Case Studies: Southern Nuclear Operating Company, Inc. — Plant Hatch

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“Southern Company serves nearly 4 million customers in one of the fastest growing regions in the United States. With more than 30,000 megawatts of generating capacity and a rapidly growing wholesale energy business, Southern Company is a major source of energy in the Southeastern United States.”

The Atlanta, Georgia-based company has had nearly 100 years of experience in providing their customers with reliable high quality service. The conglomerate is comprised of five operating utilities, as well as a wholesale generation business.

The Problem

The Southern Nuclear Operating Company’s Plant Hatch initiated an effort to extend its outage cycle from 18 to 24 months. An important part of this initiative was the difficult task of efficiently identifying, locating, assembling and analyzing specific historical work packages. These work packages, some more than ten years old, were primarily on microfilm and many were in excess of 200 pages. This overwhelming task was hampered by the following circumstances:

	The packages primarily resided on microfilm, which proved to be very time consuming
	Additional resources would be required and trained in: – The EMDS System – Film readers readers, printers and vault locations – Document management processes
	The process was very tedious
	Limited resources available to process the microfilm

The Solution

NAC International and F.Y.I jointly provided microfilm conversion services to convert the microfilm reels with high concentrations of complex historical work packages to Multi-Page PDF files. The solution improved the manner in which images are retrieved and maintained and significantly enhanced the effort to extend the Plant Hatch outage cycle from 18 to 24 months. The files were then burned onto CDs and indexed by Document ID.

The Benefits

The utilization of the F.Y.I micro-graphic solution has provided efficiency improvements along with presenting added value to their EDMS investment. The following benefits have been obtained as a result of the completion of this project:

	Facilitated the initiative to extend the plant outage cycle from 18 months to 24 months
	Improved efficiency and reliability of search and retrieval tasks
	10 years of work packages potentially available online within the Southern Company Intranet
	Substantial decrease in effort and cost of long term work package maintenance