Results at a Glance
- 55% reduction in tree-related outages (5% reduction in tree-related outages as share of all outages)
- 52% reduction in affected customers
- 24% decrease in the cost per tree worked compared to pre-Treeline program
- 31% more efficient using Treeline
The Challenge: High Effort, Limited Visibility, and Growing Complexity
Before 2024, Westerville Electric Division managed vegetation risk using traditional inspection cycles and manual planning. While the team worked hard to keep up, limited visibility into system-wide vegetation conditions made it difficult to prioritize work, forecast budgets accurately, or confidently explain program performance to leadership.
Vegetation-related outages remained a concern, pruning cycles were difficult to track at scale, and a large portion of the budget was consumed by reactive or repetitive work.
With contractor staffing challenges and a dense right-of-way environment, the team needed a way to work smarter and improve results without simply relying on more labor or inefficient spend.
The Shift: From Cycle-Based Work to Value-Driven Vegetation Management
Westerville adopted Treeline by LiveEO in 2024 to gain continuous, system-wide visibility into vegetation risk and move toward a more targeted, value-driven vegetation management model.
Treeline enabled the team to identify high-risk trees earlier, prioritize work based on actual risk rather than fixed cycles, and deploy crews more efficiently.
Instead of spreading effort evenly across the network, Westerville could focus on the locations and trees that mattered most for reliability and safety.
Importantly, Treeline supported a strategic shift in mindset: investing upfront in removing trees that cannot be effectively pruned, even if that increases removals in the short term, to reduce long-term maintenance burden and avoid repeatedly returning to the same problem trees.
Measurable Productivity Gains Without Increasing the Budget
Since implementing Treeline, Westerville has been able to accomplish significantly more vegetation work while significantly increasing output and lowering unit costs, even as total investment scaled.
By prioritizing risk more effectively and optimizing crew deployment, the team has been able to increase output without a proportional increase in budget.
Productivity gains have been substantial:
- Pruning activity more than doubled compared to pre-Treeline levels over the first two years of adoption and has continued to increase since.
- Tree removals also rose sharply as high-risk and unmanageable trees became easier to identify proactively.
This shift reflects a more strategic approach to vegetation management, addressing long-term problem trees upfront rather than repeatedly returning to the same locations.
At the same time, unit costs declined meaningfully. The average cost per pruned tree decreased by roughly 20–25% over multiple years, while the cost per removed tree fell by approximately 20%, depending on the comparison period.
These efficiency gains reflect better planning, fewer emergency interventions, and more effective use of crews and contractors.
Together, these trends show that Treeline has enabled Westerville to increase productivity, lower per-unit costs, and stretch existing resources further, clear indicators of a vegetation management program that is delivering measurable value to leadership.
Improved Reliability and Stronger Program Oversight
With better visibility into vegetation risk, Westerville has been able to proactively address high-risk areas, contributing to fewer vegetation-related outages and a lower share of vegetation-related incidents across the system.
Equally important, Treeline has transformed how the program is managed and communicated internally. Tracking pruning cycles and progress toward the City’s 4-year pruning goal has become far more manageable, giving the team greater confidence in both execution and reporting.
Digital records and visual insights make it easier to explain decisions, demonstrate progress, and show that the program is moving in a positive direction.
Laying the Foundation for the Future
Looking ahead, Westerville sees Treeline as the foundation for an even more precise and efficient vegetation management model.
The team plans to further refine risk assessments by improving tree species modeling and distance-to-conductor accuracy, while also exploring ways to account for factors such as overhang, recognizing that not all visible vegetation necessarily needs to be removed for tree health or safety.
Over time, Westerville expects to continue moving away from rigid 4–5 year cycle-based work toward a truly as-needed, condition-based approach, using Treeline to monitor the system continuously and intervene only where risk justifies it.
A Proven Turnaround with Long-Term Payback
Westerville Electric Division’s experience shows how AI-powered, satellite-based vegetation management can deliver results that matter to leadership: fewer outages, lower unit costs, higher productivity, and clearer oversight.
By making smarter upfront investments and focusing effort where it has the greatest impact, Treeline has helped Westerville build a more resilient, efficient, and future-ready vegetation management program, one that is already paying off and positioned for long-term savings.
