INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Green Technology
Enterprise applications are
core to the renewal of South
Africa’s energy sector
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New trends in energy storage, small-scale embedded generation, and smart grid systems
are disrupting the power sector, a trend that will accelerate in South Africa with the recent
lifting of licence restraints on power plants. Mohamed Cassoojee, Managing Director for
South Africa at IFS, says that the South African power industry must embrace technology
to enhance operational efficiency, reduce costs, and improve asset utilisation.
A
gainst the backdrop of these
challenges, South Africa’s energy
sector should look towards
enterprise asset management (EAM) and
modern enterprise resource planning (ERP)
applications to more tightly manage the
renewal and extension of its power generation,
transmission and distribution infrastructure.
Such solutions can help the national power
utility and municipal power companies to
better prepare for the seismic shifts currently
underway in the energy market.
Government is aware of these challenges.
Speaking at the African Utilities Week
conference, former Energy Minister Jeff
Radebe said that government needs to
invest in infrastructure and turn around the
untenable situation around Eskom’s growing
debt and increasing tariffs. He further noted
that distributed generation and smart grid
systems will disrupt the traditional power
utility delivery model.
Optimising maintenance and
field service
The shift will require a much more dynamic
and optimised approach to maintenance
and field service. South African energy
companies must thus embrace Digital
Transformation as an imperative. This
transformation begins by embracing
enterprise asset management to improve
asset utilisation, according to Cassooje.
The subsequent steps are enhancing
upstream and downstream supply chain
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management, resource optimisation,
introducing enterprise operational
intelligence, embracing new technologies
such as the Internet of Things, Machine
Learning, and predictive maintenance, and
becoming a smart utility.
To get this right, organisations must
implement an enterprise backbone
that accommodates asset and project
management, new energies and markets,
visualisation of the entire value chain,
and mobility apps. Mobile technologies
that support the field workforce have a
vital role to play in driving better ROI from
utilities’ investments in enterprise asset
management and enterprise resource
planning solutions.
Today’s leading enterprise asset
management solutions feature powerful
functionality for mobile management of
the complete workflow of work orders –
from logging status changes and updates
or receiving and creating new orders to
concluding the job and reporting time,
material and expenses.
version of the truth. If an investment project is
being managed through such a platform then
cost, progress, performance, changes and
variations can all be viewed in one dashboard.
As we seek to address South Africa’s growing
energy demands and provide the power, we
need to connect every person to the grid
and drive industrialisation of the economy,
modern enterprise software will not only be
about asset utilisation and maintenance.
It could also help manage investment in
projects such as constructing new generation
facilities, new transmission capabilities or
extensions to the electricity grid to get more
villages and customers connected. Better
management of assets and infrastructure
are key to recovery of operational and
capital costs, so that we can build a more
sustainable energy sector. n
Such solutions are easy to deploy and
intuitive for end users to learn and use. When
coupled with workforce management tools,
such solutions unlock significant productivity
gains for utilities who are trying to get the
most from their workforce and assets.
A modern enterprise solution in this scenario
provides an IT hub from which all of the
requisite business data can be delivered – one
Mohamed Cassoojee, Managing Director for
South Africa at IFS
INTELLIGENTCIO
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