About Us

The vast and vital global power and utilities industry is undergoing a significant transformation. Over the past 30 years, electricity and gas markets have been radically reshaped, thanks to newly opened markets, disruptive competitors and technologies, and the evolution of customers from passive consumers to active participants with high expectations.

The power and utilities sector, which underpins every other industry, has traditionally focused on long-lived assets and gradual policy shifts. As a result, it has adopted changes in a piecemeal, deliberate, and sometimes regulatory-constrained fashion and is not accustomed to an accelerated pace of change. But decarbonization, decentralization, and digitization are creating a new three-dimensional challenge — and impelling faster evolution. Amid rising market uncertainty and increasing pressure on traditional fossil fuel generation, the world’s largest utilities are shifting investments from large-scale power supply into the network. New value pools are forming in areas as diverse as energy management, electric car charging, and home automation. And instead of simply charging a fixed price to deliver electricity, utilities are rolling out pricing models and services more closely associated with consumer goods and industrial companies.

The utility sector faces ever-shrinking revenue streams and an on-going battle to manage CapEx and OpEx efficiency; predictive maintenance, risk assessment and capital planning have never been more important.  Using advanced analytics to develop a risk-based approach to asset maintenance and capital planning is critical to companies managing legacy assets while simultaneously supporting the transition to renewable and distributed energy, unbundled regulatory models, dynamic pricing and digital customer service.

The maintenance revolution has been underway in industry for many years. Both process and manufacturing facility operators have embraced the seismic shift from traditional maintenance practices to a very different and far more effective approach. Today the revolution has grown to include utilities and other organizations engaged in power generation, transmission and/or distribution.

The revolution is the movement from cycle, time, or usage based maintenance to a predictive maintenance approach grounded in actual need rather than arbitrary schedules. The revolution is being propelled by the ever-increasing number of more intelligent devices that self-monitor critical asset health attributes and automatically report that information to facility operators. These smarter devices – with the ability to “see, hear, and feel” – provide information that, combined with test and inspection data, enable substation owners to implement a far more efficient and effective maintenance strategy, with greatly increased asset reliability. The ISO 55000 asset management standard underscores the criticality of understanding asset condition and risk of failure, classifying the availability of that knowledge as a best practice.

Respondents to a recent global survey of 220 utilities put asset management ahead of other business efforts, with 52% saying it is a high priority. In the same survey, 55% of respondents said concerns about asset management are more important today than 12 months ago.

We SNAGS Maintaining asset health through appropriate maintenance is central to an effective asset management strategy.