First Energy Corp. (FEC) is creating an Enterprise-wide solution by integrating its AM/FM
system with other mission critical systems within the Company. First Energy has integrated its
AM/FM system to its Customer Information System (CIS), Distribution Transformer Inventory
System (DTIS), Customer Trouble Call System (CTCS), Engineering Analysis Package, and
Work Management System (CREWS). This paper will describe these integrations, the use of
different rapid application development strategies, the reasoning behind using these strategies,
the benefits and drawbacks of their usage, and the manner in which these interfaces have evolved
and will continue to evolve.
Company Profile
First Energy Corp. is an electric utility located in central and northern Ohio and western
Pennsylvania. It is the newly formed holding company for the recently announced merger
between Ohio Edison/Penn Power and Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company/Toledo Edison
(CEI/TE) which has 2.2 million customers inside its 13,200 square mile service territory.
The AM/FM project began with an eight-month pilot application in 1992. The Ohio Edison
portion of the project is on schedule to complete at the end of 1998, and the CEI/TE portion
should be completed by the end of 2000. As of October 1997, 800,000 of the 1,070,000 Ohio
Edison sites (poles, pads, vaults) have been converted; conversion of the CEI/TE territory is just
beginning. One-hundred-eighty users have been trained to use the system which they use for
designing new construction jobs, dispatching, locating equipment, and spatial related reporting.
Interfaces
Before discussing the development approaches that are being used, the existing interfaces to the
AM/FM system will be briefly described. The FirstEnergy AM/FM system is currently
integrated to the Ohio Edison Customer Information System (CIS), the Distribution Transformer
Inventory System (DTIS), an outage analysis system (Customer Trouble Call System - CTCS),
an Engineering Analysis package, and a work management system (Customer Request Work
Scheduling - CREWS). See Figure 1 below.
