Planning our work effectively

We manage 28,000km of electricity cables and lines and a huge amount of technical equipment to keep your lights on. As demand increases, these numbers keep growing.

That means we have a lot of maintenance and projects on the go.

Having good oversight and co-ordination of our field work is crucial to working efficiently and effectively.

To achieve this, we’ve implemented new management processes in our field services programme. These run across all our projects, from scoping through to completion, and is anchored by our project management applications.

We’ve also involved our service providers (the companies we engage to build and maintain our network) in our planning process so they can help us identify efficiencies and get a better understanding of the ‘big picture’.

As a result, we have visibility across all the field work happening now, as well as what we’re planning to do in the future.

By sequencing these we ensure we’re working on the right things at the right time.

This allows us to:

• Give our service providers a view ahead of our planned work, as we did for the rural schools upgrade. This allows our service providers to effectively plan their resources and in turn gets us better value for money.
• Identify opportunities to combine works. For instance, if we’re planning an outage, we check to see whether there’s other maintenance we can conduct on that part of the network while the lights are off, as we did in Hunterville
• Know what materials are needed across our projects, so we can manage the supply chain in the most cost-effective way. Strategic spares
• Undertake thorough tender processes and be confident that we’ve selected the best service providers to work with.
• Engage with you, our customers, earlier – as we’re doing with our South Waikato National Grid project.

Effective planning across all our field work has resulted in higher volumes of quality work delivered efficiently and safely.

All these gains allow us to manage our cost base and the unit rate that you pay as part of your energy bill.