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Operators in the control room have an extremely important role to play in the power delivery picture that humanity takes for granted today. Control systems are how operators can see if there is anamolies on the grid, its how they maintain visibility, assess safety and how they help customers every single day. Whether it is challenges of a dangerous high voltage line coming down, or substations going out due to a car hitting a pole, or having to operate Cap banks instead of blacking out a town, or ensuring that a hospital does not lose power or many other tough situations, the control system allows them to do their job safely and efficiently. In dealing with control centers and their supporting teams, its to be said that they have a very short time to make a good decision and the system that they use to do this has to operate at an exceptional level all day and every day. We, at Ilumig can help take the system to the highest possible quality while at the same time work with the control center and support team to elevate their support experience. Listed below are some services we offer in this area.

Ilumig can help with detailed assessment of control system health in terms of Service tickets, service interruptions, detailed application health, Infrastructure health, control room console health, database health, health of field data and health of monitoring system to mitigate top challenges with the system and elevate system performance for the control room and the business teams. We can also help implement best practices to ensure quality of the various areas such as DEV/QA/PROD lifecycle of changes to the system.

We can work with control room operators and their leadership to strive for better understanding of their day to day challenges, resolution turnarounds and bring a deep focus on improving things for them. The control room tends to react a lot to what is the value of our word, do we do what we say we are going to do, do we follow through, what is the quality of the action we take, how do our actions affect them and how can we help make their experience better.

Numerous teams are involved in the support of a control system that determine the quality of its experience to operations, ranging from Infrastructure teams, application teams, transmission and distribution teams and security teams. Change management tends to be extremely complex and if not controlled can cause huge operational impacts leading to loss of credibility with the business. We can help put processes in place that can build trust and take operations along on the journey.

MONITORING SYSTEM REVIew &

REMEDIATION

Monitoring systems if setup correctly can help great-ly aid operational excellence by helping support teams react to system issues before it ever affects operations. This is often neglected and can be lever-aged to move the needle for operations

Audit remediations can be very complex to implement in systems that have no allowed outages and changes can be near impossible to test. We can help gain a detailed understanding of all changes, its possible impact to the system and operations and how to be prepared so these complex changes can be implemented smoothly

Operational challenges with the system for users can build up over years of system operations. Some of these can be issues of different scales, but very frustrating for operations. We can come in and collaborate with operations, support and the system vendor, apply scientific approaches to get to the bottom of such issues leading to happier operations.

Patching of control system environments such as servers, clusters, databases, firewalls and the application itself , although extremely critical for security of the mission critical systems can be the leading cause of strife and impacts to operations due to unforeseen issues. We can help ease this process by bringing discipline, rigor and control to the patching process.

Operations seldom asks that nothing goes wrong. They support the electric grid where they do see things go wrong and work to fix it. But what they ask is that there is clarity and honesty in the communication to them. Changes can last all day while updating systems of this complexity, and it is imperative all impacts be communicated to even their smallest tools, they have total awareness of the state of the system at all times of all system changes. We can help with this.

Robust teams that can support extreme complexity control systems can be very hard to build and nurture. Expertise and skill are not easy to gain due to the vast and complex nature of the application and underlying hardware. We can guide teams and the vendor through knowledge sharing, collaboration and building solid documentation that can help them support operations at higher levels while elevating confidence in the teams.