Vasu Avadhanula

In this blog series, we’re examining how an automated approach to operations and planning processes can help organizations improve compliance and streamline processes across the organization to add more business value. Today we’ll look at facility ratings management, specifically FAC-008.

NERC’s FAC-008 requires that utilities define and maintain a Facility Ratings methodology, apply that methodology to its solely and jointly-owned BES Facilities, and communicate those Facility Ratings to impacted parties. It can be challenging to comply with the FAC-008 standard because related work is often distributed and shared across various business groups and information is maintained in a whole host of applications and spreadsheets. In addition, because of the large number of components that comprise a Facility, there is serious potential for calculation errors.

As an electric utility, you don’t get to decide if you will comply with NERC operations and planning standards, but you do get to determine how.

Many compliance teams still tackle compliance manually, with spreadsheets, email, repurposed project management or other tools, and maybe some duct tape. This works until it doesn’t: the list keeps getting longer, from an ever-increasing set of requirements to the growing load of tasks and actions associated with them, and your team is too small to handle everything effectively. Tasks fall through the cracks, people fall behind, so your overall compliance percentage falls, too. But you’re mandated to meet the requirements, you need to make sure your data stays within bounds, and you need to do it on an ongoing basis – which means at some point, you need a better solution.

In the opening post of this series on comparing different NERC compliance approaches, I talked about the deficiencies of using Excel to manage NERC compliance.  In this post, let us turn our attention to homegrown solutions, usually MS Sharepoint or Document Management platform-based, that support varying degrees of data and document management and perhaps, notifications. […]

Excel spreadsheets are workhorses. There isn’t a business in any industry in the world that doesn’t have someone, somewhere, using Excel to track or calculate something. Some utilities insiders estimate that nearly 50% of companies, subject to NERC compliance requirements, use Excel to manage their NERC compliance data/activities. Logic helps explain why such a ubiquitous […]