The Westinghouse Outage Control Center is an innovative, high-tech operation that provides vital central monitoring and response to our utility customers’ outage operations at nuclear power plant sites 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week during outage seasons.
The Westinghouse Outage Control Center (WOCC), based at our Operating Plant Services Center of Excellence in Madison, Pennsylvania (USA), strengthens Westinghouse’s outage service delivery performance with centralized, around‑the‑clock monitoring and emergent issue response. This OCC opened in September 2014. Westinghouse launched the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Outage Control Center (W‑E‑OCC) in March 2016. The centers enable the Operating Plants Business and Westinghouse to uphold Flawless Execution of all our field projects.
"The Westinghouse Outage Control Centers directly connects our field teams and customers to our central response team, who have a great amount of nuclear power plant outage expertise. Our experienced WOCC staff monitors every plant site where our field service teams are working to prioritize schedules and coordinate resources using real-time data exchange. This allows Westinghouse to better and more consistently deliver services safely, with high quality, and on schedule. And, this ability will help our customers achieve their outage performance goals – which is our ultimate goal,” said David Howell, senior vice president, Westinghouse Operating Plants Business.
Both WOCC teams' key responsibilities include:
- Monitor and respond to outage operations on a 24-hour/7-day-a-week basis during designated outage seasons
- Prioritize the use of Westinghouse resources to meet deliverables and commitments and resolve emergent issues
- Synchronize all personnel by communicating with speed and accuracy
- Integrate the project scheduling and issue management tools and processes to ensure efficiency and agility, and promote Continuous Improvement
- Drive for excellence in everything Westinghouse delivers to its partners and customers
In addition, the WOCC utilizes modern state-of-the-art technology for real-time video connections at target sites.
How does it work?
All calls coming in to the WOCC from customer sites are tracked in a formatted log system that include the name of the site, date, time, product line, issue and point of contact at site. Calls will then be prioritized from Level 1 to Level 3. At all levels, the WOCC works closely with and in support of the Westinghouse outage team and our customers.
The Centers also conducts daily tracking of all outages, including:
- Monitoring the Outage Hotline for key events and messages
- Updating Safety, Human Performance and major outage milestone events on the overall outage health spreadsheet
- Determine the level of Westinghouse management attention appropriate
- Consolidate all Outage Manager reports into one document that is reviewed at the daily noon operations call during outage season
“The WOCC facility and staff are now better equipped to prioritize Westinghouse resources to meet planned and scheduled deliverables and commitments while also improving our ability to immediately respond to emergent issues. Our personnel’s communications and actions are synchronized to integrate project scheduling and issue management tools and processes with agility and efficiency,” stated Steve Ira, Westinghouse vice president, PWR Operating Plant Services -- Americas/Asia..
