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Utility Provider

Cloud Case Study

Large utility provider unifies digital infrastructure to better serve customers during outages

When an utility provider serves more than 10 million customers across multiple fully regulated transmission and distribution utilities in densely populated regions, the implications of an outage are immediate, widespread and deeply felt. Not only can service interruptions hurt an utility provider’s bottom line, they also potentially risk eroding the trust and satisfaction of the residential and commercial customers who depend on these essential services to maintain livelihoods, raise families, run businesses and more.

The chief challenge for this Fortune 500 company—one of the largest electric companies in the US—is modernising, standardising and unifying an entire energy infrastructure with multiple full-scale, physically separated and disparate operational companies. Multiple sub-infrastructures at different stages of life add complexity, as do the increased pressures placed on the power grid due to skyrocketing energy demand, more severe and frequent weather events and other climate change impacts.

Collaborating to uncover new possibilities, ultimately benefiting customers

Before making the leap to full-fledged data modernisation, the utility collaborated with Deloitte to study, triage and understand its needs for modernising and standardising on a single, unified energy infrastructure ecosystem. The effort included establishing two primary programmes:

1. Converging all legacy outage management systems to a single, unified system and

2. Building a separate, but interconnected, programme for reporting and analytics, not just for outages, but for various other needs across the company, built on the Microsoft Azure platform.

With its deep technical and industry knowledge, Deloitte is helping the utility to benefit from artificial intelligence (AI), predictive analytics and to enable use cases such as better outage forecasting. They will be able to use these tools to deliver more accurate forecasts and models and to share real-time data with customers.

Everything from real-time, accurate estimates on outage fixes to possible upcoming outages based on approaching weather are now instantly available with the tap of a button.

Everything from real-time, accurate estimates on outage fixes to possible upcoming outages based on approaching weather are now instantly available with the tap of a button.

What happened next

By the numbers

10 million
Electric and gas customers served by multiple utilities across the US

6 into 1
Full-scale, legacy energy systems combined into a single unified ecosystem

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