During severe thunderstorm events, customer service representatives manually recorded phone outage reports into a legacy database. Dispatchers spent hours calling field crews to assign repair locations, while customers flooded call-center lines due to a lack of outage status information.
Engineering a Real-Time Outage Event Bus and Dispatch Portal for a Municipal Utility District
A municipal utility district managing water and electrical service for ninety thousand residents sought to shorten storm outage response times.
Challenge
Solution
FlipWorks built an event-driven Outage Management System (OMS) integration engine connected to DNP3 SCADA breaker alerts. The software groups individual customer outage reports by electrical transformer cluster, predicts fault locations automatically, and dispatches job details directly to mobile field crew tablets.
Result
- Reduced average outage incident identification and field crew dispatch time following storm events.
- Automated customer SMS outage notifications, reducing incoming call-center phone traffic during major storms.
- Improved grid reliability reporting accuracy by capturing automated SCADA breaker timestamp logs.