Utility Management in 2026: A Modern Guide for US Utilities (AMI, DATA, Field Ops)

Executive Summary: Why is Utility Management Being Redefined Today?

Modern utilities must now balance vast AMI data streams, growing operational complexity, and intensifying regulatory oversight. As of 2024, smart meter installations in North America reached 82% and are expected to exceed 91% by 2030. In fact, there are more than 150 million smart meters currently functioning in the North American region alone. These numbers continue to drive a dramatic surge in the volume, velocity, and frequency of operational data that utilities must manage.

This shift has also exposed fundamental vulnerabilities that outdated utility management approaches are unable to handle.

Scope of this guide: In this blog, ‘utility management’ refers to how utilities across sectors (electric, water, gas) manage AMI, assets, compliance, etc., throughout their network. Here, the term does not refer to simply enterprise utility bill management or energy expense tools. 

Who is this guide for? 

• Investor-owned utilities (IOUs), municipalities, cooperatives, and big water/gas utilities
• Leaders and teams in Operations, Metering/AMI, Asset Management, IT/OT, and regulatory/compliance
• Utility executives planning modernization or AMI. 2.0/3.0 Roadmaps

What are the driving forces behind utility management transformation? 

Aging infrastructure and asset fragility

A substantial portion of US grid infrastructure dates back to the 1950s–1960s. If current trends continue, utilities face a $208 billion investment shortfall by 2029. Aging assets not only increase the likelihood of outages but also elevate O&M expenditure. Outdated infra also lacks system capabilities for real-time monitoring, anomaly detection, and grid visibility.

Exponential AMI and telemetry growth

Over 100 million AMI meters have already been deployed across the US, generating terabytes of consumption and outage telemetry each year. Legacy environments were never designed for this data scale, making operational intelligence and interoperability difficult without integrating modern utility management platforms.

Increasing regulatory scrutiny and reliability mandates

Frameworks from NERC and FERC continue to emphasize digital traceability, resilience, and reporting discipline. Regulatory bodies are demanding stronger proof of operational integrity, reliability, and cybersecurity hardening; raising expectations for auditability across every utility system.

Rapid workforce attrition

An industry analysis by Power Magazine indicates that nearly 50% of the utility workforce will retire over the next decade. This positions utilities under intense pressure to build new job categories that will support digitization initiatives and net-zero mandates. 

The momentum has only accelerated post-pandemic with more than 7% of the workforce left in 2022 for reasons other than retirement. This has placed utilities under intense pressure to retain knowledge and fill operational gaps.

Decarbonization and changing load patterns

The latest NERC Reliability Assessment forecasts a 20.2 GW rise in winter peak demand in 2025, driven by rapid growth in EVs, data centers, and renewable interconnections. This fundamentally reshapes how utilities must plan, forecast, and operate their distribution and transmission networks.

What Is the Meaning of Utility Management Today?

The definition of utility management has evolved far beyond consumption tracking or billing oversight. Today it represents a centralized operational intelligence discipline: orchestrating data, workflows, analytics, workforce execution, and system events into a coordinated, real-time decisioning framework.

Research from organizations such as the International Energy Agency (IEA) reinforces this shift: utilities can meet future grid performance needs only by improving network intelligence, interoperability, and integrated operational automation.

The impact of this shift is visible across utility segments:

• A study by Bluefield Research finds that 19.5% of treated drinking water in the US is lost as NRW, costing utilities an estimated $6.4 billion in annual revenue.
  
  
• More than 70% of power transmission lines and transformers are over 25 years old, contributing to more frequent outages and higher operational expenditures.
  
  
• Smart meter rollouts and digitization produce billions of data points each day. While this improves visibility, it also increases data fragmentation and silos across AMI, IoT, SCADA, CIS/OMS, WFM, and field systems.
  
  

As long as these systems remain siloed, utilities cannot fully unlock operational resilience, reliability, or real-time orchestration.

Why Utility Management Is Now Critical for Electricity, Water, and Gas Networks 

Infrastructure, data flows, and incident workloads have grown more quickly than utilities can update their systems. This has turned utility management into a mission-critical operational job. While the overall goal, such as improved service dependability and operational efficiency stays identical across utilities, how each section must approach it is fundamentally different.

In addition to billing and asset management, modern utility management platforms function as orchestration frameworks for end-to-end utility operations. This transition matters acutely for industry players across verticals.

