West Monroe System Monitoring And Reporting Tool (SMART)

West Monroe SMART™ is a full-featured, customizable framework that produces the information your utility needs to manage and refine its smart grid investment and applicable grants.  West Monroe SMART™ facilitates compliance with the US Department of Energy and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) requirements for grant metrics and benefits reporting and monitoring by collecting and tracking data from a utility’s back office systems including:

• Financial Expenditure Data
• DOE Invoice Data
• Vendor Data
• Personnel Data including Hours Worked

Is your utility equipped to meet Department of Energy reporting requirements for ARRA grant recipients?

The DOE requires smart grid investment grant recipients to quantify improvements in the operational metrics associated with their transmission and distribution systems, as well as changes in customer usage within their service areas.  West Monroe SMART™ calculates an ongoing performance baseline for these key metrics enabling it to isolate the impact of smart grid solutions on distribution system performance and customer usage patterns.  These operational metrics are then reported to the DOE through the following reports:

• AMI Build Metrics Report
• AMI Impact Metrics Report
• Distribution Impact Metrics Report
• Distribution Impact Metrics Report
• Transmission Build Metrics Report
• Transmission Impact Metrics Report

In addition to demonstrating measurable change, West Monroe SMART&trade automates the creation of the periodic reports for the DOE not included in the Metrics and Benefits Reporting Plan, including: 

• ARRA Prime Recipient Report
• ARRA Sub Recipient Report
• Progress Report
• SF-270
• SF-425

The automation of these reporting processes allows utilities to minimize the amount of time their personnel spends to create these reports and the time spent archiving the source data.   West Monroe SMART™ also helps orchestrate the QA process for DOE reporting and automates the archival of information to ensure the utility is prepared for a Federal audit during or after the end of the five year project.

West Monroe SMART™ delivers:

• Workflow management of DOE reporting by orchestrating the data upload, validation, report generation, QA review, and data archival.  This workflow management is especially important for organizations with multiple grants or grants that have sub-recipients.
• Reporting by automating production of documents that comply with the DOE’s monthly, quarterly and semi-annual requirements
• Data acquisition by facilitating a data upload process of specific financial and operational data sets from multiple areas within the utility
• Automatic Data validation by using preconfigured and custom rules to validating the financicial, project and operational data when it is uploaded in the system and before a report is generated.
• Operational analysis by calculating baseline measurements of project and system level performance and customer usage and comparing these to actual metrics.
• Performance visibility by using a dashboard to display DOE financial, milestone, and operational performance information.
• Auditable results by maintaining all necessary reporting information in the West Monroe SMARTTM database —making it easy to conduct analyses and prepare audit reports. In addition, it eliminates the need for auditors to search grant recipients’ internal systems for relevant information; in turn, reducing business disruption.
• Security by allowing you to assign appropriate rights based on specific roles.

 View Screenshots of West Monroe SMART™