Description: Kronos for Energy automates workforce management policies that help improve workplace safety and meet documentation requirements for regulatory compliance. With Kronos workforce management solutions, energy and resources companies can create a safer workforce by automating the enforcement of policies for hiring, scheduling, tracking employee training, and documenting safety incidents while maintaining compliance.

Description: Automate crew callouts and ensure compliance with Kronos Telestaff

Description: Learn why poor time and labor data collection is a common weak point in any corporate infrastructure, one that usually escapes detection and can leak hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars each year.
An ERP system is only as good as the data being fed into it. Often ERP payroll modules don't deliver a return because they aren't being fed the right data, at the right time, in the right level of detail. That's what causes the ERP system to leak.  Perhaps it’s a weekly trickle of employee fraud. It could even be a broken mainline, the result of poorly designed interfaces, a flawed implementation, or an overextended ERP system.
Find out if you have a problem and how, by attacking your time and labor data pipeline, you can streamline business processes and cut costs.

As utility companies increase their investments in smart grid technologies, more scrutiny is being placed on the return on those investments. This conclusions paper provides insights on increasing ROI by explaining best practices for applying analytics in four key areas: advanced forecasting, data management, optimization and energy commodity risk aggregation and analysis.

Every day, the utilities industry finds new opportunities to use analytics. From smart meters to synchrophasors, newly installed grid devices collect data. Upgrades of legacy customer systems and social media outlets deliver customer insights that drive innovation. The challenge is to turn all this data into relevant, easily shared information. That is precisely why the majority of more than 200 respondents to a recent Energy Central survey said they recognize the potential in breaking down information silos. The survey, conducted on behalf of SAS, was the company’s first benchmarking of the utility sector since the advent of smart grids. Results indicate that new data sources are seen to have promise if internal change management barriers can be overcome to make analytics-based information more useful. Read more about how analytics can promote fact-driven decisions regarding renewables integration, network and outage management, customer engagement, grid automation and regulatory compliance.

If you want to trade commodity swaps, you have to pay for compliance to get in the
game. Emerging Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) rules and the industry
infrastructure being created to facilitate compliance will force many trading operations to reinvent their technology, workflows and even portfolio choices.
This white paper talks about how to adjust and even prosper in this rigorous new compliance environment. The four key areas involved in successful Dodd-Frank Title VII compliance – data aggregation, real-time workflows, activity-based costing and trade surveillance – are discussed, as well as the critical collaboration necessary between IT, risk management and compliance executives. Firms that fail to take advantage of the business improvements enabled by these mandated compliance investments are overlooking the opportunity to bring added efficiency and risk control to their trading operations.

The reliability environment for transmission providers has changed. NERC is now implementing legally enforceable reliability standards, and compliance has become more complicated, with penalties for noncompliance that can reach up to $1 million a day.  This paper looks at a subset of these new standards – facilities ratings, transmission planning and special protection systems – and how an advanced 3M conductor technology, 3M Aluminum Conductor Composite Reinforced (3M ACCR), can help simplify compliance and make it more cost effective, while protecting the reliability of the system.

Delivering the power that drives our economy and ensures our safety and well-being is the function of the transmission grid.  However, the industry faces a rapidly changing playing field where efforts to ensure grid reliability may be seen as constraining transactions from intermittent renewable resources and wholesale contracts.  At the same time, reliability oversight is increasing, a vocal public decries the siting of new lines, and economic conditions make investments that impact rates difficult to accept.
 Therefore, it is critical for utilities to reassess the full spectrum of tools available to them.  This white paper examines one example -- upgrading existing lines using advanced conductors – that can help optimize asset use and increase capacity quickly and cost effectively, while minimizing impacts on property owners and the environment.

American Electric Power (AEP) ranks among the nation’s largest generators of electricity, owning nearly 38,000 megawatts of generating capacity in the U.S.  AEP serves approximately 5.3 million customers in 12 states covering more than 200,000 square miles.  AEP prides itself on providing exceptional customer service and was in need on an integrated receivables processing solution that would allow them to reduce customer inquiry response time when it came to disputes over utility bills.  Learn how AEP implemented an integrated receivables solution and find out how they have improved customer service, reduced payment float time and more in this customer case study from WAUSAU Financial Systems.  

Distribution grids need data and systems to drive safe and reliable operations.  As SCADA, distribution automation, and outage management systems prove, dramatic improvement in grid efficiency and reliability can be achieved through increased real-time analytics driven by larger data volumes.  The Smart Grid increases the volume and variety of grid management data available by hundreds- potentially thousands- of orders of magnitude. Legacy applications for grid operations are generally not equipped to handle even the increase in data from today’s smart meters and sensors, much less maximize data use.  A new set of functions is emerging to respond to this challenge  - Advanced Distribution Management.  This Oracle paper reviews how Advanced Distribution Management organizes and analyzes the enormous volumes of new, near real-time data, and why it is so important for today’s utilities to leverage this mission-critical capability.