Electric Utilities: Batch Operations Are Being Replaced by Real-Time Intelligence

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• Electricity networks generate the highest volume of grid telemetry, outage signals, and meter events.
• Data points like AMI data input and validation, transformer/voltage performance tracking, outage and SLA workflow orchestration, meter telemetry and exception detection, and more are all necessary for modern utility administration.
• Without centralized utility management, electric utilities struggle to correlate AMI, SCADA, and field events rapidly enough to prevent losses, outages, or compliance failures.

This transition elevates utility management from manual billing audits or routine maintenance to real-time operational intelligence.

Water Utilities: Understanding Non-Revenue Water and Other Losses through Visibility

• Water utilities are confronted with issues like NRW (non-revenue water), water losses from leaks, anomalies in pressure and flow, valve failure, and inefficient distribution systems. 
• With AMI sensors, utilities can often detect hidden losses as long as the metering data, field events, and network analytics are integrated.
• Modern AMI frameworks improve visibility into existing procedures, leak reporting, telemetry from pressure and flow monitoring, and metering. 

This allows utilities to promptly identify events related to leak detection, enhance preventative maintenance, and ensure accurate billing for financial sustainability.

Gas Utilities: Performance Monitoring, Predictive Maintenance, and Operational Oversight

• Gas utility networks require extensive monitoring of pipelines with regards to pressure and flow regulation, leak detection, and predictive maintenance. This is critical to ensure consumer safety and regulatory compliance of the utility.
• Traditional scheduled maintenance and inspections of natural gas pipelines are not generally sufficiently detailed to adequately address the changing nature of corrosion, pressure anomalies and demand variations.
• Modern utility gas networks utilize real-time telemetry, condition-based asset health tracking, integrated inspection/maintenance workflows, and coordinated audit trails across multiple customers.

This is done in order to minimize the hazards and risks associated with these utilities, and ensure operational integrity remains intact.

Utilities across verticals may share common goals, from reliability, compliance, cost reduction and billing accuracy. However, there may be variance in asset type, telemetry frequency, regulatory norms or even the risk of consequences. 

A modern utility management system must be flexible enough to address these needs, while at the same time, respecting the unique operating models. This is where utilities must move beyond vertical or operation specific tools. What they must look for are platforms that act as unified operational intelligence layers. One that enables utilities to convert raw meter data into actionable insights, govern field ops workflows and drive informed decision making. 

The Biggest Obstacles for Utilities: Why Do Legacy Models Fail?

With AMI 2.0, utilities today are adopting more sensors, smart meters, and remote infrastructure. All of this leads to more costs and operational complexities, with challenges becoming more apparent over time. These hurdles do not simply affect utility operations, but also threaten service credibility, erode consumer confidence and impact long term ROI.

So, what are the biggest challenges in utility management? 

Fragmented Systems & Data Silos

• Utilities operate with a variety of systems and tools, be it AMI, SCADA, GIS, WFM, OMS, and billing systems. Each function is generally handled by a different system, resulting in data fragmentation.  
• The impact of silos can be felt strongly during operations, reporting and analysis. Utilities often face inconsistent data formats, duplicated workflows, delayed event correlation, and blind spots.
• Lack of data unification also results in outages getting misclassified or delayed, still relying on maintenance reactive frameworks, and auditing becoming a tedious process. Beyond service quality, revenue is also affected due to an absence of data traceability and lineage.  

Since there is no centralized warehouse to unify data, incoming information across channels remains scattered. This prevents utilities from functioning at their full capability, such as enabling real-time visibility and unlocking a coordinated response framework across teams.  

Real-Time Data Collection

• Despite being able to collect data in real time via sensors and meters, a majority of utility companies even today process incoming data in batches or manual cycles.
• This often creates latency in detecting outages, slowing down compliance with SLAs and affecting responsiveness.
• Due to this, utilities tend to remain reactive and cannot take full advantage of proactive maintenance, predictive load management and demand forecasting opportunities.

In today’s grid landscape, this lack of transparency should no longer be acceptable for utilities wanting to stay relevant. The legacy approach to utility management will result in inefficient use of assets, increase maintenance costs, and lower consumer satisfaction. 

