Experiences with an integrated planning environment

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:

Smallworld GIS
Logica WMS Work Management System
Convergent Group CNAP-PTI Engineering Analysis
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.

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.

Once a work request is initiated, the engineering supervisor or manager has access to all new work submitted (Item 2). Based on the supervisor's deeper understanding of the nature of the work, as well as the work priority and designer availability, the work is assigned to a designer, planner, or engineer. Using the scheduling functionality within the WMS, the supervisor is able to perform efficient scheduling. Based on the workflow of the WMS, the steps of the work request are automatically defined and serve as a guide to both the supervisor as well as the resource assigned to perform the work. The supervisor's tool is the WMS. The interface between the WMS and the graphical IPE is through the use of shared tables. Standard units, workflow information, and cost information is shared between the JD and the WMS so that the end-users of the planning environment have access to relevant WMS information. The supervisor will also have access to the updates and modifications to the work request performed by the resource performing the planning exercise. This is available in a tabular format.

Similar to the high-level system architecture diagram of Figure 1, the business processes are centered about the GIS-based graphical IPE (Item 3). The IPE consists of the graphical job design, core GIS, and engineering analysis. Within the GIS workspace environment, a designer, engineer, or planner has access to all relevant information from the WMS, including schedules, costs, and inventory, as well as the ability to perform engineering analysis and optimization. It is important to note that from a role-based end-user perspective, there is never any requirement to leave the GIS environment, all applications are seamlessly embedded into the GIS as though they were an integral component. This reduces training time and eases the burden of end-user acceptance. The engineering analysis component allows the end user to identify capacity and voltage violations and to more appropriately size equipment. (Load flow, motor start, and shortcircuit analysis are a part of the end-user's daily job function.) The engineering analysis module also offers the end user optimal switch-order planning and capacitor placement. With the IPE, the end user is not required to run a batch-mode translator between the different systems, nor is there any requirement to massage data prior to use. The designs performed using the job design tool employ corporate standards that are derived from the WMS. Business rules guide the enduser to make designs that follow corporate and industry standards. As the design has been performed graphically and is spatially enabled, it enters a proposed state until the construction has been performed in the field. Using the graphical design also eliminates the need for numerous draft resources to draw the proposed construction in a manner that is suitable for archival. A comprehensive job package is automatically generated for crews, including a bill of materials, job instructions, special instructions, and a detailed construction drawing. Once work has been completed, the user of the planning environment makes the changes to the proposed changes to create the as-built changes. At this point, a cost variance can be performed and the state of the construction is updated within the central facilities repository.

Figure 2: High-Level Relationship between Systems and Business Processes

An important interface is from the WMS/JD system to the warehouse and inventory management system (Item 4). The purpose of this interface is to enable the resource tasked with planning to validate material availability and perform material issues and returns for material forecast and requisitioned bill of materials for a particular job. This interface serves to eliminate frequent and iterative calls between the planner and the warehouse or the arbitrary substitution of materials by field crews. The interface between the WMS/JD system and accounting system allows the utility to capture accounting as well as activity-based work (Item 5). Crews are able to automatically update as built changes and perform field verification through the WMS (Item 6). Future plans are to offer the crews considerable WMS functionality through the use of a mobile data system. Model updates to the outage management system are performed on an incremental basis directly from the central facilities repository (Item 7).

The integrated system brings numerous high-level benefits to Kentucky Utilities. The benefits can be decomposed into shareholder, executive, and operational levels. The shareholder and executive level benefits include:

Positioning for expansion of service territory with better ability to manage with existing resources
Improved reporting and business controls
Improved asset utilization

The operational-level benefits include:

Enhanced customer service (in preparation for higher customer retention in a deregulated environment)
Redeployment of resources due to increased productivity
Open and expandable integration framework to support future industry trends

It is important to note that an essential aspect of the project was to perform pre and post implementation benchmarking in order to demonstrate that the target payback requirements were achieved or exceeded. Preimplementation benchmarking is often overlooked, but a crucial success factor is being able to report to both stakeholders and shareholders that the system exceeds expectations.

Change management strategy
While establishing the framework for implementing the IPE, it was readily apparent to Kentucky Utilities that developing a strong change management strategy and acting upon it would influence the success of the system implementation. One of the drivers for implementing the system was the changing nature of the industry and Kentucky Utilities' need to remain competitive in a deregulated environment. The system implementation represented a top-down sell to all Kentucky Utilities employees that started with the company president. Involvement of the end-user community in business planning and process optimization ensured that the success of the corporatewide deployment of the technology was maximized and the impact of the deployment on the day-to-day operations of the corporation was minimized. The user community must be involved in the business planning and process optimization. The Kentucky Utilities Change-Management program specifically focused on addressing:

Management and employee expectations for work behaviors, attitudes, styles, and patterns
Management and employee empowerment, enablement, and commitment

The change-management program was conducted from the perspective of the environment, as it would exist after the technological solution is implemented. This strategy de-emphasized the study of the current process environment and emphasized the transition to the future environment. Key Kentucky Utilities line managers and supervisors espoused the benefits of the system to all affected employees through a road-show and a series of information sessions. It became clear to the targeted end users what were the objectives of the system implementation and how it served to allow them to undertake more efficiently while maintaining system and individual safety.

