Integration and Development of Enterprise Systems Using a Phased Approach
Michael Bernovich PE, Project Manager Pacific Gas & Electric Company San Francisco, CA History of Legacy Systems Over the last twenty years, PG&E, like many large utilities have traditionally used a combination of legacy engineering/work-order-generation, work management, materials management, CIS, and financial systems that were implemented on a disparate range of software and hardware platforms from mainframes, mid-tier client/server architecture, and PC clients. Some of these systems were implemented at a near enterprise scale, such as the financial and CIS systems. Others, such as the engineering/work-order system were issued at the business-unit level as a generic standard system, but the local offices had the ability to customize and tailor the application to various degrees; this was especially true as segments of the engineering/work-order functionality were pared away from the former PC MSDOS based system and were migrated to PC Windows version, some of which had a client relationship to the mainframe portion of the application. There were also a few purpose built work-management systems instituted at a Divisional/Departmental level, but there was no "standard" across the utility or enterprise until the newly implemented SAP based system was rolled out recently. Since these systems have been developed and implemented through the years as computer technology evolved, it was extremely difficult and costly to integrate these legacy systems in order to collate, extract and leverage the valuable information needed for asset and enterprise management. Especially where some of the applications and systems were built entirely in-house, some were externally developed systems that evolved virtually into in-house system, and others that were based on off-the-shelf or purpose built externally developed software; a whole range of development archetypes. In more recent years, PG&E's corporate IT strategy was to move towards an enterprise management system that either included the functionality, meaning that the existing business processes and methods would be adopted wherever possible, or interfaces, be they either technologic or process-based, would be developed to integrate the aforementioned legacy systems with the new enterprise solution. The selection and implementation of the SAP financial, material and work management systems sets the stage and, a starting point, for work process re-engineering and legacy system integration. With the Utility Industry currently undergoing Electric Restructuring, expanding on existing gas deregulation and market expansion, PG&E must reduce spending everywhere to remain competitive. Since limited budgeting is available each year for work process reengineering and enterprise systems integration, PG&E had to identify and prioritize the work processes and systems that need to be integrated with the enterprise management system and provide the maximum cost benefit. This resulted in a priority based, business-drivers-as-primacy process being used to determine what legacy functionality would be used in the enterprise system, dictating business process changes, or, what legacy systems would be integrated with the enterprise system. The basic equations were: Identifying Work Processes For Integration Prior to selecting the SAP software as the corporation's enterprise management system, PG&E has already performed some analysis of various key legacy and stand alone systems that provide the critical data for asset and expense management. With the implementation of the SAP system, the corporate IT strategy has determined that the information stored in the SAP database repository will serve as the database of record for the company. In addition, the IT strategy also emphasized the use of off-the-shelf software and open systems architecture whenever possible, to minimize the cost of integration and support. With this strategy as the starting point, PG&E identified the data needed for each of the SAP modules, the manual process or existing systems that provided them. Some examples are listed below:
Prioritize/Define Scope and Phases of System Integration Once the data requirements, data sources and the process or systems providing the data have been identified, analysis of this information will help define the priority and scope of possible phases of enterprise system integration. Some of the factors considered by PG&E are as follows:
Having performed the analysis of the cost, time, and scope requirements for both development and integration of the various processes/systems that provide the data, PG&E prioritized and defined an implementation plan for the various systems, roughly spanning a period of 3 years. The time period was not a fixed time frame dictated arbitrarily; the available funds, manpower, scope of work, and priority of getting the work management system in place as a kind of integration centerpiece, all influenced the resulting 3 year time-frame. Below are the phases that were developed for the attendant engineering and AM/FM systems that were a part of this three year effort. Many other systems, both part of the SAP WM implementation and the legacy interfaces of many other non engineering/AM/FM applications were/are underway during this time-frame, in parallel with the development/integration of the JET and MIP platforms. Also, phase 3 below is currently only contemplated, not authorized, at the time-of-writing, and phase 4 is for "post 3 year" enhancements, it is also currently only contemplated. Phase 1: Job Estimating Tools (JET) Project
By leveraging off the tremendous success of the JET project, budgeting for MIP Project in Phase 2 was approved in Q4 1998 and the project started in January 1999. Budgeting for Phase 3 has already been approved based on the current progress of Phase 2, although funding has yet to be authorized. Benefits of A Phased Approach In today's competitive marketplace, a phased approach to enterprise system integration makes it a lot easier for a utility to obtain a reasonable budget for each project phase over several years, rather than attempting to submit a huge budget for one project that would last 3 or 4 years. The financial risk for a phased approach is much lower and allows management to review and rethink future phases if things go wrong. Funding for the next phase can be leveraged off the success and the cost savings of the current project. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||