Operational Intelligence can benefit everyone in your organization. So what are the top 5 signs you need Operational Intelligence for smart grids?

1. You Keep Paying for Point Solutions: With an Operational Intelligence platform, energy utilities will be able to rapidly deploy applications for demand response management, dynamic load adjustment and other capacity utilization applications. Think of an Operational Intelligence Platform as the energy utility’s platform for advanced grid services. With OI apps, new and improved services can quickly be tested, deployed and monitored, in real-time, by an IT operations manager or business analyst.

2. You’re Constantly Trying to Drive Operational Efficiencies: Operational Intelligence will help to optimize asset utilization, reducing capital equipment and maintenance costs. With OI, energy utilities can more effectively minimize the reserve that electric utilities have on stand-by. Operational Intelligence applications continuously monitor meter and device data, in real-time, correlating and analyzing that data with real-time events, to give the decision-makers in your company continuous real-time insight into business operations and KPIs.

3. Your IT Costs Seem to Increase at the Mention of Security: With Operational Intelligence, you can continuously monitor your security solutions to detect patterns that would not otherwise be detected by individual systems, sensors or point solutions. Even more so, OI pattern detection can be extended to recognize behavioral patterns for earlier detection of fraudulent activity (such as stealing power).

4. Your Customer’s Orders are Being Dropped: Broken order-to-cash and order fulfillment processes routinely result in millions of dollars lost revenue for energy utilities. With Operational Intelligence, these errors can be minimized or eliminated by implementing an end-to-end process visibility solution. This type of OI solution was most recently deployed by TXU Energy to optimize their SAP implementation. The result is immediate and has been detailed by Gartner analyst Roy Schulte as a best practice for energy utilities.

5. Your KPIs Have Been Designed to Impact Customer Loyalty: With Operational Intelligence, service assurance levels will reach an all-time high by better predicting and avoiding blackouts and brownouts. OI applications can give customers information and options that enable them to control their usage by time of day, volume and rates. Customers who can make choices to reduce their bills and environmental impact are less likely to churn. Furthermore, by empowering customers with OI apps, smart grid operators can gain real-time insight into the customer decision making patterns and respond with products and services that will increase loyalty and revenue.

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Rick Saletta is the Vice President of Global Marketing for Vitria Technology, Inc. He is recognized in Silicon Valley as a leader in the marketing of emerging platforms.