Electric utilities should use benchmarking and best practices to a much greater degree to better measure and validate organizational and industry performance, participants were told at EUCG's spring 2007 workshop in Georgia, March 25-28.

"Electric utilities must become creative to continually improve operational efficiency," said Stephen Saunders, EUCG president and Tennessee Valley Authority 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 emphasized.

During his presentation, 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."

"We encourage our membership to use EUCG to develop new and improved benchmarking databases, to document and communicate best practices, and to use all available membership resources to improve organizational outcomes," said EUCG Vice President Mark Derry of Exelon. "In essence, we encourage members to leverage the benefits of EUCG as a means to create their own 'benchmarking culture.'"

EUCG welcomed 170 workshop participants from more than 50 different utilities, including five foreign countries, to its spring workshop, said George W. Sharp, EUCG marketing director, of American Electric Power. "Workshop participants not only focused on presenting the most pressing issues facing the electric utility industry today, but also participated in group discussions aimed at resolving these issues," said Sharp. The workshop's theme, "Addressing Performance Gaps," provided the impetus around many of the workshop topics. According to Sharp, each EUCG committee developed unique agendas to address member interests, including the transmission and distribution committee: Highlights included discussions of 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.

 Other T&D workshop topics included new  approaches to contractor utilization, transforming the employee's safety  culture and inventory management.