OREANDA-NEWS. As utilities continue to juggle changing customer expectations and tighter budgets, they are increasingly reliant on maximizing the investment they have made in their existing assets. Oracle Utilities announced a management software solution to help electric, gas, and water utilities better manage asset performance. This new release provides utilities with the capacity to identify and implement effective asset maintenance strategies which enable utilities to achieve mission-critical business objectives—reducing operating costs, increasing reliability, and minimizing risk.

With the release of Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management 2.1.1, Oracle provides a unique springboard for the implementation, automation, and execution of more effective maintenance. It does so by combining the use of multiple schedules with asset data to enable utilities to trigger the right maintenance tasks at the right time.

For example, if an asset has an unexpected change in duty cycle, such as a spare substation transformer being used to replace a failing one, the maintenance schedule can be dynamically adjusted to account for the change.

“Utilities can now replace one-size-fits-all maintenance plans with multiple strategies that they can associate with one or more assets,” said Rodger Smith, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Utilities. “With Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management 2.1.1, utilities can define multiple maintenance schedules based on a wider range of asset characteristics and operating situations, such as warranty specifications and expiration, usage, and changes in operating environment. This capability helps utilities activate more targeted and effective proactive maintenance.”

The updated Oracle Utilities solution also drives enormous cost savings and significantly reduces risk by automating situational-based maintenance schedules. Unlike other work and asset management systems, Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management 2.1.1 can dynamically switch an asset to a new, optimal maintenance strategy based on operational changes—accounting for conditions such as increased use or out-of-service status. This unique automation helps ensure utilities can easily account for different use cycles by similar assets operating under different conditions.

In addition to embedded failure analytics, the new release offers out-of-the-box asset performance analytics to improve insight into asset failure and risk mitigation. Utilities can associate maintenance triggers to asset failures to determine the effectiveness of maintenance programs. In doing so, utilities can quickly gain insight into the causes of asset failures, such as incorrect maintenance frequency or gaps in training and procedures.

To drive down ownership cost, speed time to value, and reduce management complexity, Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management has been added as a core application to the common technology framework of Oracle’s utility-specific software solutions. As a result, it is highly configurable, making it easy to enhance without adding customization or compromising upgradability.

Its integration within the framework also enables customers with multiple Oracle Utilities products to more readily share information across applications, use the same skill set to manage multiple Oracle systems, and take advantage of prebuilt, cross system integrations, reducing business processes cost and resources. The other solutions on the unified framework include Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing, Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management and Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management.