Customer Success Story
Arizona Electric Power Cooperative
AEPCO stacks up against the competition with Deltek Open Plan™ and Deltek WelcomHome™
Deltek enhanced its ability to provide critical earned value management (EVM) offerings to its broad project-focused customer base with the acquisition of Welcom in March 2006.
The Challenge
Originally established in 1961 to meet the energy needs of rural southeastern Arizona, the Arizona Electric Power Cooperative (AEPCO) was restructured in 1999 in response to the deregulation of the electric utility industry. Due to the deregulation, Apache Station, AEPCO's generation facility in Cochise, Arizona, is up against increasing competition from other privately-owned utilities in the region. Cost reductions are commonplace and every gain in efficiency and production helps, especially during an outage (shutdown of a unit in order to perform maintenance inspections and repairs). AEPCO also faces a limited supply of skilled labor in this remote area of Arizona.
Recently, AEPCO scheduled an outage that was originally supposed to extend over five weeks, but in the final stages of planning, senior management asked that it be trimmed to four weeks. In addition, maintenance planners were asked to level manpower resources and stay within budget.
The Solution
To meet these challenges, AEPCO planned on loading pre-planned maintenance work packages into Deltek Open Plan to reschedule the outage adhering to resource constraints. Maintenance planners produced a new four-week schedule without overloading resources, which resulted in significant savings for AEPCO's customers.
The secret of AEPCO's success lies in optimized use of its skilled labor, careful planning and tight cost control, facilitated by a robust project management toolset. For shutdown scheduling, resource management and time reporting, AEPCO uses Open Plan and Deltek WelcomHome in conjunction with a third-party maintenance management system.
The Benefits
Completing the outage in four weeks would save AEPCO and its member cooperatives a significant amount of money. Deltek's software made it easy for planners to rise to the challenge.
“Official notice of the reduction didn't hit my desk until two days before the scheduled start date,” says Fusco. “Fortunately, the resource scheduling functions of Open Plan helped me solve the problem in about two hours and I could produce a new four-week schedule without overloading the resources. You have to have a good project management software package like Open Plan in order to be able to do this. I couldn't have done it with our previous software.”
The Apache station has four gas and two coal-fired turbine units. Outages on each unit have to be completed every 24 months to inspect all equipment, perform pre-planned preventative maintenance and make repairs on equipment with known problems. Capital expenditure work and upgrades typically take place as well.
As with any outage, craftspeople find equipment problems that are not part of the original work plan but also need to be addressed. This unplanned work has to be inserted into the schedule without impacting resource requirements or finish dates. This can be a particularly difficult task, especially when the standard five-week outage is cut to four weeks.
At Apache, the average minor unit outage takes approximately 500 in-house work orders containing various numbers of activities. These predefined work orders are outlined and planned in the maintenance management system and imported into Open Plan for scheduling. The Open Plan schedule is then distributed to the shop floor supervisors who use the daily plans to assign work and ensure that changing priorities are met.
Apache plans and schedules by craft, not by individual, with craft supervisors selecting which person actually performs the work. Time and progress are also captured by craft and entered into the schedule using WelcomHome, Deltek's Web-based project management portal. Progress information is then used to perform daily replans in Open Plan.
“Before WelcomHome, time and progress information was captured manually,” says Fred Shaheen, Electrical/Instrument Planner. “We spent up to five hours a day walking around gathering work data from the supervisors.”
Using WelcomHome, AEPCO planners can now update the schedule in approximately 20 minutes and the information is more accurate. By 7:30 each morning, they have an updated plan in time for the day's work.
“The benefits we get from the system are quicker and more accurate information, which gives us a lot more time to analyze plans and identify any potential issues,” says Shaheen. “Another advantage is that the work schedules are now more visible to the supervisors. We are avoiding scheduling conflicts and coordinating our resources more efficiently. Morale has improved because people now know exactly what's expected of them.”
“Welcom's software has definitely met our expectations,” says Fusco. “The biggest hurdles were getting buy-in and training the people. This is the third outage we've managed using Welcom software. People now feel comfortable with it and see the huge benefits it brings.”
With a dwindling skilled labor force and growing competition, the pressure will increase on AEPCO to continue to gain efficiencies. With Deltek's solutions, they have the tools to get the job done. “We now plan to fine-tune the system and educate our people more about the planning process,” concludes Fusco. “And of course, [we want to] continue to keep our overhauls on schedule and ultimately save time. Right now it's going well!”