Savannah electric - Fast track OMS implementation from a mature GIS
Donna Kemp
Southern Company Services
3100 Kilowatt Drive
Savannah, Georgia 31405
Todd Frisvold
CES International
3140 Harbor Lane North
Plymouth, Minnesota 55447
Introduction
Savannah Electric had a need and a desire to implement a new outage management system in a short
period of time and to minimize the costs. Our previous outage management system was tabular and only
analyzed meters, transformers and the immediate upstream device of the transformer. We wanted the
new system to be graphical and capable of understanding and analyzing the entire distribution electrical
model. Throughout the project Savannah Electric made decisions to ensure success. These decisions
enabled Savannah Electric to complete the project from start to finish in less than twelve months as
opposed to many other OMS implementations that have taken three to five years. Our previous outage
management system, written in 1987 and modified in 1993, was not millennium compliant. In addition, it
was implemented on a mainframe that was not millennium compliant. Savannah Electric wanted to retire
this mainframe in 1999, rather than make it millenium compliant. Thus, we had significant motivation to
achieve our goal.
The southern electric GIS
Savannah Electric's first GIS system was implemented in 1984. In 1991, Southern Company started
developing the Southern Electric Geographic Information System (SEGIS). Savannah Electric became
part of Southern Company shortly afterwards. We implemented the new system in 1995. The goal of the
SEGIS project was to procure and implement a full-featured GIS system supporting the business and
engineering needs of all five of the wholly owned electric utilities that are subsidiaries of Southern
Company. Specifically, the design of SEGIS included these goals:
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SEGIS must contain sufficient data and be organized to support application development.
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SEGIS must meet reasonable performance expectations related to specific application
requirements.
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SEGIS must be easy to use and the design should minimize complexity of operation.
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SEGIS data redundancy should be minimized.
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SEGIS design must be flexible to allow currently designed applications to change and it must be
extensible to facilitate new applications.
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SEGIS must support critical business requirements unique to the nature of electrical utilities
business functions.
Although SEGIS has grown from the initial procurement, its roots are firmly planted in solid ground. The
SEGIS design evolved from a pilot project led by two groups. Environmental Systems Research Institute
(ESRI) was primarily responsible for the landbase design. Miner and Miner Consulting Engineers (Miner
& Miner) was primarily responsible for the electrical model. Southern Company Services enhanced the
pilot applications significantly before they were implemented into production. The SEGIS
implementation is based on ESRI ArcINFO, Oracle RDBMS, and is installed on a SUN server using
Hummingbird to emulate a SUN workstation on standard PCs (with large 21" monitors).
Nearly a decade later, much of the initial SEGIS design and implementation is alive and well. Two of the
five Southern Company's utilities (Savannah Electric and Mississippi Power Company) have SEGIS fully
implemented and in production; another, Alabama Power, is partially in production; and a fourth, Gulf
Power, is currently evaluating and contemplating a SEGIS implementation.
The SEGIS design and implementation is ideal for supporting projects like the Savannah Electric OMS.
