Manufacturing

Case Study:

IEC achieves end-to-end visibility

22 September 2009

IEC's headquarters in Haifa, Israel

The Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) is the main supplier of electrical power in the State of Israel. It owns and operates 17 power station sites (including five major thermal power stations), sub-stations, as well as the transmission and distribution networks.

IEC operates in a complex environment – it has a highly distributed workforce, stringent and dynamic health safety and environmental regulations, requirements for quality compliance and an ongoing need for operational excellence. To be effective, the head office needs a consistent view across the organisation’s status critical processes, while still enabling a collaborative approach to corporate accountability and responsibility across different areas. In order to handle this challenge IEC uses a solution from ActionBase, a leading provider of action tracking and human process management systems (HPMS).

ActionBase’s eponymous solution allows organisations to effectively manage human processes and interactions usually handled in e-mail and documents. Integrated completely into standard Microsoft Office applications, ActionBase provides end-to-end real-time visibility and complete audit trail, without causing users to change their existing processes.

At IEC, the solution is used for a number of processes, including: accident and incident investigations; audit management; management and committee meetings; storage facilities complaints; quality assurance at generation and transmission divisions; and strategic and business development processes.

By storing all accidents and incidents events, internal, HSE, ISO and environmental audits, meetings and complaints in ActionBase, IEC is assured that necessary reports are created, actions are assigned to the relevant parties, and issues are reviewed. Audit reports, for example, are summarised along with findings and recommendations, and these recommendations and their derived actions are tracked and followed up, ensuring risks and quality assurance is taken care of. And in the case of complaints, which can be received by vendors, customers, IEC employees and may be an outcome of internal and external audit reviews, ActionBase assigns the issue to the relevant warehouse managers. The result is the assignment and handling of immediate corrective actions with possible effectiveness actions to be checked later.

As part of ISO compliance, quality inspections are performed at the generation and transmission divisions. The reviews are carried out either by IEC internal employees or external inspectors. Such reviews are initiated as a result of a committee request or standard business process. The reviews are summarised in ActionBase along with the discovered defects and recommendations. This means that recommendations are allocated and handled by the relevant departments while the inspectors, management and committees have full visibility of the entire process.

ActionBase also now helps IEC in its development plans. The electricity supplier promotes new entrepreneurships and projects all over the world, such as building new power stations and participating in emerging green energy projects, and using the HPMS solution the business development department manages each project’s initial stages using predefined structured steps such as opportunity examination, cost evaluation, negotiations alternatives exploring, and feasibility checks.

With ActionBase users initiate, follow up and collaborate with peers on ongoing processes and related activities in their familiar Outlook environment. This synergetic unified working environment guarantees users stay on top of their work and remain productive and responsive during the process lifecycle. ActionBase monitors breakthrough productivity and output in the organisation, while ensuring management and control business and critical generating processes.

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