Power & Utilities Industry Excellence Award Winner - Santee Cooper
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Sphera Essential Suite
- Environmental Performance Solution
- Oracle’s Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
Tech Stack
- Oracle’s Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
- Sphera Essential Suite
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Environmental Impact Reduction
- Productivity Improvements
- Waste Reduction
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Utilities
Applicable Functions
- Maintenance
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Water Utility Management
- Regulatory Compliance Monitoring
Services
- System Integration
- Software Design & Engineering Services
About The Customer
Santee Cooper is South Carolina's largest power producer. Established during the 1930’s New Deal, this state-owned electric and water utility serves more than 2 million commercial and residential customers across 46 counties. The company is strongly committed to protecting the region’s natural environment and assuring regulatory compliance. Santee Cooper takes pride in being a great place to work but many of its employees are getting older and nearing retirement. Furthermore, the company must sometimes restructure its operations to maximize efficiency. Recently, the company started shutting down four coal-fired generating units, a process that required a good deal of change with roles, responsibilities, and people all being shifted between various stations and locations.
The Challenge
Santee Cooper, South Carolina's largest power producer, faced increasing pressures from stricter environmental regulations and internal changes such as employee retirements. The company had a large number of paper forms, spreadsheets, and databases across the company, and needed a central database for consistent and accurate environmental information. The reporting needs had increased and there were more regulations in the pipeline with final rulings coming. The company needed an Environmental Management Information System (EMIS) to manage the current requirements more efficiently and deal proactively with the next generation of environmental demands. Furthermore, the company was undergoing operational adjustments due to organizational and personnel changes, including the shutdown of four coal-fired generating units, which required a lot of change with roles, responsibilities, and people all being shifted between various stations and locations.
The Solution
Santee Cooper launched an enterprise-wide Environmental Management Information System (EMIS) in 2011, choosing Sphera Essential Suite as the backbone of their new EMIS. The company's environmental managers gradually phased out many of the manual processes that involved more than 270 checklists and forms, 115 spreadsheets and two databases. The team standardized metrics, calculations terminology and more within their new centralized system. Santee Cooper integrated Sphera Essential Suite with a variety of complementary systems in order to automate and streamline the flow of raw process data directly into the company’s EMIS. Air emissions, water discharge, waste generation, fuel consumption and other environmental data is imported from systems such as: CEMS - ESC StackVision™; LIMS - Labworks; and FMIS - Fuelworx. The company also linked the EMIS with the company’s Content Management System, saving time for employees, supervisors, and auditors who can now go directly into the system and find what they need.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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