2027 Event Agenda

With the modernization of grid infrastructure, the need for accurate, scalable, and current-time telecom asset management has become increasingly critical. The Telecom Operations Management system (TOMS) has emerged as a foundational platform to support this transformation. TOMS allows us to enable data integrity, operational efficiency, and improved visibility across vast communication networks. This presentation explores the evolving role of TOMS in supporting asset lifecycle management, cost savings, and developing procedures that can be applied to multiple aspects of the business which ensure we are able to have one source of truth.

This paper includes National Grid’s multi-year experience implementing and maturing TOMS across our service territory. We will highlight the operational challenges we faced when implementing this system, fragmented approaches to asset tracking. This included inconsistent data across legacy systems, manual entry errors, lack of standardized processes, and limited validation mechanisms, all of which reduced confidence in proper asset tracking which hindered effective decision-making. Additionally, the absence of a centralized source of truth made it difficult to maintain alignment across engineering, field operations, and additional stakeholders.

TOMS has been developed into a data-driven platform that standardizes asset management practices and introduces robust validation workflows. The system supports integration with our other systems, which further improves the quality of information that is being placed into the system. TOMS is crucial to our circuit migration process and has introduced an unexpected cost saving that comes with proper data records which changes the approach that we had historically which relied very heavily on hard, physical copies with many of the important details not being captured in the proper place or being easy to obtain.

We will discuss key improvements achieved through TOMS, including enhanced inventory accuracy, reduced reconciliation efforts, improved project coordination and circuit implementation a stronger support for regulatory and operational reporting. Lessons learned from deployment and continuous improvement efforts will also be shared, along with strategies for user adaptation, quality control, and system governance.