Discussion

Dear Professor and Classmates,

Our Company uses internal and external reports and services to understand and analyze the business and key performance indicators. In the Canadian energy sector we are members of the Canadian Electricity Association (CEA).  We are a member of the CEA Analytics and Reliability Program which provides research and analytics on the country’s power generation, transmission and distribution systems ( CEA, 1.). Being part of this peer group and network of information has been a key instrument in helping the Company improve performance with metrics with a focus on evidence based performance data on reliability, causes of power outages, peer performance statistics that are a tremendous working tool for my Company.

When power is out for whatever reason we fail. Anything that disappoints a customer as is an error ( JWI, 2)  The work with the committee and reports help understand  continuous operation status, failures in the electrical system and why, Equipment issues/failures/causes and ranks system reliability across the country  which helps us benchmark our work, seek continuous learning for improvement and also manage the quality of the grid. Overall this drives quality as it really helps us examine the events and costs associated with our products and services and for our work safety is is key.  In fact safety quality is a key metric and is key in what we do as we work in a dangerous business and injury or loss of life is a serious concern when working around electrical equipment.

In our industry reliability ( hours out per year per customer) and safety performance are key metrics we review and benchmark against other utilities.

JD Power Report  ( as mentioned in the Discussion question) is good and the Customer Service Electricity for Utilities and the rankings and information on customer expectations and service level is also a tool we use each year and purchase data and reports for our annual review, but generally for information purposes and most of out utilities.These reports and metrics can be used to manage quality, 

These reports we use and purchase from CEA are not public but can be viewed in part at www.cea.com and reference Reports.

I think eliminating error and saving money are key opportunities for our leadership as we learned this week in the course. The metrics we have used and having alignment about these key areas for example with reliability and safety .

For our teams we have and know the metrics, we talk about, we have educational newsletters and meetings every Quarter and along the way we pivot to change for improvements with every new learning.We review even line item specific questions for continuous improvement in safety practices, procedures and our culture – and leadership owns this every step of the way and transformational elements they are responsible fpr (Martin,3).

As we learned this week one of the key elements of managing quality is key for our business and our customers in the area of reliability and durability  and the equipment needs to work for the grid to keep power on for customers  and it needs to function consistently overtime , even in strenuous  conditions  and that’s why we have performance targets levels that we also report to the Regulator ( Shapiro,4). Our systems like the authors mention  the key is to manage quality by prevention  and control systems and metrics  to help us gain a competitive ad vantage. The other added benefit which I think is even more important is that we keep our crews, engineers, technicians and contractors safe on the job