CITY COUNCIL AGENDA ITEM
ACTION REQUESTED:
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Approve the award of Change Order #2 to Contract 21-059, Outage Management System, to Schneider Electric for an additional two-year term
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DEPARTMENT: Electric Utility
SUBMITTED BY: Brian Groth, Director
BOARD/COMMISSION REVIEW:
N/A
BACKGROUND:
The City Council awarded Contract 21-059, Outage Management System, to Schneider Electric (Schneider) in September 2021. The purpose of this contract is to implement an outage management system (OMS) to streamline communication between the City call center and the Electric Utility control room during outages. The implementation will allow customers to see outage scope and status in near real-time on the City website. In addition, the project is expected to improve the process of dispatching City Electric Utility crews.
The original contract completion date was January 10, 2023. On January 17, 2023, the City Council approved a Change Order to extend the project completion date to December 10, 2023.
DISCUSSION:
This Change Order is requested to extend the project completion date through December 31, 2025. Initially, project kick-off was pushed into February 2022 to align with the work plan of the City’s IT Department. Midway through project implementation the primary vendor’s technical lead left the company, which resulted in a delay, including time for their new technical lead to become familiar with the project.
This technically complex project involves real-time data from multiple vendors, systems, municipal departments, and crosses network domains. Throughout the planning, the Utility has taken the opportunity to optimize workflows to take advantage of this new technology. Recently, it was discovered that a large amount of additional data needs to be added to the GIS system and the process to add this data is currently underway and being performed by existing Utility staff.
During 2023, Electric Utility staff has had limitations in the amount of time that could be dedicated to this project due to rollouts of Water AMI (go-live July 2023), Empower Water (go-live April 2024), and Cityworks Work Orders (go-live June 2023). The Electric Utility has created the 2024 work plan and expects to be able to fully staff this project through the new contract end date.
The vendor has been accommodating to the Utility’s availability and has not requested a financial Change Order for delays.
FISCAL IMPACT:
There is no fiscal impact, this is a change order to extend the completion date.