ADMS Consulting

ADMS — Advanced Distribution Management System — is what a utility runs its distribution network from. Putting one in is a multi-year program. Living with it afterward is longer still, and that is where most of the work turns out to be.

We work on both sides: consulting during the implementation, and reliability work once the system is running.

Deep expertise across the ADMS lifecycle

Our team includes former Schneider Electric principal engineers with deep expertise across ADMS implementation, integration, testing, training and operations.

We have hands-on experience supporting large-scale ADMS implementation and transformation programs for major US utilities. Through partnerships with US-based system integrators, we provide specialized expertise across DMS, OMS, SCADA, WFM, FLISR, network modelling, CIM and GIS integration.

When you need this

• An ADMS implementation is under way, and the program needs people on the utility side who have been through one before.
• The system is live, and the reporting around it does not yet answer the questions the reliability team and the regulator ask.
• Reliability metrics and indices are produced, but assembling them each month is manual and nobody fully trusts the result.

What we do

• Implementation consulting. We sit on the utility side of an ADMS program and work with the vendor and the integrator on process, data and cutover readiness.
• Process and data alignment. Network, asset and outage data has to line up with the processes the system expects. Most of the pain in an ADMS go-live is here, not in the software.
• Reliability metrics and indices. We work inside the reliability team to define, produce and maintain the indices the business and the regulator rely on. The detail is in the section below.
• Reporting that can be defended. A metric that cannot be traced back to the events behind it will be argued with every month. We set them up so it can.
• Validation and regression after go-live. Upgrades and patches keep coming. Outage handling and reporting need the same regression discipline as an ERP, and usually get less of it.
• Continuity. ADMS knowledge is scarce and engagements here run long. We staff them to stay rather than to hand over.

Utility reliability and performance

We help utilities preserve and improve reliability reporting during ADMS and OMS transformation programs.

Our consultants work with reliability teams to analyse outage and interruption logic, validate ADMS-to-analytics data flows, and verify the calculation of key reliability indicators, including SAIDI, SAIFI, CAIDI, CMI and CI, in alignment with IEEE 1366.

Our experience spans legacy-to-ADMS migration, customer interruption and restoration analysis, planned and unplanned outage classification, network-topology-based customer tracing, data validation and downstream reporting.

An ADMS program is not an IT project with a utility attached to it. The processes it changes are the ones the control room runs on, and they have to keep working through every step of the transition. That is why we treat the reliability work after go-live as part of the same engagement rather than as a separate phase. The system is only as good as the numbers it lets the team stand behind.