Westinghouse delivers greater visibility to complex nuclear orders

The Business Issue

For most businesses, missing a detail in a purchase order creates a headache. In nuclear power, it can create something much bigger.

Nuclear plants typically operate continuously for 18 to 24 months before entering planned outage periods that often last about 30 days. During those short windows, operators race to complete maintenance, repairs, and upgrades before bringing the plant back online. Orders for parts and services are often placed months in advance, which means mistakes made at the beginning of the process can surface long after work is already underway.

That's the environment Westinghouse Electric works in every day. The company supplies equipment and services to support nuclear power plants around the world. In that business, reviewing a customer order isn't just about confirming what part is being purchased. Teams also need to understand technical requirements, quality obligations, testing requirements, commercial terms, and documentation requests that may be scattered across lengthy purchase orders and requests for quotes.

And in many cases, the paperwork matters just as much as the product itself. In the manufacturing industry, customers often cannot use equipment without the documentation that proves where it came from, how it was tested, and whether it met required specifications. For years, finding those requirements depended heavily on people.

Sales teams read through multi-page documents. Engineers reviewed highlighted clauses. Important details were copied and pasted between teams. The process worked, but it also created inconsistency. Different people could focus on different requirements. And occasionally, important information remained buried deep within a document until much later in the process.

The company wasn't trying to process orders faster. It wanted greater confidence that it fully understood what customers were asking for before work began.

The Solution

Westinghouse began its modernization effort by rethinking how an order moved through the business.

They used the Pega Platform™ to bring visibility to a process that had long relied on disconnected approvals, emails, conversations, and manual handoffs. Instead of work happening across multiple places, teams could see an order's progress through a shared workflow and gain clearer insight into how work was moving across the organization.

That visibility solved one problem. Understanding the content inside customer documents was another.

Purchase orders and Requests for Quotes (RFQs) still arrived as unstructured documents containing different formats, different requirements, and different levels of complexity. Much of the review process remained dependent on people manually extracting information and deciding what needed attention.

To help address that challenge, Westinghouse integrated Fisent's Biz AI into its existing Pega application. The solution captures information such as purchase order numbers, dates, and pricing information while also helping identify requirements hidden inside lengthy customer documents. It can surface items such as testing requirements and compare information across RFQs, purchase orders, and offer letters, giving employees a clearer view of potential discrepancies before an order moves forward.

Importantly, the company continues to keep people at the center of decision-making. Employees review, validate, and act on the information. The technology helps them find what matters. It doesn't make the decision for them.

The Results

Today, Westinghouse has a more consistent way to review customer requirements and bring important information to the surface earlier in the process.

The value isn't measured in seconds saved. It's measured in confidence. Confidence that requirements buried on page 32 won't be overlooked. Confidence that information shared between teams is consistent. Confidence that customer requests, purchase orders, and commercial agreements align before work begins.

That's especially important in an industry where correcting a mistake months into an order can be far more costly than spending extra time getting it right at the beginning. As Westinghouse described it, the effort is fundamentally a risk-reduction exercise: improving the organization's understanding of customer requirements so it can move forward with greater certainty.

Want to dive deeper into Westinghouse’s journey? Watch their PegaWorld session here.