ComEd and Ventyx Strengthen Smart Grid Collaboration to Improve Service for 3.8 Million Illinois Customers

ATLANTA, Nov. 5, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- As it works to roll out the next-generation smart grid/smart meter programs to nearly 4 million customers in Chicago and Northern Illinois, Commonwealth Edison Company (ComEd), a unit of Chicago-based Exelon Corporation, is also strengthening its relationship with Ventyx, an ABB company, by adopting the latest version of the Ventyx Network Manager Outage Management System (OMS) as part of a comprehensive software and hardware upgrade.

Ventyx Network Manager OMS is a mission-critical system for ComEd Distribution Operations, providing operational decision support during outages. It integrates information about customers, system status and resources to predict and find the location of outages, dispatch repair crews efficiently and effectively communicate with customers throughout the process.

"Ventyx has been a trusted ComEd partner for many years, and we've accomplished a lot together," said Mark Browning, vice president of IT at ComEd. "The latest release of Ventyx OMS software will play an important role in our strategy to improve service and reliability and provide a better customer experience when outages do occur, as we move forward with our grid modernization initiatives."

Ventyx Outage Lifecycle Management (OLM) Solution

The Ventyx OLM solution is a key part of a utilities' holistic approach – plan, prepare, communicate and respond – to reducing both total outage duration and the amount of time individual customers lose power in an outage. Ventyx's OLM solution has been credited with reducing outage duration by as much as 30 percent and customer power loss by as much as 20 minutes across North American utilities. By enabling utilities to improve outage planning, preparation and customer communication and automate truck dispatching, Ventyx's OLM solution saves utilities money by reducing truck rolls, call volumes and dispatcher staffing levels.

ComEd uses two of the three main components of the Ventyx OLM solution suite of products. OMS has been a core capability for more than a decade, and more recently ComEd has been relying on the FocalPoint analytics platform since 2012 to provide critical communications to customers regarding outages.

"ComEd, a strong innovation partner with Ventyx and ABB, is one of the most forward-looking of many leading utilities around the world creating agile, intelligent infrastructures in a period of great change," said Yilang Chen, Ventyx EVP, Network Control. "With Ventyx Network Manager OMS ComEd is investing in a solution designed to meet these evolving needs to maximize the benefits of new technologies for its customers and stockholders."  

About ComEd
Commonwealth Edison Company (ComEd) is a unit of Chicago-based Exelon Corporation (NYSE: EXC), the nation's leading competitive energy provider, with approximately 6.6 million customers. ComEd provides service to approximately 3.8 million customers across northern Illinois, or 70 percent of the state's population. For more information visit ComEd.com, and connect with the company on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

About Ventyx
Ventyx, an ABB company, is a world-leading supplier of Industrial Enterprise Software for essential industries such as energy, mining and public infrastructure. Ventyx solutions bridge the gap between information technologies (IT) and operational technologies (OT), enabling clients to make faster, better-informed decisions in both daily operations and long-term planning strategies. Some of the world's largest organizations rely on Ventyx solutions to minimize risk, enhance operational and financial performance, and execute the right strategies for the future. For more details, see www.ventyx.com.

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