Partnership - Feels Like One Team
Pedernales Electric Cooperative (PEC) started their deployment project from an urgent need, and they are now happy to tell their story on how great cooperation can lead into solving highly important business needs - after all, success like this is always built from a combination of things.
PEC is the largest electric distribution cooperative in the USA, delivering electric power to more than 300,000 meters in Texas. Located in one of the fastest growing areas in the U.S., PEC operates on an 8,100-square-mile service area consisting of all or parts of 24 Central Texas counties, and provides safe, reliable and low-cost energy services to its members. Founded in 1938, PEC headquarters is based in Johnson City, Texas. This is where Lawanda Parnell, Chief Information Officer, and Paul Lochte, Interim Vice President of Engineering, talked about their experiences.
The story begins with PEC’s need to quickly adopt an outage management system they could rely on. “We did an extensive evaluation of some other solutions and we chose Trimble both because of the familiarity - we've been a Trimble customer for a long time - and also because it had capabilities that the other solutions did not and that weighed heavily in our decision,” Lawanda Parnell describes.
The DMS was implemented by coupling it together with PEC’s existing GIS system, and what was planned to be a one-year-project was successfully completed in less than 4 months.
“The 14 weeks was something that I have not experienced from an implementation project before, where it was that smooth. The execution was just phenomenal,” Parnell recalls. “It really felt like one team. The Trimble and PEC teams worked very closely together to make that happen.” The success was followed by a second deployment project for a Trimble system of record for staking and design processes, tied in with inventory for achieving accurate maps.
The great collaboration between PEC and Trimble has remained strong. “We are happy with our choice to go with Trimble,” smiles Parnell.
Watch the PEC deployment story on Youtube
The implementations have been beneficial to PEC on various levels. Lawanda Parnell and Paul Lochte describe the benefits in a holistic way highlighting, for example, general operational efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction. They all have to do with both network reliability, as well as map accuracy, which, in turn, is connected to the efficiency in the field and shorter outage times.
“As far as the member perception, we are now able to be more responsive,” Parnell starts, mentioning Trimble Outage Map as one example. “On the map, our members can visually see the outage status, whether there’s a truck on its way to the location, as well as the estimated time to restore.” This is a level of communication that PEC customers had been asking for for years and that, thanks to the new solution, PEC now has the ability to provide. In addition, there is a new possibility to report outages from mobile devices. “That has been a big, big win for our members, and also for our communications team,” Parnell explains, since using online communication reduces the need for e.g. phone calls.
All of that, Lawanda Parnell explains, relates also back to the utility’s J.D. Power customer satisfaction ratings and how they have continued to rise. “Of course, it’s a holistic view when your customer satisfaction increases, but these solutions definitely played a big part in providing additional information to the members.”
Parnell continues: “In order to be more responsive, you need to know where your assets are - where is that transformer or where is that pole - and be able to actually map that.”
Paul Lochte explains that PEC did a system inventory, the results of which are coming out in the next phase of the project. “We will have not only all the pole numbers and equipment numbers, but also the GPS locations of all of our assets in the system,” he specifies. “Before, we didn't have real accurate locations of all of our assets, and having that is going to help tremendously in the future.” The reliable maps will also help reduce contractor time, as field crews no longer be sent out in the field looking at a map and discovering it wasn’t accurate. Lochte adds: “We will also get some future benefits out of this that we haven't seen yet.”
“The benefits are both internal and external,” Lawanda Parnell draws up. “All of this leads to better response time to the members and better reliability, because if you know where that feeder is and where that outage occurs, you can actually send a crew there quicker.” Instead of having them trace all the way through a two mile span, the crews know exactly where the outage is.
Parnell looks at the matter in a wider perspective. “There's a mesh of things that leads to better productivity, higher customer satisfaction, better reliability of our critical enterprise system, reduced cost per meter and better SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index) numbers - all of these things are connected, whether that be the outage management, accuracy of the maps, and so on. There are a lot of business goals around these topics and when you look beneath them, that's when you start looking at having to do the work that we are doing now with Trimble.”
