OREANDA-NEWS. May 14, 2015. Oracle Utilities announced the availability of Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management 2.1 to help electric, gas, and water utilities better leverage assets and their data for mission-critical activities including investment planning, enterprise business management, and risk reduction. This new release puts Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management 2.1 on the same technology framework as Oracle’s other utility-specific applications, offering a modern, unified asset management solution that makes it easier for businesses to address customer service and operational challenges.

As data continues to cross organizational silos and influence how consumers make energy choices, Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management 2.1 offers utilities a new, proactive way to increase their capacity for enterprise process management and customer service. The upgraded solution provides an embedded analytics feature that helps utilities automate data-based tasks and continually improve work planning and scheduling to get more done with fewer resources. As well, the interface can be personalized based on job role to help accelerate productivity.

“Work and asset management is now a strategic and data-heavy endeavor with the ability to directly affect business and community health, and utilities need to be able to treat it as such,” said Rodger Smith, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Utilities. “Oracle recognizes this need, and we are addressing it with Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management 2.1, which is one of the most significant investments in work and asset management for the utilities industry in the past decade.”

As a single system for centralizing and sharing data for every asset, Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management 2.1 helps utilities make better decisions about where and when to invest capital and human resources, reduce costs by extending the value of existing investments, and ensure that best practices are applied at work while also addressing regulatory requirements and customer expectations for service, safety, and the environment. For example, a vice president of operations who needs to understand where to invest in the grid can now have all necessary data centralized in an easy-to-view and easy-to-understand format and be able to determine how capital should be spent.

Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management 2.1 also helps utilities better identify and reduce risk for workers and the community through a suite of real-time analytics that prevent failure, monitor conditions, and determine optimized maintenance strategies. For example, the upgraded solution includes condition-based scoring to better manage risk and uses the new interface to provide easier visibility. With this type of scoring, utilities can consider multiple variables to determine health on an asset-specific basis. They can also continually update the score to reflect any changes to conditions, such as maintenance being performed. Through storage and recall of the asset health score, utilities can now understand risk in real time all the time, improving the effectiveness of repair-or-replace decisions.

Because it is built using the most-advanced protocols and application development tools, the solution is easy to enhance without having to customize or compromise upgradability. In addition, its integration with Oracle’s enterprise layer of utility solutions enables customers with multiple Oracle Utilities products to more readily share information across applications to streamline operations. They can also use the same skill set to manage multiple Oracle systems, reducing the cost and resources required to support business processes.

“By getting Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management on the same technology platform as Oracle’s other utility applications, the company is highlighting the strategic value of work and asset management through this product investment,” said Marcus Torchia, research manager, IDC. “The solution is well positioned to compete globally by helping utilities deal with critical business challenges such as using data to improve risk management and extracting more value from sensor-based assets that make up an increasingly large part of utility infrastructure.”