Nordica Energy
Replacing five fragmented SCADA dashboards with one coherent operations centre
2024
Energy & Utilities
Alert-to-action time down from 11 min to 4.3 min across 94 substations
The problem
Nordica had grown through acquisitions across Norway, Sweden, and Finland — each business brought its own vendor-specific SCADA system, and none of them talked to each other. During a major winter outage in 2023, an operator missed a sensor anomaly for nine minutes simply because it appeared on a screen they weren't watching. Leadership commissioned an internal audit; it revealed that operators were actively disabling non-critical alerts to reduce noise, which masked early-warning signals. The underlying data infrastructure was also fragmented: three separate historians, inconsistent tag naming, and telemetry arriving at different polling intervals ranging from 2 seconds to 15 minutes depending on substation age.
Our approach
We started with six weeks of observational research — sitting with control room operators on day and night shifts before writing a line of code. The integration layer normalises data from all five legacy systems through a streaming pipeline, applying a unified asset model we developed together with Nordica's engineering team. The interface was designed around alert triage rather than raw data display: operators see a prioritised action queue, not a wall of metrics. We ran four rounds of usability testing with actual operators, discarding two navigation patterns that looked good in mockups but failed under shift fatigue. The system went live in phases, starting with the Swedish grid before rolling out to Norway and Finland over eight months.
The results
Alert-to-first-action time dropped from an average of 11 minutes to 4.3 minutes across 94 substations. False positive alert rate fell 71% after the first month of tuning — operators had been right to distrust the old systems. One thing we didn't anticipate: the most valuable outcome wasn't speed but confidence. Operators started re-enabling alerts they'd previously silenced, which surfaced two infrastructure issues that had been quietly degrading for months. Nordica is now integrating the Baltic network acquired in late 2024.
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