NERC Compliance

Since 2006, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has helped maintain the reliability of the North American bulk power system by developing and enforcing certain regulations. For electric utilities, complying with these regulations is nothing short of Herculean, considering that there are 94 mandatory compliance standards with over 1,000 individual requirements. Compounding the challenge is the growing incidence of security threats, diminishing budgets, accelerating changes in the NERC standards, and increasing regulatory pressure. Violations of a NERC standard can invite fines of up to $1 million per day per violation.

MetricStream NERC Compliance Management Solution

MetricStream helps utilities strengthen and simply the management of all NERC compliance requirements. The solution provides an integrated set of applications to streamline and automate end-to-end NERC compliance processes, while consolidating all compliance activities, data, and initiatives in a centralized framework. This enables a systematic, collaborative, and closed-loop approach to NERC compliance. Powerful dashboards and reports provide real-time visibility into NERC compliance processes, as along with intelligence and data to facilitate proactive and sustainable compliance.

NERC Compliance Standards

1. Resource and Demand Balancing (BAL)
2. Communications (COM)
3. Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP)
4. Emergency Preparedness and Operations (EOP)
5. Facilities Design, Connections, and Maintenance (FAC)
6. Interchange Scheduling and Coordination (INT)
7. Interconnection Reliability Operations and Coordination (IRO)
8. Modeling, Data, and Analysis (MOD)
9. Nuclear (NUC)
10. Personnel Performance, Training, and Qualifications (PER)
11. Protection and Control (PRC)
12. Transmission Operations (TOP)
13. Transmission Planning (TPL)
14. Voltage and Reactive (VAR)

Key Capabilities of MetricStream NERC Compliance Management Solution:

• A complete preloaded collection of all NERC and Regional Reliability standards and requirements, including NERC 693 and NERC CIP mandates
• A centralized repository of all compliance requirements, standards, and policies, as well as risk and control libraries, control tests, assets and issues
• Automatic alerts of changes/updates to standards, along with version control capabilities to automatically monitor the progress of NERC CIP from v3.0, to v4.0, tov5.0.
• Highly configurable workflows for managing both internal and external standards, mapping regulations, developing controls, assessing risks, performing compliance audits, preparing and implementing action plans, and identifying and remedying issues
• An integrated task and issue management solution that captures all NERC compliance violations, and monitors the implementation of mitigation plans
• Proactive alerts of compliance gaps or increasing risks, enabling immediate implementation of corrective/preventive actions

Benefits of the MetricStream Solution

• Increases Collaboration: The solution enables an integrated approach to NERC compliance, which transcends organizational/functional silos, enhances cross-enterprise coordination on compliance activities, and eliminates redundancies and duplication of effort.
• Simplifies Compliance Activities: Organizations can build a centralized and logical internal control framework that enables quick associations between controls and regulations, and simplifies the tracking of control-based activities across the enterprise
• Enables a Risk-based Compliance Approach: The solution enables detailed risk assessments with the help of configurable algorithms and methodologies. It provides a clear view of compliance risk profiles through powerful risk heat maps, dashboards and reports.
• Streamlines Compliance Audits: All audit activities -- including audit planning and scheduling, resource management, communicating with external/internal auditors, tracking issues, and reporting -- can be managed through a single, integrated framework.
• Enhances Reporting Effectiveness: Organizations can evaluate, review, and submit evidence of compliance with NERC regulations through flexible reports and self-certification documentation, including NERC RSAWs.
• Increases Transparency into Compliance: The solution tracks NERC compliance processes in real time, provides granular insights into compliance data, and helps analyze trends for effective decision making.
• Lowers Costs, Optimizes Resource Utilization: Manual tools and spreadsheets can be replaced with automated workflows that reduce the number of resources required, and saves costs