Hahn Tram spends 50 weeks out of the year traveling as senior executive consultant with Enspiria Solutions. The nature of his work takes him on the road 48 weeks of the year and he travels on vacation the other two weeks.

“For the few vacation days I can manage to take each year, I like to travel, meet different people from different cultures,” Tram said. “This may sound odd, because I do this for work too. The difference is that on vacation, I purely enjoy cultures without worrying about consequence on business, organization, and technology.”

Tram must travel so much because he helps utilities realize the benefits from IT and automation technologies for energy management, customer service, power system operations and asset management. He has helped utilities across the United States implement information systems to automate their field forces, realize and enhance AMI benefits, enable demand response, and advance toward a smart grid.

Tram will be the luncheon keynote speaker at T&D World University on Oct. 31 in Dallas, Texas. His advice for other IT professionals is to be flexible, open-minded, adaptable, and prepared for change. “There are always multiple ways to skin the pig,” Tram said. His speech will most likely reflect that philosophy.

Tram has taught several courses on information systems and automation at AMRA’s conference, the Geospatial Automation and Technology Association conference, Distributech and IEEE PES Power Systems Conference. He has also presented courses in improved outage management at Penn State University.

Before becoming a consultant with Enspiria Solutions four years ago, Tram worked as a consultant with SchlumbergerSema and Convergent Group. His 10-year consulting career followed 18 years of engineering and management positions at Westinghouse Electric and ABB.

Tram said that he takes satisfaction in solving problems for people, which is what consultants do, and enjoys learning new ideas and having new experiences each day.

“I like the challenge of exerting influence without authority,” Tram said. “I have been blessed that my career has allowed me to meet all of these desires as well as the financial needs of a common man.”

The various experiences he has had in his role benefits any students who take his courses. “I have helped conceptualize and implement technology-enabled business solutions for dozens of utilities in different sizes (from 50 thousand to 14 million customers), under different environments (from the fully regulated and vertically integrated to deregulated), and with different corporate cultures (from very risk adverse to the most progressive and aggressive),” Tram said. “My work has ranged from long-range system planning to operations and dispatch, from automated meter reading to multi-media customer contact center, from Advanced Metering Infrastructures to Demand Response and EMS/SCADA, from IT solution strategy and full-implementation. The broad technical, business, and cultural perspectives help me relate to the audience’s goals and needs.”

He fits right in with Enspiria Solutions, which helps utilities improve operational effectiveness, asset performance, customer service, and energy efficiency. Its experts provide T&D consulting and systems integration for AMI/MDMS; demand response; smart grid; GIS; outage, mobile, work and asset management; and network automation. The company is backed by the financial strength of parent company Osmose Holdings, Inc., with $600 million in revenue.

Tram is excited about the technology advances in mobile and communications technologies and utility system automation. He said the regulatory and business environments are promising for automation.

Even with all of his experience, Tram said he has not seen it all. “I have not done it all, I have not thought of it all… I am learning new tricks everyday (and most of them from customers), and I enjoy every bit of it.”