Experiences with an integrated planning environment
Derrick Dean
Kentucky Utilities Company
Robert Sarfi
Convergent Group
6399 South Fiddler's Green Circle Suite 600
Englewood, CO 80111
Introduction
A high-level view of the power delivery technology suites currently being deployed in electric
utilities worldwide reveals that the GIS is predominantly employed as a repository of corporate
facilities information. Work management (WMS), engineering analysis, enterprise resource
planning, and graphical job design systems are primarily interfaced to the GIS via an off-line
batch-mode process. With the goal of a paperless environment promoting one-touch data entry,
the use of off-line batch-mode processes is inherently a suboptimal solution both from a
technology and perhaps more importantly a business perspective. Kentucky Utilities has
identified the tremendous benefit of a tight integration of these technologies and has currently
deployed an integrated suite of applications that promotes the paradigm of one-touch data entry.
The geographic and cultural diversity of Kentucky Utilities' customer base creates the logistic
burdens of a large utility for a company of only midtier proportions. Kentucky Utilities has a
service territory that encompasses areas throughout the state of Kentucky as well as portions of
Virginia. Although Kentucky Utilities covers a vast area, its service territory is broken up by
many municipal utilities, coop's, and IOU's: Kentucky has a total of approximately 472,000
customers spread out over 60,000 square miles. Kentucky Utilities has recognized that a key
component of the strategy to resolving this management challenge is to develop a centralized and
automated means of performing and managing all work.
At the present time, the tightly integrated suite used in planning applications consists of the
following systems:
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Smallworld GIS
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Logica WMS Work Management System
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Convergent Group CNAP-PTI Engineering Analysis
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Convergent Group Graphical Job Design
Efforts are currently underway to include real-time interfaces to Oracle Financials, inventory
management, and the CIS.
This paper is divided into eight sections. The second section presents an overview of the system
architecture. The third section presents the high-level business process and benefits associated
with the implementation. The fourth reviews the change-management strategy necessary to gain
widespread acceptance for this fundamentally way of doing business. The fifth presents an
overview of the Kentucky Utilities training strategy. The sixth discusses data issues associated
with the system deployment. The seventh presents future directions. The eighth offers a review
of the material presented.