Operational Workflow and Workforce Complexity

• Utility companies need to be able to coordinate their activities such as inspections, meter installs, maintenance, outage response, and compliance audits. These operations generally run across a wide geographic area, and with many large field forces.
• Traditionally, utility companies have used spreadsheets, manual ticketing, and fragmented communications, which leads to delay in field ops updates.
• Consequently, utilities have also experienced delays in coordinating activities, poor audit trails, slow response to outages and leaks, and repeated trips to a location. Since there is no central viewing and storage of data, a loss of institutional knowledge may occur when experienced staff retires. 

Grid's case study on asset management during smart meter projects demonstrates how standardizing equipment and coordinating the efforts in real time greatly reduces operational costs, while ensuring data lineage.

Regulatory Reporting and Compliance Adherence

• Utilities are increasingly facing tougher norms with regards to safety, environmental, and sustainability initiatives. Some of the bodies governing these rules are ISO, EPA, PHMSA, etc.
• Present day compliance trends demand utility management solutions to have key capabilities; such as incident logging, digital traceability, audit trails, real time reporting and adhering to cybersecurity laws. 
• For modern utilities, compliance failure simply doesn't lead to just a fine, it may lead to penalties, enforcement actions, reputational damage and remediation costs. 

To meet these requirements, modern AMI utility solutions must embed data lineage, facilitate role-based access, and compliance ready workflows across operations. 

Aging Assets and Rising Infrastructure Costs

• Aging networks, increasing demand, deferred maintenance, and infrastructure upgrades tend to drive up capital and O&M costs.
• Unplanned asset failures, grid disruptions, water leakages or pipeline-related problems require costly emergency restorations of services. These services often incur much higher costs than planned maintenance, decrease asset useful life, and diminish service reliability.
• With growing data volumes and ops complexities, costs associated with manual management also rises. Legacy systems simply cannot scale up with these demands, making it a costly affair and susceptible to mistakes. 

Currently, the only sustainable way for a utility to mitigate unplanned outages, improve long-term operating costs and ensure continued service is through the use of modern utility management systems. Grid’s executive guide on utility asset management highlights how to curb costs/risk profiles by establishing data-driven frameworks. 

Why Do Utility Management Challenges Demand an Integrated Operational Backbone (And Not A Patchwork of Tools)

• Operation or user specific point solutions replace only one section of the stack. Their benefits are often limited, and also lead to the creation of new silos. 
• The solution: a unified ecosystem that enables real-time intelligence on the go, ensures compliance readiness at all times and across locations, and supports utility interoperability.

This is why a centralized utility management solution connecting all end points is no longer just a nice-to-have option. It is a necessity for utilities that are seeking improved efficiency, growth and continued resilience. 

What are the Key Components of A Modern Utility Management Framework? 

Utilities have to move away from traditional, siloed systems and manual workflows when dealing with outages and managing assets. To operate effectively in today’s environment, a utility management framework must reside as a layer above existing systems and function as an operational backbone; one that provides real-time insights and enhances decision making.

This is no longer an option. Enterprises that adopt such intelligent layers into their network will maintain reliability, reduce non-revenue loss, remain compliant, and ensure proactive maintenance to possible issues.  

A high-performing utility management framework has several key foundational components. 

Data Intelligence: The Core Layer of Utility Operations

Modern utility management frameworks must include a data intelligence layer that combines and validates operational signals from across the network. Examples of the types of data generated by these networks and subsequent data processing by the intelligence layer include:

• Ingesting real-time data from AMI, SCADA, IoT sensors, HES, etc. 
• Standardizing and validating incoming data streams
• Identifying meter events (failures) and reading anomalies 
• Processing the metrics associated with a meter reading and triggering a notification in case of discrepancies
• Linking telemetry data from location-based assets (such as a transformer) to a grid

It’s essential to be able to respond to AMI events as soon as they occur and the majority of utilities require a centralized, unified data architecture, so as to process, analyze, and act upon these events in real-time. Without this layer, it becomes challenging to obtain operational intelligence from the AMI and other operational systems.

