Benefits of early OMS implementation

Benefits of early OMS implementation

Jim Hayes, PE
SDIT Project Manager
Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD)
POB 15830, Mail Stop A301
Sacramento CA 95852

Carolyn B. Bakke
Sr. Industry Consultant
Intergraph Utilities
LR23A1, Huntsville, AL 35894-0001

SDIT project overview
The SDIT Project's mission is to improve customer service by applying selected information technology to the work processes associated with the District's distribution business, while providing internal efficiencies that will facilitate flat or negative rate growth.

There are four major component systems that comprise SDIT System. They are the Geographic Information System (GIS), the Outage Management System (OMS), the Engineering Support System (ESS), and the Mobile Data and Dispatch System (MDD). After vender selections in August of 1999, the implementation of the GIS and OMS systems began in the fall of 1999. Each of the major systems and the interfaces between those systems is shown in the data flow diagram below.

Figure 1. SDIT Data Flow Diagram

The GIS, using Intergraph's G/Electric, is the "custodian" of the GIS data and the provider of the basic functions for spatial analysis, design and map production. Data conversion is being performed in parallel with the GIS project implementation. The GIS is tightly integrated with SAP and Linesoft.

The OMS, using Intergraph's InService, is intended to improve two vital aspects of customer service: to provide the means to restore interrupted service faster than is currently possible; and to provide District employees and managers with accurate and current information about outages so they may better inform customers. The connectivity necessary to perform outage analysis was not available at the start of this project and will not be available until later in 2001. Rather than delay the OMS project and its benefits, the project was divided into two parts - an "Early OMS" and a "Final OMS."

The ESS, using PTI, will provide a better level of system planning to support the capital budgeting processes, and to improve system reliability and efficiency through analysis of the existing system. The improved reliability is a customer service goal that will be measured by fewer outages and better power quality. The improved efficiency will come from reduced data model maintenance costs for planning models. Higher quality plans will result in better utilization of capital resources.

The MDD system, using Intergraph's InService, will dispatch crews, troubleshooters, and service people using wireless technology, and to communicate field information to office locations and other systems. The system supports project goals by making service delivery routings more efficient and by providing better information about field conditions to District non-field personnel. MDD will contain rich scheduling functions to assure optimal utilization of field employees and crews and will interface with SAP. Implementation on this project is scheduled to begin in 2001.

Early OMS
Early OMS provides address-based dispatching of trouble calls and outages using the county supplied street network. Although automatic determination of a probable outage device is not possible with the Early OMS, trouble calls can be collected and entered into the system. The calls are graphically displayed over an intelligent street map for address matching. Visual inferencing enables the Dispatcher to determine outages, and dispatch crews to the locations. We have added three raster layers of "dumb" graphics that allows the dispatchers to view the District's 69, 21, and 12 kV facilities as an overlay on top of the County landbase. These layers can easily be turned on or off by the Dispatcher as needed. The effort enabled early exposure to SMUD's dispatching team - providing business users the opportunity to acquire product knowledge and become more system savvy.

Figure 2. Crew location displayed in Early OMS

Benefits
We have found the application to be useful as it is for crew management during storm situations. During storms, information is gathered (manually) into logical outages. When it is determined that the outage requires crew response, the outage event is assigned to a specific crew and is tracked using the "Early OMS ". As a crew is given the work it can be visually tracked on the map and its status viewed in the Unit Monitor in a tabular format. To make this system work, the crews must notify the dispatcher of the status of the jobs they are working on and when they are moving on to the next job location.

Early OMS includes an intranet application, InService NetViewer, that allows us to get information to others in the District as long as they have access to a PC with an internet browser. This has proved to be very valuable during storm situations by allowing our media folks and Management the ability to see the status of outages and crews. It has the added advantage of providing this information without the need for these individuals to come to the Dispatch Center where they may interfere with restoration efforts.

