Westinghouse Electric Company has announced the opening of the company's first outage control center to provide vital central monitoring and response to its utility customers' outage operations at U.S. nuclear power plant sites on a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week basis, during outage seasons.

The Westinghouse Outage Control Center (WOCC), based at the company's Field Services Center of Excellence in Madison, Pa., strengthens Westinghouse's outage service delivery performance with centralized, around-the-clock monitoring, emergent issue response.

This is a critical step by Westinghouse in being widely recognized for flawless execution of all its U.S. field projects.

"The Westinghouse Outage Control Center 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 will now be able to monitor every plant site where our field service teams are working to prioritize schedules and coordinate resources using real-time data exchange.

"This will allow 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 Automation and Field Services.

"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, Global Field Services - Americas/Asia.

In addition to the immediate implementation and use of the WOCC daily for real-time data exchange between WOCC staff and field staff at customer sites, Westinghouse is also using live video communications with several sites this fall.