Operational Visibility: Turning Meter Data into Actionable Insights

Ingesting real-time data alone would not enhance operations. What present day utilities require is real-time insights gained from this data.  A modern utility management framework provides tools for:

• Creating unified dashboards and control screens
• Providing outage and fault monitoring capabilities
• Maintaining SLA & compliance tracking across departments 
• Gaining insights into asset performance and analytics
• Monitoring meter status with regards to lifecycle management and anomalies 

When service operators function from this level of visibility, they can confidently make decisions by determining where losses occur, identifying failure points, isolating outages quickly, and allocating resources more effectively. This layer also eliminates operational blind spots throughout AMI, Field Operations, and Distribution Systems.

Workflow Orchestration: The Engine Driving Utility Operations

Workflow orchestration is where utility management shifts from monitoring to executing on planned actions. This stage ensures that the right actions occur, at the right time and within the right context. 

Key workflows in modern utility management include:

• Outages, leaks or meter alerts are detected and then followed through a set process until resolved.
• Incidents are automatically routed to the appropriate team along with clear priorities, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and asset information.
• Service timelines, inspections, and reporting are governed by rules and enforcement logic so that they are not overlooked.
• Exception workflow automation includes situations such as: consumption mismatch, failed reads and tariff compliance.
• Alerts are triggered when network voltage, flow, pressure or outage conditions exceed prescribed thresholds.

The layer becomes core to recording operational tasks, breaking down silos and empowering cross functional coordination. 

Field Execution: Where Operational Decisions Meet the Real World

As utility companies seek to optimize field activities, they must eliminate delays and disruptions erstwhile created by manual processes, departmental silos or routing issues. 

Core components of field execution include:

• Frontline solutions for mobile ticketing and routing, which allows technicians to receive, modify, and complete work orders in the field without delays.
• GPS mapping-based scheduling, so as to properly allocate resources by dispatching employees based on location proximity.
• Documentation by allowing technicians to capture photos, field notes, evidence of completed jobs and meter readings into the utility central database.
• Real-time updates, where operations teams can receive instantaneous visibility of issues or completed jobs as they occur in the field.
• Continuous visibility and pulling together of information needed to create accurate instructions or asset data, helping reduce recurring visits and operational overhead.

Field execution is where operational decisions convert into measurable impact. This stage closes the loop between AMI events, network performance insights, and the physical grid.

Managing Infrastructure Health: Asset and Network Performance

It is essential to adopt a predictive approach with regards to infrastructure management. Asset health and performance monitoring impacts a utility’s ability to manage their assets as they scale operations in future. 

• Monitoring transformer and meter health to identify potential issues (overload, phase imbalance, equipment stress) before a failure occurs. 
• Voltage, flow, and pressure anomaly tracking across electricity, water, and natural gas networks,   enabling utilities to build proactive frameworks. 
• Condition-based maintenance by using predictive analytics to manage aging asset issues before they occur rather than reacting when failure occurs. 
• Coordination of restoration efforts and repair actions to limit downtime and reduce the impact on customers. 
• Lifecycle and reliability monitoring for long-term capital expenditure planning based on the actual usage and performance of their assets.

This AMI layer helps reduce overall operational maintenance costs; extend asset lifespan, avoid unplanned failures, and optimize capital allocation decisions for long-term utility reliability.

Compliance and Reporting: The Governance Function of Modern Utilities 

Regulatory laws today demand consistent data lineage and traceability for streamlined auditing. Use of manual reporting systems or standalone compliance solutions are impractical in today’s environment. Utility solutions must have compliance as an embedded feature, not a feature to be added later on. 

The Modern Utility Management Framework enables the following features:

• Governance control to enforce policies and maintain auditable records of operational decisions along with grid events.
• Role based access control ensures authorized personnel get to initiate, review, and approve operational actions.
• Tamper-proof logs and traceability to capture every event, change, and action as auditable trail for regulators. 
• Real time reporting and documentation for accurate and timestamped regulatory reporting, enabling error free inspection or incident response frameworks.
• SLA and compliance oversight for continuous service monitoring and ensuring reliability benchmarks are met to avoid penalties. 

Enterprises are being regulated by governing bodies and agencies with more stringent conditions than ever. Having a built-in compliance layer in UMS (utility management solutions) is no longer just an add-on, but integral to its very architecture. Utilities that do not build these layers into their architecture will continue to face rising O&M costs, regulatory risks and delayed response to outages. 

What Does a High-Performing Utility Management Looks Like in Action?

