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Utility Modernization & Critical Infrastructure Insights
How Do Utilities Integrate Samsara With SAP? 7 Integration Essentials.
Tamazari’s lessons from connecting fleet telematics, SAP HR and utility operations Overview: Tamazari helped a major PNW utility modernize their fleet spanning more than 1,000 vehicles. Tamazari led a deployment that included an SAP HR integration that automatically synchronized driver information as employees joined, left, or changed roles. That implementation offers a useful blueprint for utilities considering how Samsara and SAP should work together. 1. Start With the Busi
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Modernizing Legacy Systems
How To Modernize SCADA Systems Without Disrupting Operations
Tamazari Shares Practical Tips on What It Takes to Keep Critical Systems Running Critical Infrastructure Does Not Have a Pause Button SCADA modernization is often described as a technology upgrade. In reality, it is closer to performing surgery while the patient is awake, walking, and carrying millions of people through daily life. That is the pressure behind live-system modernization. Public sector infrastructure like Rail lines, water plants, substations, airports, and publ
3 min read
Keeping Payroll Moving Through a Complex Workday + UKG Transition
How Tamazari Helped Prepare a 1,600-Person Public-Safety Workforce for a New Scheduling and Timekeeping Platform SUMMARY Moving timekeeping out of an enterprise HR platform sounds straightforward until payroll, security, benefits, job changes, leave rules and union requirements all still depend on the system being left behind. Tamazari supported a large municipal government as one of its public-safety departments prepared to move approximately 1,600 employees from Workday Tim
5 min read
How Do Utilities Modernize Legacy Transmission Asset Data? 8 Steps to Better Connected Systems.
A Practical Path From Scattered Records to a Trusted View of the Grid A transmission infrastructure drawing from the 1940s can still hold information an engineer needs today. Whether that information can be found, trusted and used across the utility's systems is critical to supporting daily operations. But finding it can mean sending an email and waiting for someone to locate the right file. Even then, the asset may have different identifiers in the drawing, SAP and GIS. Tha
4 min read
Water Utility SCADA Modernization: Connecting Plant Operations and Citywide Decision-Making
How Lynchburg used Ignition across 10 active projects supporting operations, maintenance, reporting and administration SUMMARY The City of Lynchburg Department of Water Resources needed more from its operational technology. Two aging SCADA systems were becoming difficult to maintain, connecting new equipment was challenging, and limited access to data and automation slowed everyday work. By adopting Ignition, the department improved plant visibility and control while extendin
3 min read
Solar SCADA Modernization: Bringing More than 30 Sites onto One Platform
How Tamazari used Ignition to unify Ecoplexus solar operations, improve performance visibility and reduce monitoring costs SUMMARY Managing a solar portfolio becomes harder when every site presents a different picture. Ecoplexus faced that challenge across more than 30 solar sites, where disconnected data acquisition systems limited visibility, customization and access to operational information. Ecoplexus consolidated its sites onto a single Ignition SCADA platform. The proj
3 min read
Utility Billing: Can Your Team Explain Higher Bills Despite Lower Usage?
Why Utility Rate Changes Require More Than a Billing System Update Overview: As electricity rates and grid investments reshape customer costs, utilities need coordinated implementation across systems, data and teams to deliver accurate bills customers can understand. “I Used Less. Why Is My Electric Bill Higher?” A customer turns off unnecessary lights, adjusts the thermostat, buys efficient appliances and waits until later to run the laundry. They are doing what utilities ha
4 min read
When Wildfire Risk Rises, Tamazari Helps Utilities See and Act Faster
A Practical Approach to Wildfire Mitigation, Situational Awareness and Grid Resilience Overview: Smaller utilities do not need billion-dollar grid-hardening programs to get serious about wildfire readiness. They need better visibility, targeted automation, stronger asset data and a practical path from wildfire risk to action. Why Wildfire Mitigation is Especially Challenging for Small Utilities For years, wildfire risk in the utility industry was treated as a Western problem,
4 min read
How Utilities Can Build a Smarter Funding Strategy
Making Grants and Utility Capital Work Together Overview: Tamazari's practical guide to combining grants, public funding and utility capital into one coordinated modernization strategy. The federal push to modernize the grid has been building for nearly five years. In 2021, Congress created the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, authorizing up to $10.5 billion to help utilities, states, Tribes and other orga
9 min read
From 1940s Drawings to Real-Time Transmission Visibility
How Tamazari Turned Legacy Records into Faster Decisions and Stronger Field Readiness SUMMARY A large Pacific Northwest utility brought Tamazari in to support a major Transmission GIS modernization initiative focused on one urgent goal: making transmission asset information easier to find, trust, and use. The work transformed decades of legacy transmission line drawings, some dating back to the 1940s, into a standardized digital foundation connected across SAP, Smallworld GIS
5 min read
From Military SATCOM to Utility IT: How Tim "Boss" Bagwell Delivers Mission-Critical Infrastructure
