Zia Consulting Orchestrated Communications for Utility Company

The Challenge

Internal communication is extremely important for an electric utilities company that manages the flow of electric power to tens of millions of customers. As a membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation that is governed by a board of directors, the organization is charged with meeting the needs of their consumers, cooperatives, generators, power marketers, retail electric providers, investor-owned electric utilities, and municipal-owned electric utilities.

Meeting these needs requires performing tasks like scheduling power on an electric grid that connects thousands of miles of transmission lines and hundreds of generating units. The company also performs financial settlement for the competitive wholesale bulk-power market and administers retail switching for millions of premises in competitive choice areas. Finally, the customer must stay in compliance with certain government entities. Upholding these responsibilities requires a strong focus on accurate and efficient internal communication.

The customer experienced a number of challenges with their internal communication. First, all communication was being managed on a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are too basic and not user-friendly enough to meet customers’ needs. Second, the workflow they used to complete tasks was a manual process that involved passing Word documents through a number of people. This process was extremely inefficient, as it allowed for human error and took time away from those who could be completing more substantive tasks. The company also lacked a current and accessible dashboard for sharing internal communications. Third, their electronic billboard system and company newsletter were authored separately in SharePoint. This meant that it was cumbersome to manage and created extra work by authoring on different systems for different platforms.

The Strategy

Zia Consulting addressed these challenges by building a solution utilizing Alfresco for the repository and Crafter for the scalable, cloud-native management system. Alfresco is a digital business platform that provides a single repository for the storage of information. Crafter CMS is a Content Management System that supports the authoring and delivery of content. Specifically, it is used to create and manage websites, while also providing endless capabilities via APIs. In this scenario, APIs served as the interface between the different systems and platforms being used to communicate. 

Using this strategy, the authoring nodes also contained the delivery components. This made it easier for content authors to preview changes locally before approving and publishing them to one or more delivery environments. The delivery environment included Crafter Engine, Crafter Deployer, and Crafter Search. Systems like the Solr index server and MongoDB database were used to personalize information. Crafter enabled the customer to combine communications via email, spreadsheets, and SharePoint. By consolidating, the customer could use a simpler tool for authoring, editing, and publishing.

Finally, the solution managed document change control to ensure that market participants received current and complete information. The electric utilities company provided regular Power Operations Bulletins with timely email notifications of changes to the Operating Procedure Manual to all subscribers. Subscribers also received Market Notices with scheduled releases, outages, business process failures, and other important information. Training material on transmission system, wholesale market, and retail market operations was available. Finally, mailing lists and committees were established to share relevant information related to the on-the-ground activities.

The Results

The customer now enjoys single authoring ability via Crafter. An internal website replaced a spreadsheet, making information browsable on the web with filtering, sorting, and searching capabilities. The workflow is now built inside a single, web-enabled platform that distributes information, reports, and available products. The employees no longer shepherd information via email and SharePoint, making collaboration much easier.  

Zia provided their technological expertise and support during the rollout of new releases within controlled environments. They worked with the customer’s blended team to provide direction for project roadmaps. As a result, Zia continues to be engaged with new work for the customer and they consistently rank very high in customer evaluations.