Utilities

Private and publically owned utilities and public works - water, telecoms, electricity, gas, roadways, bridges & buildings, waste disposal & drainage - all play an important role in the critical infrastructure network and those systems that communities rely on in every day life. These organisations manage the physical facilities, supply chains, information technologies and communication networks, which, if destroyed or degraded, would adversely impact national security and social and economic wellbeing.

Now, more than ever, the potential for security breaches and natural disasters underscores the need for fast and effective ways to mitigate risks and to communicate with a range of stakeholders during time-sensitive situations. Whether it's during major hazards that affect assets, minor incident response where automation of procedures can be planned and enacted, OHS&E incidents in the utilities environment, Human Resource Protection and Monitoring, or other crises, OCA can assist the following types of organisations:

Grid Manager of Urban Water Entitlements
Water Suppliers, Recycled and Distribution Management
Electricity
Natural Gas
Telecommunications
Sewage and Treatment Facilities

OCA Incident Manager supports:

Use	Description
Utilities as critical infrastructure	In the Utilities sector, assets are critical infrastructure by their very nature. The OCA software allows you to map out your critical infrastructure in whatever format it may be and include key details about assets that help you respond to incidents, as well as related stakeholder information, site appointments, plans for response, and rich media integration such as CCTV feeds, images or alert triggers, giving you a total operational picture of what is happening to your assets. With the asset import and synchronisation tools, you don't have to use the OCA to replace your asset management system. Rather it can complement that information and allow you to utilise this information from a strategic perspective.
Major hazards	Utilities play an enormous role in major civilian hazards, whether such incidents have an environmental or civilian impact. Water Utilities companies can be monitoring potential overflow of dams, or the impact of pollutants/bacteria from a public health perspective. For Electricity companies, major incidents such as cyclones bushfires can have a huge impact on the electricity grid generally and specific infrastructure. The OCA can assist in planning and response functions for such incidents within your own utilities emergency response team; however it can also assist co-ordination of shared resources with civilian agencies via the OCA Connect interoperability tool.
Compliance	Utilities companies are heavily governed by compliance and regulatory requirements. Decision making in relation to incidents, preparation and response is keenly monitored. An incident happens and you need to work out whether you had done everything you could to ensure that that asset was adequately monitored and maintained? Did you do the site inspections properly? Did you have monitoring tools in place? The OCA can assist by ensuring that you follow the right procedures in relation to compliance procedures. The OCA tasking system allows you to automate regular tasks such as site inspections, and the workflow engine that complements tasking allows you to ensure that your team is reminded of their tasks. The OCA Audit trail can also track where decisions have been made, whether you responded in the timelines that you set for yourself, and provide transparency in post hoc investigations into incidents, whether they are an internal audit or a Royal Commission.
Bring Disparate Information together	Utilities companies tend to have resources all over the place rather than having one centralised asset. What's more, hardware and software devices to manage such utilities information can also vary widely. The OCA can assist by bringing information about disparate asset and information sources into the one system, giving you a common operating picture of what is going on, where.
Consume alarms from multiple security systems	Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) software and other monitoring systems play an important role in monitoring utilities network operations and infrastructure. OCA Incident Manager has been designed with SCADA in mind. OCA is an open architecture piece of software and consumes inputs from any range of third party sources via SOAP/XML. SCADA monitoring and alerts triggers are often done by the SCADA system itself, however where OCA can play a role is by consuming SCADA alarm triggers at a strategic level. OCA does more than just create an alarm; its workflow tool can create an action plan to deal with that trigger. Not all SCADA alarms are high severity, but OCA allows you to select which SCADA alarms you use as triggers for action within OCA, or takes SCADA alarms as pieces of information that may contribute to total situational awareness in relation to broad based incidents.
Make decisions quickly, and mitigate your costs	When your Utilities infrastructure is impacted by incidents the cost can be enormous. Financial penalties may be in place for you not meeting your service levels. Not finding the root of the problem early on can have an on flow effect to other operational capabilities. Every second in response to incidents, counts. OCA can assist in your response time to incidents and assist with reducing the financial impact. OCA has a powerful workflow engine that allows you to enter standard operating procedures - e.g. business continuity plans, emergency response plans or just business as usual procedures - to ensure that your resources follow the plan in terms of tasks, communications and decision making.
Alerting	OCA alerting platform is totally integrated in OCA. Throughout OCA, you can send information via OCA Communication gateway via email, SMS, fax, voice and XML - conforming with the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standard. Send out reminders for site inspections public health warnings, keep key stakeholders informed, and use the workflow tools to automate communications around utilities related emergency plans or operating procedures. You can also send messages from a single source to multiple media, including public websites, intranets, and social media tools. The alerting tools in OCA are totally integrated with your incident and asset management, requests for assistance, and situational reporting, meaning that you can send out the right pieces of information at the touch of a button. Moreover, if you have standardised communication that needs to be sent in relation to particular incidents, then OCA workflows tool can automate that communication.
Get mobile and Geospatial	Utilities work means a great deal of field work - at a Dam, a power grid/station, in remote locations and across large geographic areas, and that means personnel need to be able to access critical information not just via computers, but via mobile phones and PDAs. OCA is optimised for delivery across multiple devices, including Blackberries, IPhones, Android phones as well as a variety of tablet devices. Whilst OCA is good at distributing information such as task and assistance requests, it can also consume information from external information sources whether they be roaming GIS tracking systems, tracking resources or personnel, or alarm triggers from external security systems. OCA allows you bring multiple sources together, and access that information in real time-in the field. Often an incident will affect a geographical area, or multiple areas. OCA geospatial tools allow you to plot affected areas and send communications to key stakeholders in those areas. Using the asset tool you can reach key utilities workers and responders in a targeted and sophisticated manner. You can also use OCA to quickly identify assets and people within a geographical area, or mark-up an incident map for sharing with other stakeholders. OCA integrates with GeoRSS, KML, CAP and ESRI among other mapping standards and systems.
Security	Security of information is key for utilities companies, particularly given how sensitive utilities information can be in a counter-terrorism context. The OCA Incident Manager is the only incident management product in the world to be certified to the internationally recognised Common Criteria EAL2+ security rating - (ISO/IEC 15408). The OCA's multi-node cloud software offering is hosted by Fujitsu with data centres that meet the stringent ASIO T4 and ISO27001 standards. You can also host the application yourself, and we have experience in setting up hardware in classified environments. Key staff also have clearance to the appropriate levels. If security of data matters to you, then you can't do better than OCA.
Resource management & tracking	The OCA asset and request for assistance modules can be used to allocate any resources to incidents be they human, fixed, mobile, vehicles or equipment. Not only can you assign resources to your own staff within the system, but you can also send external requests for assistance to third party agencies using the OCA communications gateway. Resources can be tracked and allocated in many ways - geographically, by resource availability, by capability, by type, by cost. You can also enter costs against resource requests or allocations, to easily track the overall cost of a response or recovery effort. The OCA Designer tool allows you to create new asset categories on the fly.
Crisis severity	OCA deals with different levels of crises, and can be easily configured to match your crisis matrix. When a utilities incident moves from low to high severity, you can use the workflow tool to send communication out to staff and get them in to work on the incident, quickly and efficiently.