Managing the grey area with enterprise integration

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.

. 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.

GRM Components

	The Trouble Reporting component collects the trouble calls that indicate a network outage. The calls come from customer call centers, the Customer Information System (CIS), the voice response unit (VRU), real-time network statusing equipment (SCADA), automatic meter reading equipment (AMR), and the Internet. The trouble calls are processed and sent to the outage analysis application.

	The outage analysis engine assimilates the trouble calls, providing the ability to automatically determine outage devices, perform switching orders, feeder lockouts, call grouping, and maintain real-time network status. An OMS is the major application used in the service restoration process. For many utility customers, this is the most significant responsibility of the utility.getting the power back online. The electrical network model used in the OMS is maintained and created with the GIS. Tight integration between the OMS and the GIS is a must for efficient operations.

GIS/OMS Integration Approach
Many GIS vendors have enhanced their product offerings to include outage and dispatch systems preintegrated with their GIS product.

By providing the pre-integration, GIS vendors have resolved several complex issues:

The development of custom interfaces that are difficult to create and maintain.
The management of multiple vendors, a difficult and expensive process.

Vendors offering primarily OMS solutions with "best of breed products" are no longer the preferred solution. Utilities are putting greater importance on pre-integrated enterprise solutions offered by GIS vendors, which simplifies implementation and lowers the cost of ownership.

	Dispatch software provides for the dispatching of field crews and service restoration. The major functions supported by dispatch applications should include: crew dispatch, call grouping, callback lists, scheduling, and best crew recommendation. Specific interfaces to dispatching software, such as mobile computing, global positioning system (GPS), and automatic vehicle location (AVL) systems are integral mechanisms within a GRM environment.

	Decision support and service analysis is supported today via spatial analysis tools. Market analysis, spatial query, spatial analysis, and the generation of maps and reports is the primary functionality required by these users.

	Implementing a work management system (WMS) supports better management of the workload in the distribution areas through timely and accurate knowledge of current and future workloads. Tight integration of a WMS with GIS improves the crews' productivity, resulting in significant labor costs savings, and providing better utilization of both company crews and outside-contractor crews.

	Operations and maintenance require the capability to view and edit facilities data in the field through a viewer application. Enterprise access to GIS facility information is used to perform inspections, record changes, and feed information back to the office.

	Integrating engineering network analysis functionality with GIS provides a standard, cost-effective way to bridge the gap between design and mapping, with pre-built data models, rulebase functionality and design analysis tools. Using a common compatible units database and providing interfaces to work management and ERP technology, a focus on standards usage and code compliance provides construction cost savings and cycle time reduction.

GIS/Design Tools Trends
Similar to the OMS market, Engineering Analysis vendors provide a niche solution for distribution and transmission departments. There are many small vendors in the industry offering these specialty tools. GIS systems have traditionally provided facility data in a structured format to the Engineering Analysis tool via an ASCII file interface-an acceptable approach that is still used. Nevertheless, utilities are requiring a closer integration of these tools. At least one company in the industry has made their analysis components directly available to GIS applications.

This companies calculation engines can be utilized directly in the GIS environment for such analysis as load flow and short circuit. This is a major step in eliminating the need to share data via ASCII files and provide for the user a seamless integration of GIS and Engineering Analysis.

GIS has historically done a poor job in providing a high-quality design tools for the utility industry. In the last 10 years, GIS systems have been improved in this area with the addition of Compatible Units (CU) and integration with WMS, but this has been of little help for the most demanding design engineers. Similar to the Engineering Analysis market, small software companies have risen out of the engineering services business to provide these specialty tools.

These tools have been notorious for being very expensive and make difficult integration partners for the GIS vendors. Although this segment of the GRM market is lagging behind the other segments, there is a trend to integrate these tools within GIS. As GIS tools are pushed to the field for front-end design, this need will become more prevalent.

The questions for GIS vendors and their customers: How far do you go with the integration? Is it worth the high cost of the design tool along with the price of the GIS seat? Each utility company will have different requirements that will need to be weighed against the cost of the seat and its benefits. No matter how far one goes with the integration of the tools, the industry is definitely moving toward better integration of design capabilities.

