Only a small proportion of trees in a utility’s right-of-way are responsible for network failure, e.g., service outages, fires, or damage to facilities. An “ideal” vegetation management program will target only these trees at the right time with the right maintenance activities, resulting in no vegetation-related failures at a very small fraction of current costs. Unfortunately, current practices are at the other extreme. The cyclic line clearance programs common at many utilities imply that all trees are equally likely to cause failure, resulting in extremely low ROI for investments in vegetation management.
Though the “ideal” vegetation management program can never be realized, TreeAM offers utilities customizable tools to start bridging this gap over successive maintenance cycles at their own pace. Examples include:
- Eliminating or reducing touch-points between people and with data over the scale, scope and long planning horizons of vegetation management programs. It will also reduce errors, delays, and costs.
- Creating a knowledgebase of historical data, decisions, activities, and outcomes that can evolve modularly (so utilities can start small) to enable more intelligent decisions over time.
- Enabling a path to continuous improvement that can withstand changes in budget, environmental conditions, regulations, and business priorities.
- Analytical and modeling tools made user-friendly for use by vegetation managers and arborists.
- Implementing true Integrated Vegetation Management at the level of data, process, analytics, users, workflows, and decision making.