Interfacing AM/FM/GIS with enterprise and Operations Systems

The Plan – Bringing Vendors Together
In an effort to avoid the time and expense of continually developing custom interfaces to other systems, ESRI, a leading GIS vendor, began a utility industry initiative it calls OpenFM. The goal of OpenFM is to bring together the leading vendors of three complimentary technologies with SAP and ESRI to build standard interfaces between their systems. The complimentary technologies include Outage Management, Mobile Data Dispatch and Network Analysis. The GIS component is ESRI’S AM/FM application called Arc Facilities Manager.

Each interface between complimentary technologies and GIS, as well as with SAP’s R/3 are being defined in generic terms. The interfaces are being built as ready-made, drop-in options that will require little or no customization by the implementing utility. The vendors have used use-case scenarios to define business objects that will be at the core of each interface. In addition, each interface design supports future integration for all vendors, and as a result will be an open standard. Once completed these interface designs will be published, so that other vendors not included in the original group can build interfaces to their own system using the OpenFM standards.

The Details – Building BAPIs
Using the Business Objects and BAPIs defined and developed in OpenFM by ESRI, SAP and key industry partners, an overall integrated solution is well within reach. The use of BAPIs will ensure that when two applications systems communicate with each other, the business-related information, such as the order details, customer number or facility ID, all use the same semantics. BAPIs can be seen as building on COM/DCOM or CORBA to offer interface technology for integrating SAP and non-SAP applications.

AM/FM/GIS
ESRI will interface with each of the complimentary technolo ies, as well as SAP, through its .$ AM/FM application called Arc Facilities Manager (ArcFM ). ArcFM is an ARC/INFO@ software-based application designed for editing, maintenance, modeling, and data management of utility information. ArcFM’s standard templates for utilities include a data model and business rules stored in a technology-independent data architecture. These standard templates and their respective data models will be used to develop the GIS BAPIs. The following diagram illustrates the location of BAPIs with respect to each of the technology components of OpenFM.

Figure 2 Block Diagram of Components of OpenFM and BAPI Interfaces