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Operations Support
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Operations Management via the Web: PacifiCorp’s Operations Visualization System Puts Facilities Maps on the Web
Information Access Features of OVS
At its core, OVS is an information access and visualization tool. A few key aspects of OVS
illustrate the orientation of the OVS system to data display.
- Ormnize Data the Way the User Wants It. Data in OVS is organized for a single purpose: to
support the visualization of operations information. Other, original uses of the data (for
example, for customer accounting or trouble call management) are subjugated to the OVS use
of the data. In this way, the experience for the OVS user is of a consistent and integrated data
and mapping environment that supports the goals of OVS, not the goals of the systems
originating the data.
- Navigate by Text In~ut or On the Map. OVS users can “navigate”, or move around through the
maps, either by clicking on the map to “zoom in” or by filling in query forms. Many of the data
elements in OVS are linked via a Web hyperlink. For example, a user can navigate from a
customer’s account information to specific service information, and from there to a map display
showing the user’s service located on a street map and relative to other services and to company
Figure 5 – Users can navigate by clicking on the map, or via text input. Objects returned from text searches
have hyperlinks to additional reports and to the map.
facilities. All of these links area single click operation. (See Figure 5.)
- Summarize Information U~ the Service Area Hierarchy. PacifiCorp organizes service areas
hierarchically. The OVS system allows users to work at any single level of the hierarchy (for
example, always taking a substation view of service areas) or to navigate up and down through
service areas. Service area reports of customers and trouble calls allow single-click access up
and down the service area hierarchy. For example, a user studying trouble calls at the
substation level can easily display a map of the entire substation service area or a report on all
the customers served by the substation; or, the user can “drill down” to a circuit-level view on
either the map or in a tabular reporting interface.
Figure 6 – OVS provides summaries of electric service area status, both thematically and in linked reports.
- Selectable Obiects. Virtually every object in the map is selectable and has an associated report.
The user can select an object just by clicking on it, at which point a list of available reports is
displayed for the user to choose among. You can also create a report on an object simply by
double-clicking on the object. You can select and report on multiple objects at once; for
example, you can use the mouse to “drag a box” around several trouble calls, then retrieve a
report summarizing the status of those calls.
- Downloadable Spreadsheets. One of the most popular features in OVS is the ability to create
reports in a downloadable spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel format. Users can select objects in
the map or from a text interface and request a spreadsheet-format report on those objects. The
resulting spreadsheet can then be manipulated, graphed, sorted, and even saved for later review.
Operations managers especially like the ability to capture data from OVS and work with it offline,
or produce a spreadsheet of data for later analysis and to email it to colleagues during and
outage.
- Printable and Pasteable Matx. All maps in OVS are full Windows MetaFile objects, which
means that they can be easily imported into programs like word processors or spreadsheets.
Users often make a spreadsheet report of trouble calls or electric services and then “paste in” a
map that shows those locations. The maps can also be printed, with very high print quality.
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