Speeding Up Power Grid Disruption Recovery with Storm Manager

In a previous post, we talked about speeding up power grid disruption recovery efforts by targeting a key area of hidden bottlenecks: logistics. Recovering from power grid disruptions requires an enormous amount of administrative work to organize, manage, and coordinate your field crews. And a good power grid disruption management application can help you do all that faster and easier than ever before.

At GE Vernova Digital, our recommended tool for managing power grid disruption recovery logistics is Storm Manager. This all-in-one application is easy-to-use, intuitive, and consolidates all your most bottleneck-prone power grid recovery tasks behind a single pane of glass.

Here’s a look at how it can streamline your power grid disruption recovery efforts:

Few things slow power grid disruption recovery efforts more than delayed onboarding for contract crews. This frequently happens when your contractors use different systems than you, the utility manager hiring them. The most common means of navigating this discrepancy is with handoffs – which typically involve your team manually entering data from the contractors’ systems into your own. With Storm Manager, on the other hand, everyone is united on the same application. Even if your contractors have never even heard of Storm Manager before, all they need to do is download it from the App Store or Google Play and begin using it. The result? Fewer time-consuming handoffs.

During power grid disruption recovery, it’s critical to know exactly where your crews – both internal and external – are stationed at all times. Further, you need to be able to see their locations at a glance, rather than calling them individually to find out where they are. Storm Manager lets you do just that with its integrated GPS tracking of resource locations. This enables you to easily verify your crews’ task compliance (i.e. making sure they are in their assigned areas), check if any of them are in harm’s way in emergency situations, and determine what their next assignment should be per their current location.

Even if you have the phone numbers of every single one of your field workers, you will encounter situations in which calling them individually is not practical. For example, there may be an emergency situation in which you need to alert everyone at once. Even just a simple assignment change for a particular crew can turn into a bottleneck if the workers are too busy to answer your call. With Storm Manager, you can ensure everyone gets the information they need, when they need it, via the application’s direct workforce communications. The capability of having everyone communicate via the same application and method is invaluable.

Time and expense tracking are two tasks that are highly prone to bottlenecks. Both tasks need to happen within a single interface, or else your employees will use any method they want – be it via email, spreadsheet, paper memo, or anything else.  You can save your administrative staff from painfully slow data entry by tracking all time and expense data through Storm Manager. In addition to keeping all this information in one place, the application digitally records every transaction’s time, submitter, and location for faster reporting and reconciliation. It even facilitates the approval process, making it easier for your office workers to review and approve hours and expenses in the moment.

Arranging hotel accommodations is part of hiring external contractors to support your own workforce. Finding and assigning hotel rooms for contractors can be a slow and imprecise process, potentially delaying your recovery.  Storm Manager speeds up this process by introducing much needed automation. The application can quickly assess the number of rooms needed based on your crew sheets in the system, automatically notify personnel of their room assignment, and even use GPS tracking to determine the best place for each worker to stay based on their location. 

By streamlining processes that are especially vulnerable to bottlenecks, Storm Manager keeps efficiency high and power grid recovery durations down. Your employees will appreciate the streamlined work processes, and your customers will notice the faster restoration of power. Everybody wins.