Duke Energy is one of the world’s largest electric utilities, with mergers of electric utilities in the Carolinas, Florida, and Midwest areas of America. Ongoing customer expectations for improved service quality, need for operational efficiencies, and meeting regulatory requirements caused Duke Energy to evaluate the disparate Intelligent Electronic Device (IED) management systems it was using and determine a standard methodology for IED management moving forward.

The Secure Access and Device Management (SADM) project was undertaken with the following goals:

• standardize the management of over 60,000 IEDs and 4,000 substations across the service territory
• manage both NERC CIP cyber assets and pole-top distribution management devices
• manage the existing fleet of devices (multiple device types from multiple vendors)
• integrate new (future) devices from any vendor. Duke spent 18 months planning for the project to meet the wide-ranging requirements and staging an industry RFP process.

With a large variety of vendor’s IEDs utilized within Duke Energy's service territory, a universal multi-vendor IED management system is preferred over each individual vendor's IED management system. This presentation discusses Duke's need for IED management, the vendor selection process, the current SADM project underway at Duke Energy along with benefits realized by the project, and lessons learned.