Nuclear energy innovator breaks through digital transformation barriers with Microsoft technology and services

From turnkey operating plant services to micro-reactors for remote applications, Westinghouse Electric Company is leading the way toward safe, carbon-free nuclear power to meet growing energy needs. It built the first commercial pressurized-water reactor more than 60 years ago. Today, Westinghouse technology is the basis for approximately one-half of the world's operating nuclear plants.

The company must help customers maintain an aging fleet of existing reactors while innovating for the future. It’s a tough challenge that increasingly requires a forward-looking approach to IT. “Data is gold in our industry, but it’s always been difficult and expensive to get,” says Brandon Momeyer, Director of Operations, Digital & Innovation at Westinghouse Electric Company. “We need a way to capture data more easily and derive more intelligence from it than we ever have before to support continued operational excellence.” 

Breaking through barriers to transformation

In the nuclear industry, highly regulated data and a total commitment to safety require a conservative approach to change. For Westinghouse Electric Company, siloed technology strategies had created significant technical debt, including more than 3,000 applications and 2,300 databases. Yet it lacked the ability to quickly turn data into insights.

New leadership helped establish a new level of commitment to digital transformation. Mike Abram became Chief Information Officer and Bill McDade took on the role of Vice President of Digital Technology. “People at Westinghouse Electric Company are some of the most intelligent, passionate individuals I’ve ever worked with," says McDade. “Everybody here wants to do digital transformation right and sees it as the way forward. Change agents are welcome here.”

To Abram, the logical starting point was identifying a vendor that could address the many complex aspects of the company’s business. “Microsoft stood out as the only organization with a comprehensive suite of technology that covered all our needs under a single umbrella.”

Turning crisis into opportunity

The company’s deeper relationship with Microsoft began with the deployment of Surface devices followed by Teams and Microsoft 365 E5 to their employees worldwide, giving them access to best-in-class productivity apps with advanced security, compliance, voice, and analytical capabilities. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, employees could quickly shift to remote work while staying productive and connected.

When traditional onsite customer inspections of nuclear fuel manufacturing became impossible, engineers could virtually “walk” customers through the facility using Surface and Microsoft Teams. “We used Microsoft technology to come up with quick, creative solutions that enabled us to keep product moving out the door without the risk of exposing our workforce to illness,” says Abram.

Making the right choice for data-science innovation

Elsewhere, McDade’s digital team was looking for ways to tackle the central challenge of its business: capturing and using data locked away in spreadsheets or databases and adopting industrial-grade AI and ML capabilities. The company already had a sophisticated data-science team. In 2019, ML-driven maintenance operations at one plant resulted in $1,000,000 in annual savings. Moving to the cloud would unleash the ability to accelerate and scale additional wins like these.

Although early success built confidence in Microsoft, Westinghouse Electric Company needed to objectively evaluate leading AI/ML vendors to ensure it chose the right platform. The company held a proof-of-concept “bake off” for various use cases, including edge-based process optimization, natural language processing, and computer vision.

Microsoft and its partner, Insight, demonstrated that AI on Azure combined ease of use, sophisticated features, and enterprise scalability. Insight delivered additional value with interdisciplinary expertise from its AI Center of Excellence. Westinghouse Electric Company decided Microsoft was the right choice.

Implementing data intelligence

Working closely with Insight and Microsoft, Westinghouse Electric Company is gaining the ability to maximize the contributions of its data-science experts. Using the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework and the concept of data fabric, along with contributions from Microsoft and Insight, the company is looking forward to using data more effectively and discovering value in data that would have been forgotten or discarded. “With Azure cloud resources and agility, we will be able to say ‘yes’ to more potential applications of data science,” says Scott Sidener, Digital Chief Engineer, Digital & Innovation at Westinghouse Electric Company. “At the same time, we can reduce the cost of maintaining infrastructure, deploying test and development capacity, and other on-premises tasks that don’t add value.”

One of the most important goals is to help customers become more competitive in the energy marketplace. Nuclear power has many advantages, but the maintenance required is costly. Using ML to monitor assets in real time and detect abnormal operations early will improve safety and optimize maintenance. At the same time, the company will be able to aggregate data across utilities to provide unique insights to customers.

Westinghouse Electric Company is building AI/ML capacity using a variety of Azure solutions. They will empower data scientists and developers to create, collaborate on, and deploy ML models faster using Azure Machine Learning. Developers will be able to integrate AI services such as computer vision, natural language processing, and anomaly detection into applications using APIs from Azure Cognitive Services APIs. For big data analytics using Apache Spark, the team will use Azure Databricks for rapid setup, automatic scaling, and interactive collaboration using the languages and frameworks of their choice.

Empowering people with security and agility

Data scientists aren’t the only ones who are benefiting from the adoption of Microsoft technologies at Westinghouse Electric Company. With the deployment of Microsoft 365 E5, Abram saw an opportunity to democratize analytics and make data more accessible with Power BI. “We had nine different analytics and reporting technologies throughout the company,” he notes. “We needed to consolidate those functions into a tool that empowers everyone to work with data and takes the reporting burden off IT. When we adopted Microsoft 365, Power BI immediately demonstrated that it could provide robust data experiences integrated in the tools people already use every day.”

Digital transformation with Microsoft is making an impact inside the IT department as well. In order to simplify and consolidate its security and management solutions while maintaining high industry standards, the company chose Azure Defender to protect its hybrid cloud workloads against evolving security threats. It's also using Azure Sentinel, a cloud-based Security Information and Event Management solution for next-generation security operations incorporating AI and large-scale intelligence. The team expects to achieve faster response to security incidents, greater visibility across their IT ecosystem, and more efficient IT operations thanks to automation and analytics.

More broadly, the adoption of Azure is helping the organization dramatically increase digital agility. “When you’re reliant on datacenter infrastructure, it’s impossible to move quickly,” says Abram. “Increasingly, we need to respond to requests in days or even hours. With Azure fully operationalized, we will be able to spin up and shut down workloads or analyze huge volumes of data in minutes and use best-in-class industry processes for rapid development.”

Creating a lasting relationship

The story of digital transformation at Westinghouse Electric Company is about more than individual technologies. At the heart, it’s about enabling new levels of speed and agility with a unified platform. “We need to move faster and implement new technology with the least amount of impact to our employees,” says Abram. “That’s a lot easier with the Microsoft platform where every solution works together holistically, helping us deliver the best results with the least effort and risk.”

Westinghouse Electric Company leaders agree that Microsoft has helped them shape their digital transformation strategy and shift their culture to make it a reality. “There’s a steep learning curve when you're implementing new innovations at this pace and scale,” says Sidener. “Microsoft and its partners have been generous with architecture best practices, high-quality training, and their deep industry experience. Most importantly, Microsoft people are deeply engaged with helping us build great things. It has been an incredibly positive experience.”

The important mission of the company—meeting global needs for safe, reliable, zero-carbon energy—makes this relationship even more meaningful. “Westinghouse Electric Company is the best-positioned solution provider in the nuclear-energy industry to help operators become more competitive,” says Mike Drudy, Director of Digital Innovation, Digital & Innovation at Westinghouse Electric Company. “With Microsoft, we can innovate faster to keep today’s nuclear plants hard at work while advancing reactor technology to meet demand in a carbon-free future.”