GRM includes enterprise access to facility data and operational status. A WEB application provides the ability to post outage analysis, view facilities and landbase, view crews, view outages, and request reliability reports such as SAIDI, CAIDI, and SAIFI.

The encompassing GRM environment provides the Dispatch and OMS applications software, the geospatial enabling technology, and project management and implementation services to build and deploy integrated solutions.

Software Systems Integrator
A utility can choose one of several methods to implement a GRM or ERP solution. The first alternative is the best-of-breed approach, in which the company selects several applications from various specialty vendors and attempts to assemble its own system.

Network Analysis The initial license fees with this approach are expensive, and the cost associated with the integration and implementation processes are excessive. Moreover, the architectures of the individual applications are different, the user interfaces are inconsistent, and the data models overlap. Such system implementations are usually lengthy and sometimes never reach completion.

A second alternative is to hire a systems integrator (SI) to assemble a custom system from component products. This is the same as a best-of-breed approach, with the addition of an SI to produce the customized system. The SI may have the skills to assemble the system, but the component upgrade problem will still exist. The SI is not the software manufacturer and cannot add features to improve integration or provide product enhancements, product support, or training.

The third and most successful approach is one in which the software vendor acts as the systems integrator. A GRM solution supplied by the software vendor who is also the systems integrator (the software SI) will be successful precisely because the offering is a configurable, integrated product rather than a collection of technologies, components, and services. The software SI can deliver a GRM solution that offers broad functional coverage, vertical industry extensions, and a robust technical architecture with training, documentation, implementation, product enhancements, global support, and an extensive list of software and services.

Many utilities have already taken an incremental step with creating GRM environments with the implementation of a GIS system. Companies find, when they implement GRM solutions, that they are able to reduce the time required to retrieve facility information and eliminate redundant manual and digital datasets, saving time and money.

GIS/WMS and the ERP Influence
In the early '90s, the utility industry began the trend to integrate GIS with WMS. GIS systems were integrated with WMS by utilizing exchange or island tables for moving data between the two systems. This technique has proven to be sound and holds up under production environments. Both Illinois Power and Texas Utilities have been utilizing their integrated systems for many years.

GIS vendors have been careful not to cross over into the WMS market; instead they have chosen to create partnerships with the WMS vendors. These partnerships have been reasonably successful and continue to remain active.

Nevertheless, there are storm clouds on the horizon for WMS vendors. ERP vendors, such as SAP, are beginning to step into this market and offer utilities additional options that were not available just a few years ago. Currently, WMS vendors clearly offer a best-of-breed solution, but the gap is shrinking, and utilities will begin to question the value placed on "best of breed."

Conclusion
After careful evaluation of the industry today and where it's headed, it becomes obvious that very significant changes will occur over the next few years. The biggest impact on the industry will be the ERP vendors. ERP vendors will gradually shrink the market for the WMS vendors. In some cases, we might see ERP vendors purchase WMS vendors in order to pole-vault their WMS modules for immediate credibility with this technology.

GIS vendors will gradually absorb, from an architectural standpoint, the engineering analysis and design tools that have been so popular as standalone tools in the '90s. Truly integrated solutions will come out of the GIS vendors that offer seamless integration of the tools designers require.

Standalone OMS and mobile data vendors will have a difficult time maintaining their market share. GIS vendors are already offering products that compete with these vendors with the added benefit of pre-integration. The functionality gap between the best-ofbreed vendors and GIS vendors will continue to narrow. Just as the ERP industry consolidated its offerings under single vendors, so will the GIS industry.

Information technology and business process improvement have emerged as tools that give utilities the competitive edge. In fact, competing effectively will be virtually impossible without the comprehensive set of highly integrated business applications provided by a GRM solution. The system automates building and maintaining the network facilities delivery system, creating an integrated workflow that specifically addresses new construction, operations, maintenance, and system restoration.

Understanding available software solutions and how to piece them together to solve business problems will be critical. Does the utility go with pre-integrated solutions that offers lower startup and cost of ownership benefits or do they trade off with best of breed products and deal with the additional impact of integrating. In any case, the utility should set a long-term strategy that best aligns its goals with the future direction the software industry is moving. That is, pre-integrated solutions that reduce the time to implement and the cost of ownership.