Document management systems in utilities

Hawaiian Electric Company serves the island of Oahu, including the city of Honolulu, and has an interest in about 75,000 poles in its system, of which over 50,000 are jointly owned with the local telephone company, the City and County of Honolulu, and/or the State of Hawaii. HECo first started on the DMS trail in 1995 when it made a decision to replace the existing 25- year-old mainframe joint pole records database and paper filing system with a more user-friendly and companywide accessible database. This led to the selection of a DMS to realize the vision of a totally electronic database and reporting system for the 100,000 pole records in the system. An internal task force team made up of end users was formed to guide the company’s joint pole automation effort. This resulted in a fully operational DMS system in 1999, which is now being viewed as a pilot that can be expanded to provide document management capabilities to the entire corporation. This joint pole archival records system is different from other archived records systems in which less than 10 percent of the records are normally accessed. In this system, older records are more likely to be accessed because of pole deterioration. All of these records will be accessed sooner or later.

The way we were
In the preautomation paper product world, HECo’s Joint Pole (JP) system included a combination of three types of records:

Some basic pole information data that were being maintained on a 25-year-old mainframe flat file that could only be used to produce keypunch cards
Type-written, multicopy transaction forms and drawings that were kept in folders for each pole transaction going back to 1972
Microfilm and microfiche records of pole installations that extend back for the 60 years prior to 1972

Paper records included manually typed notices of construction to other pole occupants, acceptances, completion notices, billings and other miscellaneous correspondence, along with the sketch or drawing of the work order. A JP Coordinator is responsible for all correspondence with other pole occupants, including everything from monitoring job status to final billing when the job is closed and filed.

Every pole is individually identified with a number and corresponding street name. Each time a pole or anchor requires either maintenance or replacement, a new work order is assigned, referred to as a Joint Pole Application Number. An engineer would first obtain the pole identification number from a map and then find the keypunch card file which referenced the latest JP application number. From there the search was reduced to finding the appropriate file draw and folder. The engineer would then create a new application, work order and drawing using the existing data as a guide.

The main shortcomings of the old system were:

The data was coded and could not be directly read from mainframe printouts.
The database was not capable of performing queries.
Keypunch cards contained limited information.
Other pole information was keyed in but could only be extracted through the use of special report generation programs from the non-relational database.
Searching previous records for the pole location required that the clerk first find each record to determine the previous application number
In some cases this would mean digging up five or more records in succession (including a time-consuming microfilm search) to get the complete history of a pole location.
Records and correspondence were manually typed on multicopy forms and physically delivered by daily courier to external joint pole owners.
Items like pole restoration and CATV came after the old mainframe program was developed and was not included in the database; this information had to be hand-written onto each keypunch card.
Records and drawings were physically deteriorating and were being lost and misfiled by users.
Engineers, maintenance crews and other users located throughout the company's service area who needed access to these records were required to come into the main engineering office where over 35 filing cabinets held the microfiche, records and drawings.