As it works to roll out the next-generation smart grid/smart meter programs to nearly 4 million customers in Chicago and Northern Illinois, Commonwealth Edison Co. is also strengthening its relationship with Ventyx. ComEd is adopting the latest version of the Ventyx Network Manager Outage Management System (OMS) as part of a comprehensive software and hardware upgrade.
Ventyx Network Manager OMS is a mission-critical system for ComEd Distribution Operations, providing operational decision support during outages. It integrates information about customers, system status and resources to predict and find the location of outages, dispatch repair crews efficiently and effectively communicate with customers throughout the process.
The Ventyx OLM solution is a key part of a utilities' holistic approach – plan, prepare, communicate and respond – to reducing both total outage duration and the amount of time individual customers lose power in an outage. Ventyx's OLM solution has been credited with reducing outage duration by as much as 30 percent and customer power loss by as much as 20 minutes across North American utilities. By enabling utilities to improve outage planning, preparation and customer communication and automate truck dispatching, Ventyx's OLM solution saves utilities money by reducing truck rolls, call volumes and dispatcher staffing levels.
ComEd uses two of the three main components of the Ventyx OLM solution suite of products. OMS has been a core capability for more than a decade, and more recently ComEd has been relying on the FocalPoint analytics platform since 2012 to provide critical communications to customers regarding outages.
