Shedding Light on Protection System Maintenance Data
Protection and control (P&C) asset management is tricky. Philosophies, devices, and schemes vary; protection engineering and maintenance activities generate data differently, constantly.
Enterprise-level asset management systems do not adequately present—let alone capture—critical details about relays and other P&C components. Organizations risk heavy capital and revenue losses, non-compliance penalties, and injury or loss of life if specifics about P&C systems are obscured and information becomes misinterpreted because of limitations enterprise asset management systems have concerning P&C data.
A single solution for storing, managing, and analyzing P&C data is needed, yet organizations operate with a mix of commercial and home-grown software. Connecting protection engineering and test data to enterprise asset management systems is a struggle because diverse applications and tools used by P&C personnel emit data in dissimilar formats that were never intended for system-wide management in the first place.
Over time, P&C “systems-of-systems” impact worker efficiency by introducing additional steps and requirements whenever new technologies or initiatives are adopted. When key personnel move on, managers might face situations where employees use workarounds to navigate cumbersome tasks and process gaps.
P&C workers today have many more responsibilities than ever. In addition to growing requisite skills and knowledge to do their jobs, they are impacted by numerous compliance-mandated priorities. Office-to-field operations between engineering and testing teams must be cyber secure while specific details about their work must be tracked and documented.
Highly trained P&C professionals diverted to compliance tasks add expense onto protection system development, commissioning, and maintenance. P&C support staff step in to ease the administrative burden, but they become overloaded tracing data points generated out of complicated—and usually manual—workflow and reporting processes. IT teams become tethered to supporting P&C software—new and old—while consulting department administrators in complex matters surrounding compliance readiness regardless of technology and workforce dynamics.
Although similar situations could also exist in other areas of utility and industrial organizations, protection system data is mission-critical to the company’s most expensive and highest-profile assets. Timely insight into the condition of relays and the other components of the protection system is essential to system operators, work planners and to the safety of employees who repair system equipment and maintain transformers, breakers, and other apparatus.
Doble PowerBase™ provides a management platform tailored to both P&C data and protection system work. It consolidates data from engineering, field and administrative areas while offering data exchanges with external systems. All stakeholders, including those from asset management, compliance, and IT gain clearer views of protection system information and have powerful reporting tools at their disposal.
Additional Information:
- Product Information – Doble PowerBase™
- Further Reading: Theory Meets Testing: Life of a Transformer Seminar’s Transformer Relay Protection Program
- Learn More: Protection Training and Education Opportunities
