We are well on our way to providing our membership with the first benchmarking data exclusively collected from electric utilities. This will help our members better understand where they are performing along a common continuum,” said Jack Flack, IT Committee chairperson from TVA.

The Nuclear Committee meeting was attended by more than 85% of North American nuclear operators as well as companies from Japan and Romania. The committee focused on supply chain strategic sourcing, Nuclear Regulatory Commission/Institute of Nuclear Power Operations performance indicator overview, interactive panels on work force planning, metrics to identify best performers, and breakout sessions to discuss current industry issues/topics of interest.

The Fossil Committee discussed management of aging power plant infrastructure, success stories around human performance programs, and approaches to ash removal, disposal and sale, while the Hydroelectric Committee focused on the cause and management of catastrophic plant failures and results of the group’s safety survey, which included a discussion on improving safety performance.

EUCG will hold its 2007 fall workshop in Denver from Sept. 30 through Oct. 2. More information is available at EUCG website https://www.eucg.org.

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