Public utility Evergy saves over 120,000 hours per year with Power Platform

Evergy keeps the lights on for more than 1.7 million customers in Kansas and Missouri, an area roughly the size of Colorado in the midwestern United States. The company’s transmission and distribution lines stretch more than 62,000 miles — enough to wrap around the equator two-and-a-half times. For a public provider of energy, sitting in the Great Plains has its advantages, including some of the best wind-power potential in the world. But the same winds that provide energy to Evergy’s customers can wreak havoc on its power lines, which traverse expansive, empty landscape, dense urban areas, and everything in between.  

Monitoring the condition of power lines has long been a very expensive manual process requiring manual inspection overhead in a helicopter, noting potential points of failure with eyes, pen and paper. With the advent of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), Evergy began supplementing the eyes-on inspections with camera-equipped drones that could take high-resolution photographs of the infrastructure at various angles. But there was a catch — the images needed to be stitched together, which required a bespoke application along with the time and expertise to execute the operation.

An Evergy citizen developer used Power Automate to build a robotic process automation (RPA) solution that automates the back-end processes. “Our citizen developer wanted to build it,” explains Kevin Hampton, Sr. Manager, Digital Operations Strategy at Evergy, “and my team provided coaching and helped to operationalize it.”

After each flight, the drone images are moved into a OneDrive flat file folder. A desktop RPA flow then moves the images into a separate application and initiates a process that stitches the images together for further analysis. What once took three days now happens overnight. “That team is no longer in the business of document management and stitching things together,” says Hampton. “They're in the business of flying and getting images.”  

From RPA to full, enterprise-level innovation

The drone automation is just one of hundreds of digital solutions being developed at Evergy using Power Platform. The company’s automation program actually started with another RPA product in 2020. However, problems getting it to work with the company’s legacy systems initiated a move to Power Automate. “We were already using Microsoft technologies and the easy-to-use interface for Power Automate resonated better with our citizen developers than the RPA platform we were using,” says Hampton.

Another reason that Evergy ultimately decided to move to Power Automate was its integration with the broader Power Platform. Together with Power Apps, Power Automate could now be leveraged for more than just RPA and enable development of complete, enterprise-ready digital solutions. As Hampton explains, “With Power Automate and the broader Power Platform, we graduated from being an RPA team to thinking more like an innovation team.”

To illustrate his point, Hampton highlights one of company’s first big automation wins: a solution that helped improve the time entry process for energy distribution employees. Prior to automation, workers used PDF, Excel and paper forms to record time manually and clerks entered that data into Evergy’s ERP system. The initial idea was to use RPA to reduce repetitive data entry, but RPA could not fix the problem of incorrect time coding. The new Power App solution features a simple user interface with data validation built-in and automated flows that verify work orders, gather approved records, and enter them into the company’s ERP system. Line workers can now sort and search historic records in one location and supervisors have everything in one place to review and approve entries.

Using Power Apps enabled the team to show progress weekly, iterate based on feedback, and build trust which led to over a 90% adoption rate. This solution saved distribution teams over 15,000 hours per year and it will be extended to the transmission and substation groups later this year.

Driving an 11-fold growth in automation

To better manage its Power Platform development, Evergy has set up multiple Power Platform Centers of Excellence (CoE), for each major division, such as operations, customer, supply chain, finance and HR. Security and governance, including access to custom connectors, is managed centrally by the company’s IT team. CoE’s have access to the typical dev-test-production environments and can migrate solutions with Azure DevOps.

The customer CoE enables employees to submit automation requests and have them built by a team of developers. This often includes urgent requests with tight timelines such as billing and payment processes. “Because we’re able to re-use existing Power Automate flows into the same systems, we can often turn around mission critical automation requests in  same or next day,” says Steven Glenn, Manager, Customer Automation at Evergy.

Training is another key part of Evergy’s CoE programs because all employees have access to learn and build solutions. Therefore, every other week Hampton and his team lead a community chat for employees to present use cases and share best practices. Citizen developers can also schedule individual time for coaching in how to scope, build and deploy new digital ideas.

Evergy’s CoE strategy is paying off. Since launch in 2020, the use of Power Automate has grown 11-fold across the company. Over 700 automation ideas have been submitted and 110 makers have created more than 275 Power Platform production solutions. This includes more than 900 Power Apps and 3,200 Power Automate flows. In total, process automation at Evergy is freeing up over 120,000 hours per year so that employees can focus on higher value activities.

Innovating for the future

Automation with Power Platform is helping drive broader, strategic goals for the company. Take the company’s responsible transition to cleaner energy generation, for example. Part of this plan involves retiring coal power plants which often include staffing transitions into other areas of the company. Automation reduces the need to temporarily backfill positions as a plant is gradually shut down. As Hampton says, “Power Platform is enabling us to automate more business processes, more efficiently – and that’s adding up to greater agility across the entire company.”

As Evergy’s automation activity continues to grow, the company is also expanding its use of Power Platform, including
the latest AI capabilities in Power Platform. A recent solution developed using AI Builder in Power Automate, for example, extracts data from PDF delivery receipts and moves them into a Power Apps tool for human-in-the-loop review. The solution frees up over 5,600 hours per year in manual processing and tracks inventory and consumption levels more efficiently.

The success of the solution is also opening the door for even more possibilities with generative AI and Copilot. As Hampton says, “How we deploy Generative AI in the Power Platform has the potential to reshape how we work.” He also points out, “We recognize the need to measure and demonstrate the value and impact of generative AI for our utility and our customers, to ensure its transparency, fairness, and accountability, and to foster a culture of trust and collaboration among our stakeholders.” To that end, Evergy’s move to AI includes an AI Technology Governance Model encompassing enterprise users, citizen developers, and COEs.

With innovation like this – and the business results to back it all up – Evergy’s senior leadership is equally excited to see Power Platform being used more and more across the company. As Chad Carsten, Director, Operations Technology says, "We've had users across departments and various technical capabilities quickly pick up and enjoy using Power Platform. It has become a key tool in our technology strategy."

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