Planning our work effectively

We manage 28,000km of electricity cables and lines and a huge amount of technical equipment to keep the lights on. As demand increases, these numbers keep growing.

As you can imagine, that means we have a lot of maintenance and projects on the go.

Having good oversight across, and co-ordination between our field work is crucial to working efficiently and getting value for money.

To achieve this we implemented new management processes in our field services programme. These run across all of our projects from scoping through to completion and is anchored by our project management applications.

We also involved our service providers – the companies we engage to build and maintain our network – in our planning process so they could help us identify efficiencies and get a better understanding of the ‘big picture’.

As a result we have visibility across all the field work happening now, and what we’re planning to do in the future. By sequencing these we ensure we’re working on the right things at the right time. This allows us to:

• Give our service providers a view ahead of our planned work. Allowing them to effectively plan their resources. This efficiency results in us getting better value for money.
• Identify opportunities to combine works together. For instance, if we’re planning an outage, we check to see whether there’s other maintenance we can conduct on that part of the network while the lights are off.
• Know what materials are needed across our projects, so we can manage the supply chain in the most cost-effective way.
• Conduct thorough tender processes and be confident that we’ve selected the best providers to work with.
• Engage with you, our customers, earlier.

Effective planning across all our field work has resulted in increased volumes of quality work delivered efficiently and safely

All these gains allow us to manage our cost base and the unit rate that you pay as part of your energy bill.

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