Gas Service Information at the Desktop
Dennis J Carter
GIM/SIMS Project Leader
Consumers Energy
530 W Willow
Lansing, MI 48920
Telephone (517) 374-2349
Fax (517)374-8419
E-mail: djcarter@cmsenergy.com
David S Lucian
GIM/SIMS Project Manager
Consumers Energy
530 W Willow
Lansing, MI 48920
Telephone (517) 374-2306
Fax (517)374-8419
E-mail: dslucian@cmsenergy.com
Introduction
In 1995 Consumers Energy went through a reengineering process that resulted in the placing of
the customer contact closer to the customer. Four major headquarters were divided into 40
customer service centers. This presented a problem with providing access to the service records
in multiple locations. The solutions identified were either duplicate 2.5 million service records
for distribution to the smaller offices and then maintain duplicate sets or convert the paper
records into an electronic format and provide electronic access over the company LAN. The
chosen solution was electronic access. This paper will present the process used to accomplish
this conversion.
Data Modeling
To determine the relationships of the information on the service record card a group of users was
gathered to model the data. This model was then used to design the logical database, which
would be the repository of all of the information about the gas service such as address, size,
material, vintage, etc. This session also determined that along with the information that would
reside in the database a scanned image of the sketch showing the service route would also be
required by users to perform their daily activities.
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