Internal Work Management System (WMS)

NGED has procured a WMS for use across their East Midlands, West Midlands, South West and South Wales licence areas. The WMS shall improve the coordination and management of NGED's workforce.

NGED is undergoing significant change as it prepares to become a key facilitator in the net zero transition. The electricity network will see an acceleration in the uptake of Low Carbon Technologies (LCTs) as transport and heating decarbonises. In addition, there is also a requirement to efficiently manage an ageing asset base. In both cases, there is a need for NGED to drive operational changes to maintain and improve the high level of network reliability and cost-effectiveness for their customers.

NGED's Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system, CROWN, is used to manage all asset related activities. CROWN is therefore the primary tool for managing volumes of maintenance and new connection related work.

NGED currently use an in-house developed software system called STARS to schedule resources for field-based jobs and tasks. These jobs and tasks include inspections, maintenance of plant and equipment, responding to faults and providing new electricity connections from low voltage up to 132,000 V. Presently, scheduling and allocating resources to carry out the work is predominantly manually driven at a local level with limited visibility to understand detailed costs and timescales for each relevant activity across the business. This approach is already beginning to be difficult to manage under both the volume of new connections and the scale of maintenance required across the entire network. In addition, the current system does not provide senior managers with easy access to understand underlying costs and timescale variations.

The new WMS is intended to replace STARS and provide the intelligence, user-experience and functionality required by NGED to efficiently manage its network and workforce.