The long transaction and work management integration
The impact of WMS / GIS integration on the long transaction
WMS integration greatly increases demands on the LT within production GIS. With the integration, the robustness
of the LT process becomes much more critical. A failure of a LT that is a key to both a design and a WMS work
packages could affect several systems. Thus, the time and effort expended to create the changes in the LT must be
multiplied by the effort expended on the other systems to understand the total investment in the managed by LT and
the expense related to loosing it.
De~endencies on External Systems for LT Stage Management
In order for the integration to be as effective as possible, and avoid duplication of effort, stage management in the
GIS must be reflected in the WMS and vice versa. When a stage is completed in one system the completion of that
stage should be reflected in the other system. There should not be a need to perform a task in one system then go
into the other system and report the task completed.
This means that the LT in the GIS must be robust enough to be advanced and demoted from the WMS with minimal
failures. The design stored in the LT must be able to track with the work package in the WMS. At any point in the
business process users should be able to find the work package in either system. After finding it they should be able
to see the absolute status of the design.
Fault Tolerance and Data InteErity
Because the work packages must track together in both system and due to the increased importance of the changes
recorded within the LT, it is critical that the systems interface be fault tolerant. Each system must not only be able
to advance and demote the stages of the work within the other, they must also detect failures in the interface and
respond appropriately.
When the failure of these attempted changes go undetected, the work packages become out of phase in the two
systems and corrective manual intervention is required. Due to the high volume of work packages being processed,
a high percentage of failures would quickly lead to severe data corruption.
Increased Investment in LT Data
In addition to holding information about updates to the GIS, the LT now contain key information regarding work
packages in the WMS. This makes it more important that the LT be completed successfully. In this new integrated
environment a corrupted LT causes much more damage. It also is more important that the LT fimctionality be
pushed down into that database in order to take full advantage of the data management features of RDBMS.
FEC GIS / WMS and long transaction implementation
AM/FM Implementation
FirstEnergy is an energy services provider with 2.1 million customers and a 13,000 square mile service territory in
Northern and Central Ohio and Western Pennsylvania. FirstEnergy was formed from the 1997 merger of Ohio
Edison Company and Centerior Energy. FirstEnergy began the AM/FM project in 1992 (as Ohio Edison Company)
with a proof of conceptpilot. Thepilot covered a fifty square mile portion of our service territory. The pilot
involved approximately 20,000 customers and 19,000 sites. At the end of the pilot we were given approval and
started a project.
