Regulatory Compliance and Tariff Management Solutions

All utilities answer to multiple regulatory agencies - local, county, commission, state, federal - on air quality and emissions, water quality, toxic releases, and health and safety compliance. Each operational area requires complex reporting. For example, even though Title 5 applies across the United States, most facilities have their own permits, requiring different technology configuration and reporting requirements. One utility plant must report to the state of Oklahoma within 24 hours of an emissions exceedance.

By assuring they have the data required to comply with complex regulatory regimes, companies can ensure they can take an enterprise approach to compliance, to capture the entire range of activities that comprise the organization's effort to meet or exceed regulators expectations. Microsoft solutions can automate each step of a required North American Electric Corporations (NERC) quarterly report on critical infrastructure protection so that no steps are missed and the report is submitted accurately and on time.

Generating operations produce phenomenal amounts, all of which is subject to review and oversight. For instance, power generators are required to install continuous emissions monitors (CEM) to track emissions under the Clean Air Act. CEMs produce a steady flow of time series data that must be transmitted, stored, and processed.

To keep pace, utilities benefit from systems that are capable of handling time series data and tens of thousands of records. Data from these CEMs is used to report to regulators and voluntary registries. It can also be used to manage carbon emissions. Microsoft and its partners provide solutions for real time performance monitoring and exposing this information in ways that provides business insight and accelerated decision making.

The information required by regulators is often different from that produced by production systems, causing most reporting to be performed manually using spreadsheets and logbooks. This can create costly, labor-intensive work when a company receives inquiries from regulators. In addition, it is not easy for environmental coordinators to access information about the status of regularly required (e.g., weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual) tasks, taking time away from active management of compliance activities.

Utilities benefit from the security features that are built into the Microsoft Vista and Microsoft Office programs, to automate manual processes for managing compliance, responsibility, accountability and audit-readiness. They also benefit from partner solutions that are pre-loaded with all applicable regional standards, requirements and measures, to expedite utilities' understanding and adaptation to the requirements. Other partner solutions offer secure connections between field devices like relays, meters and equipment monitors, to the different utility business intelligence systems like historians, asset and outage management systems, over the various communication networks of fiber, leased-line, wireless and dial-up.

As plant engineers and environmental compliance personnel reach retirement age, few utilities have enough qualified replacements. At the same time, documentation of operating practices for compliance is not always easily accessible to the next generation of workers. This puts utility companies at risk of losing valuable knowledge on how to meet complex regulatory requirements.

Utilities can benefit from the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server System that combines with Unified Communications solutions to enable knowledge capture and sharing for quick access to engineering expertise to resolve operations issues through near instantaneous access to subject matter experts (SME) or knowledge repositories. Operations and engineering can integrate and accomplish more while operations and maintenance budgets and workforce resources shrink. Unified Communications (a healing of the split between what you do on the computer and the phone), comprehensive search, and enterprise wide business intelligence are all key ingredients to successfully rising to these challenges.

The merger and acquisition boom of the last few years will continue as holding companies seek to rationalize costs and entries into markets. Most previous mergers - and all future ones - will continue to require large-scale information technology integration. Standardization across plants could allow companies to improve on the ability to meet regulatory requirements and, more important, develop common practices and approaches to energy efficiency and reduced emissions at the plants. Utilities worldwide already have spent large sums on technology and automation, creating a mix that is expensive to abandon, but also costly to maintain and make available throughout an enterprise.

Utilities can benefit from Microsoft approaches to leveraging existing systems. Microsoft is at the forefront in developing tools such as Web services that can connect and stitch together previously isolated, far-flung data. Moreover, our software is designed to work together. Cloud Computing and Software+Services models will enable utilities to have greater flexibility and agility to confront new business challenges. Microsoft embraces these requirements and its software vision enhances and extends utilities' technology investments - without requiring rip and replace of existing systems.

Many companies no longer even consciously gather the information necessary for successful rate case or tariff petitions, thwarting timely and efficient response to the thousands of requests that public utility commissions make during such procedures. Plus, many of the people that have expertise in the area or rate/tariff cases are nearing the retirement age and companies are at risk of losing their expertise.

Utilities can benefit from Microsoft solutions for rate case and tariff petitions which allow automation of many of the tasks and provide a mechanism for standardization of workflow, knowledge capture and retention to guard against the problems of the aging workforce. Rate/tariff case solutions built on the Microsoft platform:

• Extend compliance applications to every relevant information worker through deep integration with the familiar, easy-to-use Microsoft Office and Web experiences.

• Offer a common framework to apply policy-based retention and protection to content of all types e.g. documents, images, e-mail, web content.

• Deploy a unified SharePoint foundation that lowers IT deployment and management costs.

• Enable unified search capabilities, with simplified metadata tagging for more consistency and effective filing and convenient workflow controls for policy enforcement.

• Provide a solution that lowers deployment and management costs by building on a unified, enterprise ready foundation that reduces the complexity and cost of addressing multiple requirements.