Utility Management is more than just a conceptual framework or architectural design. Its true value is realized when an organization is able to achieve tangible results such as decreased outages, reduced losses, improved workforce performance, etc. In this section, let’s explore a few examples of how utility management solutions have been successfully deployed in industry scenarios.

Water Leak Detection and Loss Prevention 

Electric and water Utilities with AMI meters and smart sensors can identify leaks and issues quicker than regular monitoring equipment. NRW or non-revenue water category is one of the most burdening financial liabilities in the Water Utility Industry, leading to a multibillion-dollar unaccounted loss each year.

With modern utility management frameworks, measurable impacts can be achieved such as:

• Users can now identify leaks early on using pressure and flow telemetry, with utility solutions identifying deviations from normal flow patterns and auto-triggering alerts before they escalate.  
• Leak events are prioritized based on severity and geography, with field crews dispatched to the highest-risk zone first, ensuring field service impact.
• Smart meters enable remote monitoring, which reduces reliance on manual inspection rounds and can also help identify hidden leaks without requiring physical checks.
• A single event source initiates repair workflows; leak repair, isolation, and service restoration all adhere to set rules and procedures.
• Historical data on leak patterns and repair drive prevention strategies. Operators can uncover hidden patterns on networks that highlight segments most prone to failures. 

Results: Minimized service disruptions, reduced water loss and enhanced revenue protection. 

Outage Detection and Service Restoration at Scale

Electric utilities are experiencing increasing grid stress and complexity. New -age utility management solutions transforms the traditional outage lifecycle:

• Outage signals are gathered from AMI, SCADA, and field telemetry, with events now  detected at the meter or feeder level early on even before a consumer reports it. 
• Outage clusters are automatically categorized and mapped, with utilities now isolating the affected grid segment without disrupting the entire network. 
• For example, Department of Energy’s Smart Grid Investment witnessed a 40% reduction in SAIDI and 45% dip in SAIFI.  
• Workflows for fault location and isolation are automated; the system detects upstream and downstream effects and stops cascading failures.
• Ticket routing leads restoration teams automatically, with dispatches depending on severity and location, saving response time.
• The restoration process is tracked in real-time, so operators know when the outage happened, crews were dispatched, and service was restored.

Results: Faster restoration cycles, reduced service failure, and improved grid reliability metrics. 

Field Ops Workforce Efficiency and First-Time Fix Rates

Utilities face substantial cost and service risk during field execution. Effective utility management enables:

• GPS-based routing and workforce scheduling, where teams are deployed based on real-time proximity and availability to save journey time.
• Mobile field applications provide on-site access to the meter, pipeline, and asset history. This allows technicians to make judgments about repairs based on all available operational information.
• Mobile ticketing enables work order closure in the field, which means no delays or duplication in reporting or paperwork.
• Real-time updates from the field are sent to the control room, ensuring operational sync without waiting for callbacks. 
• Modern utility solutions also provide image capture as proof of work and prevent recurring visits by creating operational records through documentation. 
• Take a key project undertaken by Bain & Co for instance. An electric utility integrated AMI field solutions and improved field productivity by 25% within its first year. 

Results: Faster service restoration, fewer recurring visits, and lower operational costs. 

Billing Anomalies and Revenue Protection

Inaccurate consumption statistics, abnormalities, or failed meter readings are frequently the cause of revenue loss. Utility management frameworks increase billing integrity by:

• Detecting usage abnormalities and tampering signals early on, enabling utilities to ensure billing accuracy before the customer cycle begins.
• Reconciling events between meters and billing systems, with mismatches being identified automatically, eliminating manual audits.
• Routing automated workflows for failed readings and exceptions, where cases are then resolved via structured processes.
• Facilitating automated meter and tariff data validation, reducing manual labor while increasing billing accuracy.
• Real-time reporting features that lowers dispute processing and revenue leakage, with utilities preventing billing issues head on instead of fixing them later.

Result: Enhanced revenue protection and reduced consumer complaints 

Case Study Spotlight: How Grid Strengthened Water Utility Management At Scale?

A leading water utility deployed Grid to manage data coming from more than 480,000 smart water meters. Like many water utilities, there were varying reporting cadences (how frequently different meters reported data). Most meters communicated hourly, while others 48 times a day. 

Due to this complexity, the utility faced challenges of gaps in data, often leading to delayed anomaly detection and increasing NRW (Non-revenue water). 

