Blog 4: The Everyday Superheroes Save a City from Disaster

Ah, success. There’s nothing like a job well done – and eight months into their DATM engagement with Kinsmen Group, Bruce and the Viddaco* team feel rather smug. Why wouldn’t they? They’ve watched their plants and facilities transform into well-run, sophisticated environments. Just consider their results so far…

• New efficiencies, big and small, have reduced costs and realized a dramatic drop in downtime and emergency maintenance.
• Leaders have far better visibility into their teams’ activities and performance, enabling them to identify roadblocks and spot improvement opportunities.
• Viddaco is finally beginning to leverage Industry 4.0 tools like artificial intelligence, advanced data analytics, and machine learning.
• Sustainability goals are far more attainable because their engineering, operations, and maintenance teams stay agile and organized despite new equipment learning curves and change projects.

“We’re looking at a future of more innovation and productivity,” Selina summarizes with a smile. “Everything has changed – and it’s all gone so smoothly, thanks to the consistent DATM support.”

“We’ll see,” Bruce says gloomily. Of course, he’s pleased by their results, but he’s also aware that their improvements haven’t been tested yet. As the saying goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. And with summer approaching—the season of power outages in their hot Southwestern city—heat is the enemy. He’s unsure if their enhanced reliability will hold up through July and August or if the team will remember how to use their new skills in a crisis.

It’s June when the temperature begins to climb. Bruce nervously checks the weather forecast daily, his heart sinking when he sees a row of unusually high triple-digit temperatures.

The Outage

One hot morning, the temperature hits one hundred degrees earlier than usual.

“We’re supposed to break records this week,” says Peter, a young operations specialist. “Hope we can meet demand this summer. It’s supposed to be a scorcher.”

Intern Natasha looks nervous. “Wait, what happens if we can’t?”

“We’re going to be fine,” Bruce says. “We’ve upgraded our grid, and our new systems monitor every inch of our infrastructure. There’s no need to worry.” But he keeps checking his watch, which reads another degree higher every time he looks at it. The truth is, not all their systems have been upgraded or replaced yet.

The power grid operated flawlessly that day.

The next day, the city is at one hundred and ten degrees by noon. Bruce is eating lunch with Selina in his office when the lights flicker.

A moment later, the office goes dark. They look out the windows to see the entire street is affected. It’s official: a power failure is impacting the city.

From Failure to Inferno

The Viddaco team swings into action. Text messages and phone calls mention severe voltage instability and grid failure. A field team reports that a major power line overheated and flashed, starting a small fire in a tree.

Bruce’s stomach is in knots. He thinks of the nearly one million people affected. He can only envision their customers’ stress, the strain on phone lines, and the possible failure of sewage pumping stations. If the outage lasts too long, restaurants and grocery stores will have to throw away food. The impacts on humans and animals could be unimaginable.

Two Viddaco leaders are furious. “We all know what caused this!” says Lex, an operations leader. “Poorly managed maintenance and out-of-service equipment.”

“I don’t think so,” engineering leader Emma says. “I bet maintenance didn’t run their schedule for planned outages by us as they’re supposed to. It’s happened before and left the grid open to human error.”

Leaving Lex and Emma to argue, Bruce meets with Selina, Clark, and Diana, who have mobilized their teams. To his surprise, he finds an unprecedented level of efficiency.

Every worker is finding the up-to-date asset information they need. No one has wasted time searching for maintenance histories or waiting for an answer from someone. A year earlier, they would have had to track down the engineer who knew the right person who knew where certain information was. Now, the answers are available to everyone.

Privately, Diana has worried that her team will struggle to act efficiently, given the recent influx of new equipment.  Her efforts to transition into a modernized grid have been successful, but she isn’t quite sure how adept the team is. Now, she’s stunned to see them act with confidence and easy competence. The DATM guidance has elevated her technicians’ productivity and technological literacy – and she couldn’t be prouder.

Everyone not only works faster but also collaborates better than ever. Bruce is surprised and thrilled to see workers at different plants communicating efficiently with each other and with workers in the field.

Thanks to their new visibility, they can trace the origins of the issue. Peter and Natasha have detected a software bug on an old system that didn’t spark the right alarm when transmission lines were overloaded. Because the alarm didn’t sound, the issue spiraled into a massive problem for the grid.

They corrected the issue and restored power in under an hour, which is a major success story for the team.

A Team of Everyday Superheroes

Bruce is massively relieved, but he wishes they’d replaced the software sooner. The DATM engagement had identified it as a problem, but Bruce’s team hadn’t gotten to that correction yet.

“We should have done this earlier,” Bruce says to Selina. “If we had started this upgrade two years ago, we wouldn’t have had an outage today.”

“What matters is how our teams reacted,” Selina says. “Did you see how effective they were? In just eight months, our workforce has become digitally fluent. Sure, this outage was frightening, but today proved that we’re resilient enough to handle the worst of the worst.”

She’s right, Bruce realizes. Today could have been the nightmare that has always dogged his thoughts—a power failure snowballing into widespread catastrophe. But they solved it, and now he knows they’ll also be able to solve any future challenges. Kinsmen Group isn’t even done yet; they have more new technologies to look forward to and other improvements.

As the sun sets on the hottest summer day, Bruce sends a message to Viddaco’s workforce, telling them he is proud of their expertise and dedication. “The city is lucky to have its power in your capable hands,” he says. “Thank you for being the everyday superheroes we needed today.”

When he and Selina leave the office, the sweltering summer night is still well over a hundred degrees, but Bruce knows their customers can sleep comfortably tonight in air-conditioned homes. And if another problem does occur this summer, he’s confident the Viddaco team can solve it – just as he is confident Viddaco is headed into a future of greater innovation and achievement.

*Names changed to protect their real identities.