Power Shower

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The CXO's involvement with IT is even more important in the
government sector where culture change is still an issue

For
government companies carved out of old departments, bringing employees out of
the traditional mindset to compete with the best in the private sector is a huge
challenge by all accounts. But the good thing, at least in some places, is that
the earlier resistance to computers 'not being useful' is changing. The
low-key, unassuming government worker has realized how IT is making him more
productive, lessening his physical and mental strain.

One
person who has been reinforcing this message is the managing director of
Karnataka Power Transmission Corporation Limited (KPTCL) and the chairman of
Electricity Supply Companies (ESCOMS), Bharat Lal. While trying to inject the
right dose of IT into his employees' mind and soul, he has made sure not to
overdo his 'conversion' or overshoot his expectation. Slowly but surely, he
is crawling towards a target of making every employee in his company computer
literate.  “We have 35,000
employees and if you exclude Group D employees, we need to enhance the skills of
about 25,000 people 30% of them are already computer literate,” he says.
Training courses have therefore been designed and external agencies identified
to train.

This
is not to say that KPTCL is a laggard in adopting IT. Bharat's point is to
really ensure that technology, and its importance, permeates down to all levels
and not remain confined to a group that interfaces with it regularly. “The
level of exposure of our IT heads is anyway less. Things can only improve
because the thrust is from the top management. We have now started a
coordination committee for IT that looks at the progress of all our five
distribution companies like the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company (BESCOM),”
he tells.

IT
initiatives at the company had started in 1995 but picked up only in the last
one and a half years. It is already a heavy user of IT and has aggressive
targets-the IT spend at KPTCL and its allied companies is likely to grow ten
fold in the next one year-from its present slim looking use of 1% of its
annual turnover of Rs 7,000 crore-says the MD.

“When
we talk of IT use in the power sector, it starts with the automation of
processes and systems; it starts with power generation, what is received at the
stations and what is given to the consumer. If all the three have to match, then
technology is absolutely essential,” Bharat says. His expectation from the
outset, thus, was to have a good and reliable network of data acquisition, among
other things, at the major transmission level, at the generating point, at the
load dispatch center. That has happened with satellite communication and now
KPTCL has live data availability around the clock. The MD now wishes to move
further from here and relate the flow of energy from load dispatch centers to
down stations and from stations to the consumers. This is where he wants IT to
play a major role, again.

In
fact, it has already started playing some role. To begin with, every
distribution company now has a website that has a profiling of the company as
well as details of the consumer -billing, tendering, statutory information
etc. Second is customer information system where all information is stored
centrally in a server. The other areas where IT is being used in a big way is
works and project monitoring and material management to detect what materials
are available in the stores, stations, when were these procured and its
guarantee period among others.

Satisfaction index As the MD of KPTCL, Bharat Lal has been able to promote IT culture from the top, spearheading many projects himself and laying down the roadmap for the future. As the MD of BESCOM, he had acheived zero transformer failure rate, which means that not a single distribution transformer has failed in Bangalore in the last two years. Transmission and distribution losses in BESCOM region have reduced to an all time low of 9.5%, the lowest among all power distribution companies in the country. He also kicked off the any-time payment kiosks--24-hr automated bill collection centers.

A
noticeable benefit is increase in revenues; the MD is pleased to contend. The
introduction of the energy accounting and auditing applications is a case in
point. “Through this, we can track down the use of energy below sub stations.
Earlier, we never had a mechanism of finding out how much was the loss and
where. Now we know how much has been dispensed from the station, how much has
been consumed at the transformer level and how much by consumers,” he says. At
the transformer level now, KPTCL has put up meters. What is recorded in a month
is known and so is what is being billed to the consumer. The transformer meter,
the installation and the consumer bill are all read on the same day. This has
resulted in substantial revenue savings. “In BESCOM, about eight lakh meters
were checked after we came to know about high losses at the transformer level.
We found that about 10% of the meters were not good. After we replaced these
meters, recordings have increased by 10% and our revenues too. This was possible
because we can now analyze the data of lakhs of consumers,” Bharat tells.

Yet
another noticeable help is in the number of complaints, which have come down
considerably. The chief engineers use laptops. Some employees also use spot
billing machines, very much like a Simputer-a hand-held device that has an
inbuilt program to give out a bill immediately.

The
IT-savvy MD still sees a lot of gaps that IT can bridge at his company. Among
them are GIS and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA). “We want
distribution automation to happen. If power goes out in a particular area, can
supply be ensured from other areas? We also want integrated analysis of power
flows, like flow patterns,” he says.

Tendering
of the jobs will be out soon. Not much maintenance outsourcing can be expected
though. A huge IT literate in-house pool of talent is being readied to do that.
Lal has been the driving force behind the changing perspective of KPTCL
employees on myriad issues including technology.

Goutam
Das

goutamd@cybermedia.co.in