About the Client

The client is a 130+ years old American investor-owned utilities company, one of the largest producers of combined natural gas and electric energy. With complex operations spanning exploration, extraction, transportation, refining, and distribution, the client manages a diverse portfolio of assets, including rigs, wells, pipelines, pumps, fleets, and plants, which are often in remote or extreme environments.

The consumer leverages a comprehensive asset management platform designed to optimize maintenance, streamline operations, and ensure regulatory compliance. By unifying asset data and processes on a single platform, the client achieves enhanced operational efficiency, cost savings, and resilience across its oil and gas operations.

Need for Change

As an asset-heavy utility provider serving over 900,000 customers across 51 cities and 7 counties, the client recognized that legacy systems and fragmented processes were limiting operational efficiency and driving up infrastructure costs. With increasing demands for reliability, regulatory compliance, and rapid outage response, the client needed to modernize its technology stack and unify asset management in utilities workflows. Building an innovative outage management system and enhancing planning capabilities became essential to support growth, improve service delivery, and enable seamless adoption across business units.

Challenges

In the context of asset maintenance and operational planning, clients often encounter a range of obstacles that can impact efficiency, accuracy, and overall effectiveness. These challenges may arise from regulatory requirements, system limitations, process complexities, and data inconsistencies. Addressing these issues is essential for driving improvement and achieving operational goals.

Complex Prerequisites and Planning Difficulties

High standards, stringent regulations, and intricate work protocols make it challenging to plan and coordinate all the prerequisites required for maintenance activities.

Redundant Work Due to Duplicate Orders

The presence of multiple duplicate work orders results in redundant tasks and ineffective planning, ultimately wasting resources and time.

Inadequate Assessment of Work Order Complexity

Although priority calculations exist, there is no robust mechanism to accurately assess the true complexity of work orders, making it more challenging to allocate resources effectively.

Scheduling and Crew Planning Inefficiencies

Limited scheduling tool functionality and disconnected systems lead to poor integration and lack of flexibility. Updates are not synchronized across platforms, resulting in inefficient crew allocation and ineffective labour planning.

Incorrect Cost Allocation

Work orders are sometimes charged to the wrong GL accounts or departments, leading to financial discrepancies and reporting issues.

Fragmented Outage Work Creation

Manual work order creation across fragmented systems causes delays and reduces visibility into progress tracking for outage-related tasks.

LTM’s Solution

LTM delivers innovative, tailored solutions that address the multifaceted challenges of asset-intensive industries. By combining deep domain expertise with advanced technology, LTM empowers firms to transform their maintenance and planning functions in the context of asset management in utilities, driving operational excellence and measurable business outcomes.

Intelligent Work Order Management

The team automated the identification of duplicate work orders, proactively flagging them for users. This not only prevents redundant work but also streamlines planning, optimizes resource allocation, and minimizes unnecessary operational costs.

Complexity-Based Prioritization

Advanced criteria were established to assess and categorize the complexity of each work order. This enables dynamic prioritization, ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently and that high-impact tasks receive the attention they require.

Enhanced Scheduling Experience

LTM enhanced the user interface of graphical scheduling applications, introducing custom actions such as jeopardy indicators on work orders. These enhancements provide users with greater visibility into potential risks and enable more proactive management of schedules and dependencies.

Automated Financial Alignment

The solution automated the assignment of GL accounts for each department and work type, ensuring that cost allocation is both accurate and aligned with predefined business rules. This reduces manual intervention and supports financial transparency.

Real-Time Outage Coordination

By integrating outage work order creation with OMS events, LTM enabled near real-time sharing of assignments and work progress. This integration reduces manual intervention, improves visibility, and accelerates response times during critical outage events.

Seamless Crew and Labor Integration

The solution facilitates the smooth transfer of crew and labor information between systems, supporting more effective planning and assignment of teams for outage events and complex maintenance windows.

Tech Stack

• Languages supported: Java, Python, Java Script

• DB: Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 

• Part Migration from Maximo 7.6.1.3 to MAS 9.0 

Benefits

By implementing targeted process improvements and automation, the company has realized significant operational and financial gains. These benefits reflect enhanced efficiency, cost savings, and improved planning accuracy across maintenance and asset management functions, driving forward digital transformation in asset management.

11% Reduction in Operational Expenditure

Achieved through accurate first-time Bill of Materials (BOM) issuance and correct GL accounting.

Zero Duplicate Work Orders

Automation and process improvements have eliminated redundant work orders, streamlining operations.

20% Increase in Planning Efficiency

Enhanced planning processes and tools have led to significantly better resource utilization and scheduling.

USD 30,000 Monthly Savings

Direct cost savings realized through improved efficiency and elimination of waste.

Conclusion

This transformation stands as a testament to the power of targeted digital modernization in asset-intensive industries. By addressing long-standing operational challenges and integrating intelligent automation, the initiative achieved measurable improvements in efficiency, planning accuracy, and cost savings. This effort not only delivered immediate financial and operational benefits but also established a scalable foundation for future innovation and resilience. The success of this project demonstrates how a strategic approach to enterprise asset management and digital transformation in asset management can unlock significant value, positioning the firm as a leader in operational excellence within the utilities sector.