Outage management planning and performance within a South African energy service provider
Date
2023
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Abstract
The study was motivated by our nation's present energy crisis; the electrical energy supply company has been fighting to keep the lights on since 2008, and the research is based on outage management planning. The organization’s core function is to ascertain that the power plants are dependable, that planned maintenance and outage work is properly planned and that completion dates are met to produce electricity continuously.
This research report focuses on outage planning in the energy supply industry, including the planning process, procedures, and tools used to ensure that when a
unit is taken out of service for a planned outage, it will be put back into service on schedule, within the budget that has been set, and to the specified quality standard. The unit is expected to operate in accordance with the defined performance standard up to its next scheduled outage to deliver a dependable service. The study focuses on outage planning difficulties, optimum planning performance techniques, and planning process gaps. This is a qualitative research study which employs the thematic analysis approach of semi-structured interviews with staff members of the outage department at five power stations in the Eskom Generation division to explore the difficulties, gaps, and performance status and gather descriptive data. The research findings demonstrated that from the themes developed the challenges faced by the outage planning team are, the late release of funding, funding shortage, the scope of work that’s undefined, procurement challenges and lack of expertise. The outage planning process is not the issue, rather, it is the lack of commitment to it that makes it difficult to achieve the established outage planning standards The recommendations reached on reducing the inefficiencies are divided into five disciplines including the main challenges; Engineering for undefined scope of work, Finance for the late release of funds, Procurement to deal with delayed orders, Human resource for the lack of expertise, and Process for outage planning process shortcomings.
Description
A research article submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Administration Johannesburg, [2023]
Keywords
Electrical energy supply, UCTD, Energy supply industry, Outage management, South African energy service provider
Citation
Choche, Segomotso. (2023). Outage management planning and performance within a South African energy service provider [Master’s dissertation , University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg]. WireDSpace.https://hdl.handle.net/10539/41636