Utilities do not need another vendor pushing “AI” at them. They need partners who understand the daily realities of planning circuits, stretching OPEX dollars, and defending decisions to regulators. That is where Satelytics’ edge lies: a deliberate, structured habit of listening to vegetation managers and building the product around their real-world constraints and metrics.

What Vegetation Managers Told Us

In a recent daylong listening session with an electric utility customer, their vegetation leader walked through the pressures and bottlenecks that define the job today.

He began with regulatory pressure. Public Utilities Commissions judge utilities using reliability metrics like SAIDI, SAIFI, and CAIDI, all of which are heavily influenced by vegetation-related outages. Poor performance or high-profile failures can quickly land a utility under scrutiny or formal penalty proceedings. At the same time, tree-caused interruptions are not a niche issue. The U.S. Department of Energy and industry analyses estimate that vegetation contributes to more than 20% percent of power outages in the United States, and in some service territories, it is the dominant cause of weather-related interruptions.

Traditional time-based trimming cycles are no longer sufficient. Managers know that “trim every X years” is blunt, expensive, and only loosely correlated to improved reliability. Research on enhanced tree trimming and optimized vegetation programs shows that targeted approaches can cut storm-related outages by 16% to 65%, depending on storm severity and methodology. But shifting from time-based to fully predictive models carries risk: during the transition, outages can actually increase if planning, budgets, and field workflows are not aligned.

This is where the customer pushed Satelytics hardest: help make the transition without breaking reliability metrics or budgets.

Designing Around the Real Workflow

The same customer walked step-by-step through how work actually gets done in his organization, from the desktop to the right-of-way, and challenged Satelytics to fit that reality instead of forcing new process. He laid out four stages:

1. Planning and scheduling: planners decide where to send crews, balancing monthly OPEX, contractor capacity, and the impact on reliability metrics. Circuit criticality is not abstract; a line serving 5,000 customers will always win over one serving 100 when budgets are tight.
   
2. Canvassing and pre-identification: field teams walk lines, identify vegetation risks, and define scope—tree by tree. Those observations drive cost estimates that will later be scrutinized internally and by regulators.
   
3. Execution of work: internal crews and contractors bid, schedule, and complete the work.
   
4. Post-assessment: the utility verifies completion, updates maintenance cycles, and determines when to return.

Instead of treating imagery and analytics as a separate, standalone tool, Satelytics used this feedback to embed at the utility’s true entry point: planning and scheduling. The product now emphasizes prioritization, routing, and tree-level and circuit-level risk data that slot directly into planners’ existing processes. The objective is not just to “find trees,” but to help managers answer defensible questions like:

• Which circuits move SAIDI/SAIFI the most if addressed first?
• Which specific spans and trees within those circuits present the greatest fall-in risk based on height, distance, and health?
• How do these decisions stay within budget while still showing progress to regulators over a 3–5 year horizon?

Industry guidance supports this long view. Vegetation experts note that tree management decisions typically take three to five years to show up as sustained SAIFI/SAIDI improvements. Satelytics bakes that reality into its roadmap. We design not for quick gimmicks, but for programs that match utilities’ 5–7 year planning cycles and regulatory expectations.

Turning Customer Pain Into Product Direction

Listening sessions like this do more than generate quotes; they set Satelytics’ development priorities. From this single customer discussion, several immediate product themes emerged:

• Hybrid predictive + time-based support: vegetation managers are not abandoning cycles overnight. They want a hybrid model that overlays predictive risk on existing time-based plans, so Satelytics now focuses on making that blended view intuitive rather than insisting on “all-in AI” from day one.

• Integration over isolation: utilities stressed that a solution has little value if it does not sync with systems like SAP, Maximo, Dynamics 365, and existing vegetation management tools. Failures in integrating asset and outage data have been cited as root causes in NERC vegetation violations, which carry average penalties exceeding US$200,000 per violation. That feedback sharpened Satelytics’ emphasis on data integration, not just detection algorithms.

• Modern, circuit-linked interfaces: managers asked for dashboards that speak their language: customer counts per circuit, outage-prone feeders, tree counts and history per line, and cost alignment with budgets. Those requests mirror what industry best practice now recommends — combining detailed vegetation data with reliability and cost metrics to justify proactive work and avoid deferred maintenance that grows more expensive each year.

• Tree-level metrics and defensibility: with more than one-fifth of outages tied to vegetation and vegetation-related transmission outages still regularly reported across the bulk power system, managers need to defend each line-mile and tree removal. Satelytics’ analytics now emphasize traceable, tree-level evidence that supports both internal stakeholders and external auditors.

In short, the roadmap is being written in collaboration with the people responsible for keeping lights on, not in isolation from them.

Listening As a Strategic Advantage

On paper, every vendor claims to understand customers. In practice, the industry’s enforcement and outage history tells a different story.

Vegetation management remains one of the most scrutinized reliability domains; violations of NERC’s FAC-003 vegetation standard now carry the highest average non‑CIP penalty, and approximately 58% of those violations are deemed a serious risk to bulk system reliability. At the same time, U.S. customers still experience, on average, several hours of interruption per year, with vegetation a major driver.

Satelytics’ advantage is not simply sophisticated analytics; it is how those analytics are shaped by the direct voices of vegetation managers who live with CAIDI, SAIDI, and SAIFI every day. By sitting with customers, mapping their workflows, and iterating product design around their regulatory, financial, and operational realities, Satelytics is building more than a monitoring platform. It is building an implementation partner that understands:

• Reliability metrics and outage statistics are not abstract—they drive reputation, rate cases, and capital allocation.
• Vegetation managers must show early wins while committing to a three- to five-year performance horizon.
• Integration, usability, and defensibility matter as much as detection accuracy.

Vegetation-related outages are not going away on their own. But utilities that pair robust vegetation programs with partners who actually listen are already demonstrating material reductions in outage frequency and improved resilience during storms. Call us to discuss your thoughts… we’re listening… intently.