Training
Kentucky Utilities recognized that the most appropriate training strategy for their new system was to develop a role-based training methodology, specifically designed for its business processes and service territory, and to deliver the training using a train-the-trainer approach. A success factor identified in the change-management strategy was that the system should be evangelized and presented by Kentucky Utilities resources respected by all employee levels. The focus of the training was not on specific systems but rather on how the suite of systems would interact over the course of performing their work tasks.

The initial training and courseware was developed by the consulting firm that assisted Kentucky Utilities in the development of the system. The training was offered to end users in the pilot district, Lexington. Following their initial training, the end users were immersed in an environment where use of the integrated planning system was mandatory. Following several months of use and a better understanding for the ways in which the company could maximize the benefits of the new system, the training material was revised. A subset of the initial end-user group was identified as the trainers and evangelists of the new system. This group of trainers presented the new system to district offices, trained all other company resources, and served as the first line of support for the remainder of the end users.

At the present time, approximately 140 end users work with the IPE or an associated system. The training of the end users occurred over a period of three months. The Kentucky Utilities model involved the trainers visiting the individual work sites to perform training. Due to the common interface of the components of the IPE, training time was minimized.

The importance of data
The importance of quality data cannot be overemphasized as a contributing factor to the success of a complicated integrated project such as the IPE in place at Kentucky Utilities. Prior to the paper-GIS conversion, Kentucky Utilities had different standards due to both acquisitions and varying district standards. As Kentucky Utilities intended to make use of the central repository of data to drive all construction and outage management, it was quickly apparent that data quality could affect the usability of the system.

In order to address the data quality issues, Kentucky Utilities employed a team of draftspeople familiar with the service territory and standards to perform preconversion scrub activities and post-conversion clean-up activities. The schedule for companywide deployment was constrained by the availability of data. Kentucky Utilities was committed to ensuring that data was of a sufficiently high quality prior to deploying the new technology. End users are often not sympathetic to data issues and choose to find fault with the technology.

Future directions
Kentucky Utilities recognizes that the nature of the industry is constantly evolving and that the technology in place should support the ever-changing business model. The components of the system and integration technology have been selected to ensure that the system can evolve with Kentucky Utilities' business and is scalable to support future growth and acquisitions. In the immediate future, the integrated planning system will include additional functionality in the areas of interfaces, Web-based management reporting, and mobile computing.

Current plans for the system development include building upon the interfaces to Oracle Financials and IMS. Exchanging additional relevant information with inventory and accounting systems will enable the Kentucky Utilities management team to develop a stronger business strategy. Development is currently under way for this initiative.

Web-based management reporting is a relatively low-cost system component that Kentucky Utilities is investigating. The IPE in place contains the data as well as the structures to support a system for standard and ad hoc reporting. The implementation cost of the Web-based management reporting is relatively low and is thought to represent good value for Kentucky Utilities.

Mobile computing consisting of both mobile data terminals and walkaway design are both on the near-term horizon for Kentucky Utilities. Integration and deployment of these two technologies will provide real-time information that will enable more efficient use of resources. This direction has taken a lower priority to the interface with accounting and IMS systems due to the high cost of implementation.

Conclusion
At the present time, Kentucky Utilities has in place an IPE that enables it to reduce costs, increase productivity, reduce cycle times, and improve customer satisfaction. The IPE represents a trend in which information technology no longer plays a supporting role in a company's operations but serves as an operational tool. The IPE has been in place at Kentucky Utilities for nearly a year.

While all the component technologies of the IPE are well understood, combining them into a tightly integrated environment is a highly complex task that encompasses human issues as well as technology-a factor that is often forgotten in large system integration projects. Establishment of a strong support infrastructure also contributes to the successful acceptance of the system by end users.

References

Boyd, Stephen, "A Practical Approach to Work Management Integration", Proceedings GITA 1999.
Cernich, Robert, and Butler, Morton, "Work Management/GIS Integration: Improves Estimates, Saves Time", Proceedings GITA 1998.
Hitt, Kevin, "ERP, WMS, GIS: Who Controls the Work Order ?", Proceedings GITA 1999.