Figure 3 Early OMS Intranet Application

Because InService provides a full suite of workforce management functions in addition to OMS, we taking advantage of the Scheduling functionality to input work planned for a later date. The information about the job and the crew is placed in the scheduler by the supervisor responsible for the work. The day that the job is scheduled it will automatically pop into the event monitor on the Dispatcher's workstations allowing them to see work planned for the crew for that day. Right now, we are using this to track the work that is scheduled for weekends. This also has the advantage of allowing the on-call supervisor to view from home the jobs that are being worked and the crews working on them using their SecureID cards and Netviewer. The supervisor can also monitor the crews work-time to track the number of hours they have worked.

Figure 4. Scheduling future work in Early OMS

Special skills held by individuals are also defined within the system and persons with these skills can be found from within the "Early OMS" by doing a skills search. EXAMPLE: If a backhoe operator is needed to assist on a job, the Dispatcher can, use the skills search to list of District personnel qualified to operate a backhoe. The same holds true for other skills stored in the system.

Figure 5. Skill Search Query

Figure 6. Skill Search Results

All District crews have previously been defined in the system and can be logged on and off as the report on and off duty. The system allows the Dispatcher to take crews out of service when they are on a meal break, getting fuel or other times when they are not available to receive new work. When in the Out of Service status the crew is identified in a different color than those crews available to accept work. All status changes are time stamped for reporting purposes. Early OMS includes a management reporting tool, allowing the District to better analyze crew performance.

Figure 7. Report Output

Lessons Learned
One difficulty we ran into was convincing the dispatchers and crews of the benefits of the system. Once they began to use it for simple things like finding a street location, they began to experiment on their own to find other beneficial uses. We have used the scratch pad functionality to place lists of groups of employees and other such information. This give the Dispatchers a single location where they can retrieve the info needed.

Future plans
Now that Early OMS is in production, implementation of the Final OMS project is now underway. The Final OMS will use the connectivity from the GIS and will interface with other external systems for functions such as trouble call taking. The interfaces for the Final OMS are as follows: GIS Interface
The GIS interface will publish the latest landbase and GIS facilities from G/Electric into the InService OMS. Frequency of the publish is yet to be determined.

SCADA Interface
Using ICCP, this interface will accept notification of breaker status changes, which will automatically create outage events in Final OMS. This interface will also provide Substation and feeder load information. Energy Operations will develop an extract database and place 30 minute KW, KVAR information covering the previous day load information for all substation and feeders with SCADA each day.

SAP Interface
Final OMS will interface with the Customer Care (CCS) and Plant Maintenance (PM) modules. The interface to SAP-CCS will:

Enable the CSR to create, query, update and cancel customer trouble and outage call information from SAP-CCS. This real-time, two-way interface enables CSRs or Agents to enter trouble or outage calls via a CCS-customized entry screen. After OMS analyzes the call, it will send status update information back to SAP-CCS.
Provide a subset of customer data to provide basic customer data to be easily accessed by OMS.

The interface to SAP-PM will:

Allow the daily work schedule to be placed into OMS for crew tracking.
Notify SAP-PM when an outage involves SMUD equipment.
Update SAP-PM when an outage event is updated
Notify SAP-PM when a completed outage requires follow-up work.

IVR Interface
The IVR interface enables customers to report outages through the Brite IVR. The interface also allows customers to inquire about outage status and estimated time of repair through the IVR. The IVR will also be used for call-backs after outages have been restored.

HVCA Interface
The HVCA interface enables customers to report and query outages through the HVCA and enables SMUD to have a call placed and a message played from the HVCA to affected customers for planned outages. Future plans for OMS also include the Mobile Data Dispatch (MDD) project. The MDD project will extend the OMS to manage routine work and provide mobile computing for crews, both for outage and routine work. This project will be an extension of the Final OMS using Intergraph's InService, taking advantage of the existing interfaces to SAP. Automatic dispatch, workload balancing, and mobile computing are the main components of this project.

Conclusion
The Early OMS implementation is providing the project team with the knowledge and expertise to implement a more robust "Final OMS". In addition to the benefits already being realized by the Early OMS, it should be much easier to mover forward with the final version of OMS now that the main users are somewhat comfortable with the interface and navigating the early version. All the users say they are looking forward to both the final OMS and the Mobile Data applications and the improvements these products will bring.