With Grid’s utility management solution, a central operational layer was established connecting data intelligence, process automation and field ops execution. Just within a few weeks after deployment, the utility enterprise began detecting issues that were previously undetectable.

Key operational outcomes included:

• Improved data completeness and visibility: Grid monitored cadence in real time, with 424,951 meters communicating (88.2% coverage). Stale intervals and silent meters were reported early, eliminating billing disputes and downstream delays.
• Backflow detection and safety response: The system detected 1,159 backflow incidents with a measured reverse-flow volume of 1,298,787 m³. Each incident triggered high-priority safety workflows and compliance-ready logs. 
• Revenue protection via unmapped-meter identification: The utility recovered their revenue and cleaned up master data by identifying ‘309 unmapped but consuming meters,’ which translated to 86 m³ of unbilled consumption within 72 hours.

Impact: The utility minimized NRW, increased integrity in billing and fast-tracked issue resolution throughout the network; all essential elements of utility management. 

How to Evaluate the Right Utility Management Solution? 

Selecting a solution for utility management is no longer merely about purchasing software. It is choosing an operational backbone that supports AMI growth, regulatory compliance, and field ops performance, at least over the next decade. 

Looking for a detailed explanation for vendor selection steps? Read our blog on How to Choose the Right Utility Management Solution. 

Below we have listed down key evaluation criteria for utility leaders when examining such solutions. 

Utility Stack Interoperability

Without rip-and-replace initiatives, the solution must interface with existing systems such as AMI, SCADA, MDM, GIS, OMS, billing, and WFM. Utilities value systems that sit above the stack, integrate data flows, and eliminate silos.

Real-Time Data Layer & Intelligence

Operating data in batch cycles is no longer feasible for modern utilities. To detect outages, leaks, and meter problems more quickly, utilities should look for solutions that provide real-time ingestion, validation, anomaly detection, and telemetry correlation. 

Scalability for High-Volume AMI Data

Meter counts and sensor density are rapidly growing in AMI ecosystems. The solution must scale horizontally without performance degradation, especially during outage bursts or peak demand situations.

Workflow Automation & Closed-Loop Response

The solution must trigger rule-based processes that automatically assign, escalate and close tasks based on exceptions (leaks, backflow, tampering, billing issues).  This is where most operational ROI is realized for utility solutions.

Auditability, Security, and Compliance

With NERC, FERC, EPA, and ISO standards growing, utilities need platforms that enable role-based access, immutable records, encryption, and audit-ready reporting incorporated within daily operations.

Deployment Flexibility

Utilities vary by regulatory environments and IT preparedness. A modern system should allow on-premise, private cloud, or hybrid deployments without sacrificing performance.

Reporting, Analytics & Decision-Focused Dashboards

Executives and operators require clear visibility for making decisions. Utilities should seek platforms that provide export-ready regulatory reporting, asset health views, zone-wise intelligence, and real-time dashboards.

Integration Maturity & Field Execution Alignments

A utility management solution truly succeeds in its purpose if insights reach field operations. The ideal platform must enable mobile workflows, GPS navigation, picture proof, field ticketing, and seamless handoffs between operations and field workers.

Today, utility management is no longer a linear workflow, but rather an operational backbone of well-oiled organization. It defines how  successfully a utility responds to outages, eliminates losses, manages assets, satisfies regulatory expectations, and provides reliable customer service.

The insights, business frameworks, and real-world use cases explored above highlight an avoidable reality. Utilities with a unified operational intelligence will be the ones that remain resilient, compliant and financially efficient in the years to come. 

Conclusion: Building a Future-Ready Utility Through Operational Intelligence

The way forward involves adopting a centralized operational layer; one that connects field ops, AMI telemetry, asset management, etc into a coordinated framework. This strategy guarantees that operators have real-time knowledge to plan, forecast, and execute confidently while also enhancing transparency and resilience. 

Utility networks are increasingly becoming more digitized, and this has also led to customer expectations evolving over time. For leaders that are planning their modernization roadmap, one thing is absolutely certain. The sooner a robust utility management layer is implemented, the quicker they can realize operational gains, efficiency and prevent revenue leakage. 

Grid’s experience with prominent utilities in the US and North America illustrates what is possible when operational intelligence becomes the backbone of everyday operations, helping utilities to evolve from reactive management to proactive, data-backed decision making.  

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