Duke Energy is the nation’s largest electric power holding company with 7 million electric customers and 500,000 gas customers. The company is headquartered in North Carolina and employs about 30,000 employees and has approximately $14.5 in annual revenues.
Duke Energy’s grid is regularly audited by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) as well as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). As part of these audits, Duke must prove that it is taking the necessary steps to secure the grid and minimize risks. This requires the continual collection of information on who has access to the grid and any changes in infrastructure. Duke’s existing asset management application required manual reporting, so their policies and procedures were not standardized.
Duke chose to implement BMC FootPrints asset management solution to deal with increasingly complex policies and requirements. Standardizing and automating processes has enabled Duke to grow while ensuring it meets all security and access requirements. Workflow automation allowed Duke to eliminate many manual tasks that were involved in the process, reducing the need for additional personnel. FootPrints also improved Duke’s audit management, greatly decreasing the time and manpower required to gather the necessary information. Duke also got access to audit trails, reducing the company’s risk of noncompliance which could cost them over $1 million a day.
By automating and standardizing their workflow, Duke Energy can enforce its policies on a consistent basis and no one person or team has to have an expert on the entire company’s processes and policies. The annual Return On Investment (ROI) was calculated at 242% with a payback period of only 5 months. Jacque Donald, a systems engineer for Duke Energy said, “If we didn’t have FootPrints, it would be a triple effort to keep up with everything, and we’d need different skills and different people to manage it.”
Learn more by downloading the full case study from Nucleus Research.