Managing the grey area with enterprise integration
Jay Stinson
Intergraph Utilities
One Madison Industrial Park
Huntsville, AL 35894
Introduction
One of the fastest changing and most competitive industries in existence today is the
utility. Until recently, most utilities operated as monopolies in their business areas. The
advent of deregulation is driving competition, mergers, acquisitions, and performancebased
rates into the millennium-a new era of foreseeable competition, lower operating
costs, and critical customer service. Utilities are responding to this new competitive
environment by moving into new communities, searching for partnerships, and offering
an expanded range of services. Software vendors are capitalizing on these changes by
aggressively positioning their products and services to better support industry demands.
Homegrown, proprietary, departmental solutions within utilities are no longer practical.
The advent of enterprisewide systems consisting of pre-integrated, COTS products and
solutions saves money on initial development cost and greatly reduces the cost of
ownership.
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Enterprise Resource Planning Environment
The most familiar example of this environment is ERP for a utilities financial division.
ERP vendors have long recognized a need for pre-integrated, highly configurable
solutions that were quick to implement. With the added motivation of Y2K looming,
many utility companies feel compelled to jump on the ERP bandwagon.
ERP systems provide valuable tools toward achieving specific business objectives by
knitting together the various parts of a company, enabling executives to make betterinformed
decisions, reduce costs, and bolster productivity. However, while an ERP
system addresses a utility's financial business process, it does not directly support the
engineering, operations, construction, dispatching, mobile computing, or maintenance
processes. These business processes are driving a similar requirement for specific preintegrated
product solutions. This emerging environment has been tagged as the
Geospatial Resource Management environment. GRM deals with provisioning and
sustaining the service delivery network. This unique environment consists of graphics,
spatial data, and complex relationships not addressed by the ERP environment yet
necessary for managing resources.
The GRM Environment
Geospatial Resource Management systems integrate with ERP provisioning tools and
sustain the service delivery network. GRM addresses design and change management,
dispatch, service analysis, network analysis, outage analysis, mobile computing, trouble
reporting, operations and maintenance, and enterprise viewing and access. These
applications are highly interdependent, consist of geospatial data, and share a common
facilities model.
The effective Geospatial Resource Management solution is comprised of several
integrated applications. Each application can operate as a standalone process; however,
the real value comes from the benefits achieved through an integrated workflow. These
geospatial network-based applications share another common characteristic.they are
highly interdependent, as indicated in the integrated workflow diagram below.
