Incident Management (Stage 1)

Completed

Fossil Fuels: Oil Gas and Coal(Oil and Gas, Refining, transport and storage of oil and gas)

Applied Research and Development

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Mechanical, Aeronautical and Manufacturing Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting

Project Contact
SGN

Network Innovation Allowance

Ofgem

01 December 2015

01 April 2016

4 months

£25,197

Technical Consultancy

South East

Network Innovation Allowance

Project Contact, SGN

The objective of this work is to develop a sound understanding of the requirements to take forward to a development stage. To do this the project will engage professionals from the incident management arena and the Network departments involved in incident management to review and bring forward process designs and operating best practices. This will ensure that at the end of the overall project the industry has a robust and complete incident management solution that is ready for implementation. Specific success criteria are: To investigate and fully understand SGNs existing Incident Management ProcessTo develop and propose changes and technical enhancements to the Incident Management Process. To demonstrate potential technical solutions to improve the Incident Management Process, through mock ups and use cases, and to present those solutions to SGN for usability feedback.

Loss of supply incidents can affect hundreds or thousands of properties and the current software tools used to support the process of managing the incident response are not integrated or fit for purpose. More significantly, a major loss of supply incident (affecting 100,000 properties) will currently present significant challenges to a GDN in managing the incident. Incidents that place a high demand on resources to investigate and manage are not limited to actual loss of supply. In January 2013 the ‘French Gas Cloud’ resulted in a period of high call volumes to the national emergency number and onward to the GDN OCCs. Subsequent investigation work was also carried out by regional depot staff. Approximately 50% of the cost of the incident was spent on admin staff having to capture and process data to ensure every customer had a visit or had some form of contact from a GDN. This also had an ongoing financial impact of other depot staff having to back-fill and additional assistance to maintain on-going depot activities during the incident. A major incident (of any kind) will require the GDN to provide significant resources, and come at a considerable cost. Operations require a comprehensive solution to manage information and resources during a large scale incident and to enable a quicker decision making process on resource requirements. The information captured by the solution will also help to provide accurate cost information after the incident’s resolution and onward recharge where appropriate to ensure the GB Gas customer is not paying for other companies’ errors when working or operating near gas mains and assets. SGN are now looking to assess the possibility of introducing a more advanced innovative incident management platform solution to improve the operational processes, specifically around customer interaction, people and resource management and incident recharge (where appropriate) using the fire service incident response methodology as a starting point. This was identified as the best in practice fit following an earlier PQQ exercise. Visit to OCC, review of sample previous major incidentsReview of Policy and Process documentation, discussions with SGN staff, analysis of possible improvements and writing upAnalysis of technical Enhancements, discussions with SGN staff, feasibility and preliminary system design, use case analysis, cost estimation and presentation material (storyboard, mock ups)Business case analysis of possible enhancements and reportPresentation of findings to SGN and final discussionsNote : Project Documents may be available via the ENA Smarter Networks Portal using the Website link above

31/08/18