Experiences with an integrated planning environment
System overview
One of the fundamental goals of the system implemented by Kentucky Utilities was to eliminate
duplicate data entry. While superficially this goal may appear to be one that is easily attained,
single-touch data entry is only feasible if a suite of commercially available applications is tightly
integrated into a holistic system. Due to the vast service territory, centralization or consolidation
of all planning and work management functions is not a realistic objective. At the present time
Kentucky Utilities supports twelve district offices, supporting mostly rural areas, with the
exception of Lexington, which covers nearly a third of the customers within a concentrated urban
area. Often engineers and planners will share work between regional offices, necessitating the
need for a distributed solution. Figure 1 presents a high-level overview of the system currently in
place at Kentucky Utilities.
In Figure 1, one will notice that the central data repository is located at Kentucky Utilities
corporate office in Lexington. Situating the central servers at the corporate office facilitates
around-the-clock support (many of the local offices do not have a sufficient number of end-users
to justify on-site support personnel). Item 1 represents the central Smallworld server. At the
present time it is housed on a redundant set of HP-UX servers. Unix was chosen for the central
server in order to meet Kentucky Utilities' high availability requirements. The Convergent
Group graphical job design, as well as the CNAP-PTI engineering analysis applications, also
reside on the central GIS server. In addition to the central GIS server, a central WMS server is
located at the corporate office (Item 3). Since the component systems all use Oracle as an
external database, tight integration became a much easier task. The Oracle users to support the
graphical job design and engineering also reside on the central WMS server (Item 2).
As with any corporation that has disparate offices situated over a wide area, network
connectivity between the central servers and the remote sites was of considerable concern. While
it is a business objective of Kentucky Utilities to limit redundant T-1 access to remote offices, at
the present time, connection to several offices lacks the bandwidth to support even a relatively
small number of concurrent GIS sessions. The network bandwidth issues were overcome through
the use of Smallworld cache servers located at strategically selected district offices.
Figure 1: High-level Kentucky Utilities System Architecture
The district offices make use of cache servers (Item 5) to improve graphics performance for
remote users. These district office cache servers also house the graphical job design and
engineering analysis applications. The district office clients (Item 6) are relatively thin but do
house GIS clients. The GIS data store employed by the district office clients is housed on the
district office cache server but nongraphical information is stored and retrieved from the central
data repository.
System business process and benefits
In order to appreciate the benefits associated with the deployment of an IPE it is important to
understand how the tightly integrated system fits into the business processes at Kentucky
Utilities. Figure 2 provides an overview of how the systems form an integral part of the
Kentucky Utilities business processes. The integration is designed so that an individual is
required to employ only one particular system environment in order to accomplish their work;
multiple logins and cross-platform training is rendered obsolete.
In Figure 2, work is initiated by a service representative (taking calls from customers or
contractors), a marketing representative (on the behalf of major commercial accounts), or an
internal customer (Item 1). At the present time the work is relayed verbally to the appropriate
engineering supervisor or manager to schedule the work within the WMS. Future plans dictate
that the work-order initiation is to be performed by the resource receiving the call. It is
anticipated that this task will be accomplished by the addition of a screen for the call takers or
through the provision of work-order initiation and tracking screens from the WMS. The interface
between the WMS and the customer is bidirectional. The bidirectionality is important as it allows
the customer interface the opportunity to provide instant feedback to the customer without
disrupting the engineering supervisor or manager with inquiries about the status of work. By
associating the work request with a specific address or valid equipment identification within the
GIS, it is possible to spatially reference the work request from its inception. Prompt and accurate
feedback to the customer is a primary benefit of the CIS interface to WMS. Management
reporting can also be performed using custom-designed reports or ad hoc queries from the WMS
database.
