Strategy for spatially integrated distribution information system in energy delivery utility mergers
Hahn Tram, Larry Engelken, Andy Gay
Convergent Group
6200 South Syracuse Way, Suite 200
Englewood, Colorado 80111-4737
Distribution operations and management for today's utility
As utilities go through mergers, which are common in today's deregulated
industry, the combined company explores the operational savings achievable by
consolidating the distribution operations and management, and integrating the
information technologies to support the consolidation (Juhl, 1998). Potential
savings range from synergism in system enhancements and support to
standardized business metrics and reporting. Just as impoftant, when the
combined company considers alternate methods and technologies for integrating
their distribution information systems, it should take the opportunity to exploit
what other business solutions modern information technologies can support and
what additional business benefits they can bring. Following are examples of
what a modern, integrated Distribution Information System (DIS) can support:
-
Customer Service Differentiation and Marketing - DIS facilitates proactive
communication with customers. It can automate such information as planned
outage notifications and updates.
- Performance Based Rates (PBR) - PBR and performance contracts award
the utility with higher revenue in return for guaranteed service reliability and
quality. For accounting, DIS can provide the data and documentation
required. For business planning, DIS can facilitate historical data analysis for
the setting and targeted marketing of PBR.
- Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) - RCM maximizes the use of the
utility's maintenance budget by focusing on the equipment that needs
maintenance the most and that would impact system reliability more
significantly. The need depends on the operational, failure, and outage history
of equipment, which can be tracked by a DIS.
- Value Based Planning O/BP) - VBP does network planning to meet customer
expectations of service quality, in addition to energy demafids. DIS can
support the reliability analysis needed for VBP with computerized records of
operations and outage histories.
Because of the multitude of potential business drivers and benefits, the combined
company must prioritize its business goals and develop a business strategy
before starting the DIS integration. The pre-merger utilities most likely have
different business drivers than the post-merger utility. The executives of the
combined company need to unify the drivers as a matter of priority. The goals in
customer service, energy delivery quality, operational efficiency, etc., set the
direction and priorities of the DIS implementation.
The pre-merger companies also likely have different business processes, and the
executives need to make key decisions on whether and how to consolidate them.
For example, whether to centralize or decentralize data maintenance, planning,
engineering, and dispatch operations will affect the DIS integration architecture.
Furthermore, appropriate business processes must be in place to leverage DIS
for the different objectives. The utility must then take a system approach to DIS
that consider the technologies, the business process implications, and the
required cultural change (Engelken, 1999). The business process considerations
should include not only the processes that DIS needs to support, but also the
processes that are needed to maintain DIS and its data.
Time to market is often a key business driver. Instead of taking years to build a
DIS that perfectly matches the utility's environment and requirements, it often
makes much better business sense to spend a year or less building a solution
that meets most of the requirements and delivers most of the benefits. The
reason is the rapidly changing business environments of utilities today and the
information technologies available. In "lmplementation of an Information
Technology Architecture for Energy Delivery Utility Mergers" (Tram, 1999), the
authors have presented an overall approach for a rapid, effective implementation
of an integrated IT architecture for energy delivery utilities. The following
discussions focus on the data integration strategy of the IT architecture.
DIS data integration
The data that the DIS uses and maintains involve many utility organizations
(Figure 1). A DIS that integrates the data to support various departmental
functions will provide great business benefits, from reduced data costs through
one-touch data maintenance to effective and consistent decision making enabled
by more timely and accurate information. Hence, data integration is key to a
successful DIS.
Figure 1. DIS Needs to Suppori Distribution Management Operations
Across Many Utility Functional Organizations
Furthermore, DIS needs to support multiple information technologies, ranging
from Interactive Voice Response (IVR) for trouble call entry to a Distribution
Management System (DMS) and Distribution Automation (DA) for network
operations and control. Some of these systems may be new systems being
implemented under the same initiative as DIS, and some are utility legacy
systems. In any case, an effective method of integration is at the database level
(Lonski, 1997). Figure 2 illustrates the data integration concept, which also
enables the leverage of the DIS database for other business solutions and
additional benefits. A unified DIS data model that combines the network facility
and connectivity model with the customer operations model to support this
integration is presented in "implementation of a Unified Data Model for
Distribution Management Systems" (Foster, 1999).