A Q&A with Tim Bagwell, far left, Senior Solutions Consultant, Tamazari Q: Tim, before we get into the consulting work, take us back to the start. What was your role in the Air Force? A: I spent roughly 1998 to 2005 in the Air Force as a satellite communications technician. By the end I was a Staff Sergeant running a small team. The shorthand is "SATCOM," but the practical reality was setting up and maintaining the data links that let dispersed units talk to each other and to
4 min read
Water Treatment SCADA with Ignition: Modernizing Plant Operations
Executive Summary A regional water treatment operator managing 12 drinking water plants and 8 wastewater treatment facilities across a 150-kilometer service area faced mounting challenges with its aging, fragmented SCADA infrastructure. Legacy systems from multiple vendors created data silos, manual reporting consumed hundreds of staff hours annually, and the lack of remote monitoring capabilities meant that operators had to physically travel to sites for routine checks, even
8 min read
Bills, Blackouts, and Broken Trust: The 5 Biggest Consumer Concerns About the Future of Energy
Modernization Means Nothing if Energy Bills Keep Rising Why Consumers are Losing Trust in the Future of Energy For years, the future of energy has been framed like a strategy deck. It was about modernization, decarbonization, grid transformation, and innovation roadmaps. But that's not how most consumers experience it day to day. They experience it through rate increases, a long outage, a confusing rebate page, or the creeping feeling that the system is getting more expensive
5 min read
The Data-Driven Future of Utility Vegetation Management is Here
Inside Tamazari's Approach to Proactive Planning, Wildfire Mitigation, and Reliability SUMMARY A large Pacific Northwest utility needed a smarter way to manage vegetation risk across its transmission and distribution network. The goal was not simply to trim more trees. It was to make better decisions about where vegetation posed the highest wildfire risk, where budgets should be focused, and how the organization could turn field and system data into actionable planning. Tamaz
5 min read
From Help Desk to Enterprise ITSM: A Utility Transformation Story
Inside Tamazari’s Cherwell Rollout for 100+ Tacoma Public Utilities Users SUMMARY Tacoma Public Utilities (TPU) needed an IT service management (ITSM) system that could keep pace with the reality of running three essential services—power, water, and rail—on shared technology. Tamazari led a phased rollout of Cherwell ITSM (Ivanti) for 100+ users, establishing practical Change, Asset, and Problem Management in addition to connecting SolarWinds monitoring. The result was cleare
4 min read
Clean Energy Programs Are Stress-Testing Utility Billing Systems
How Time-of-Use Rates, EV Tariffs, and Net Billing are Exposing CIS Limitations The Silent Operational Risk Utilities Didn’t Plan For Clean energy is working—at least on the surface. Time-of-use rates are expanding. EV tariffs are filling up faster than forecasts predicted. Net billing has replaced simpler net metering in many regions. Not to mention, community solar subscriptions are scaling at record speed. From the outside, it looks like momentum. But behind the scenes, ma
3 min read
Reliable Utilities Run on Reliable Records.
How a Major PNW Utility Eliminated Document Chaos with Tamazari's Help SUMMARY Tamazari partnered with a major PNW electric and natural gas utility to modernize how its Engineering Department managed critical infrastructure documentation. Leveraging deep experience in regulated utilities, we led the deployment of a centralized document imaging solution that replaced fragmented file storage with a single, trusted system of record. The initiative improved engineering accuracy,
3 min read
When Customer Billing Can’t Keep Up, Clean Energy Can’t Scale
Tamazari's Approach to Turning Complex Billing Into a Foundation for Energy Transition SUMMARY As utilities navigate the energy transition, billing systems have become a critical—but often underestimated—lever for change. A major PNW utility partnered with Tamazari to modernize its complex billing capabilities, enabling time-varying rates, distributed energy resources (DERs), EV programs, and community solar initiatives. What began as a technical necessity evolved into a tran
3 min read
Fiber Optic GIS Database Development for Electric Utilities
How Tamazari Documented 6,000+ Miles of Utility Fiber to Improve Reliability and Operations SUMMARY When fiber construction moves faster than documentation, utilities feel it everywhere—from provisioning delays to longer outages and frustrated crews. That’s exactly where KAMO Power and Tacoma Public Utilities found themselves until Tamazari came aboard. We led the development and long-term maintenance of comprehensive fiber optic GIS databases for both utilities. Together, th
4 min read
Land Mobile Radio (LMR) Isn’t Legacy—It’s Mission-Critical
Tamazari Leads the Way in Proving Why LMR Remains Essential in Modern Operations SUMMARY When everything else fails—cell towers, fiber, power—voice radio is often the last system standing. For nearly two decades, Tamazari has helped utilities and public agencies make sure that system works when people’s safety, livelihoods, and communities depend on it. Across Alaska, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Washington, Tamazari has designed, deployed, and managed land mobile radio (LMR) syst
5 min read
Preparing Tacoma Water for What Comes Next with Modern SCADA
Inside Tamazari’s Modernization of a Critical Water Telemetry Network SUMMARY Most people never think about the systems that keep clean water flowing—or what happens if operators lose visibility into them. Tacoma Water does. Tamazari partnered with the utility to modernize the microwave communications backbone that supports SCADA across its water system. The work strengthened reliability across 15+ remote sites, delivered four-nines availability, and ensured operators always
3 min read
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