Case Study:
The strategy of generating, wheeling & transmitting, and buying & selling power relies on a complex series of projects and ongoing supply & demand. When the US President directed the DOE to continue to grow jobs while meeting the ever-increasing demand for energy, they called Advisicon in to optimize their project management system and move toward achieving their goals.
Business Situation
The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) existing 40+ year project management systems, including design engineering, manufacturing, transmission, maintenance, and efficiency optimization programs (such as Wind Generation Technology system optimization), were not able to meet the request by the US President to move from $300M to $800M yearly. Each group within DOE managed work in a siloed, non-centralized manner, causing handoff problems. There was an extreme lack of visibility from cradle to grave—project start to completion—troublingly including customer requests and vendor payments.
Solution Delivered
Advisicon helped map processes and align project and resource tracking related information into a single Microsoft Project PPM enterprise system. We created integration tools that automated manual processes (such as estimating vendor payments & contracts) and integrated them into the Project PPM system, as well as Oracle ERP and other financial systems. Advisicon helped stand up four Project Management Offices and implemented a Project Management Authority to govern the project offices & project control centers. This standardized how projects and contracts were estimated, approved, managed, tracked, and reported—eliminating roadblocks, allowing scaling to do more project work, and boosting the number of jobs.
Benefits Received
Sizing and scaling of projects was standardized using the Microsoft or customized form-based systems—all integrating with MS Project Enterprise. Dashboards, reports, enhanced visuals on project progress, slippages, resource capacity, and demand shortfalls linked into the system as well, allowing the DOE to increase their existing workload capacity from $300M to $700M.
The Company Today
As the US DOE is continually moving toward renewable, clean energy, Bonneville Power Administration customers have 82% of their power coming from carbon-free hydropower. They keep fully abreast of climate change research and the potential impacts to energy use and water availability. With the technology and processes that Advisicon put into place, they can and do prepare a resilient hydropower system.
