Oracle Software Helps Utilities Improve Efficiency

Oracle has released Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management 1.9.1.2 with enhancements to help electric, gas and water utilities improve operational efficiency through streamlined work planning processes and improved enterprise asset management and reliability, the company says.

The update has more than 40 feature enhancements intended to help utilities improve work planning processes, enterprise asset management (EAM), and assessment capabilities.

The company says Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management 1.9.1.2 enables utilities to streamline their work planning processes to support a continuous cycle of improvement for job plans to mitigate job delays and wasted time, which has a direct correlation to increased wrench time and asset reliability.

Enhancements within the Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management failure mode and effects analysis tool include both preventive maintenance plans and corrective action work templates, allowing utilities to identify what failures their preventive maintenance program is attempting to mitigate as well as to identify the corrective action to take when a specific type of failure occurs. Additionally, the Oracle tool allows users to associate failures to specific components within an asset to ensure utilities can document and develop more comprehensive maintenance strategies.

The update also offers enhanced asset condition assessment functionality to better support capital planning, the company says. Utilities can now automatically calculate a total asset condition score based on multiple and varied inspection assessments to give a more accurate picture of an asset’s health and life expectancy (for example, calculating how much more quickly an asset will fail in a highly corrosive environment).

In addition, utilities can automatically derive a “Confidence Rating” based on the age of the condition assessments performed within the system. These new features combine to help utilities better track, evaluate, and make informed asset-repair or -replace decisions.