Enterprise resource management
Current Solutions and Trends
One approach to integration is to look at all of the resource schemas and use the least common
denominator to define the company's crews. This allows all applications (MWM, OMS, WMS)
to use the same view of resources and lets each application "schedule" the type of work they
manage best. Most of the systems support some kind of crew inactive flag so that even though it
has been defined, the crew is not schedulable or assignable until it is placed in its active state.
Having each of the systems "steal" and "return" resources is one approach to getting the most out
of the existing scheduling functionalities of each of the technologies. This allows MWM to
schedule future appointments and to dispatch all work to crews. WMS is allowed to schedule
longer-duration work orders and feeds the next day's scheduled tasks to the MWM for
dispatching. The RCM tools feed filler tasks to the MWM, which has the capability to
automatically assign and dispatch this type of work to qualified resources. OMS typically takes
advantage of the MWM's ability to support the fixed assignment of resources to tasks to handle
emergency dispatching requirements. To support a global view of all current work assignments,
a virtual status board depicting all crews and their status changes are fed by the crew within each
of the systems. Most of the mobile systems support tracking crew enroute, crew at site, crew
signed out, etc. Trouble systems support orders dispatched and orders queued or assigned. WMS
systems support orders queued or assigned. RCM systems support specifying facilities requiring
inspections, surveys, or preventative maintenance tasks. These need to be enhanced typically via
GIS technology to include overlaying the locations of current work tasks with the locations of
the facilities needing to be inspected, surveyed, or requiring some program manager work on
them.
Current Research and Future Possibilities
Based on deploying these technologies over the last six years, there are a number of deficiencies
that an enterprise resource management application would fill. Some of the functionalities that
have been identified to have business benefits are:
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Six-week rolling "real" schedule
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Graphical timeline calendar
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Support for "What If" scenarios to compare costs of schedules
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Cross-utility support
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Crew database
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Multiple sources providing the definitions of tasks to be scheduled
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Task type, skill type, and location optimizations
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Support for trouble interruption and auto rescheduling of all existing jobs
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Potential for auto scheduling and dispatching trouble orders to trouble crews
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Dynamic task creation and auto rescheduling
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Enterprise-accessible map board of all crews
The current workforce applications (MWM, OMS, WMS) would need to become more open in
their architectures to support integration with such an enterprise resource manager. The
workforce applications would still be the right place to define the tasks. The enterprise resource
manager would be the global view of the company's crews and support the management of task
interdependencies between the separate applications. This would allow the supervisors and
schedulers of today's systems to spend much more time analyzing and optimizing
system-generated schedules rather than manually scheduling and reviewing the schedules from
the separate systems. This would enable more of a program management approach to defining
tasks, durations, and task dependencies and allowing the enterprise resource manager to schedule
and spread the tasks evenly over the workforce.
Integration Issues
Each of the workforce applications has distinct architectures. And, at a high level, any
application that supports the manual assignment of tasks to crews (typically all three support this
and in some cases it is critical to the overall workflow (OMS), would require interactive
integration so that the human scheduler would be able to take advantage of all of the visual aids
the enterprise resource manager provides to support the manual overriding of its generated
schedule. Most of these systems (MWM, WMS) have architectures that support third-party CPM
schedulers to feed back the schedules into their respective systems for further refinement and
actual dispatching. There are severe limitations in workgroup scheduling support in most of these
current architectures. They assume a single corporate scheduling czar is running and managing
the scheduling runs. There is the need for a workgroup approach and the need to merge
schedules.
The need for the enterprise resource manager to allow for varying degrees of abstraction in task
definitions is a major hurdle to overcome. The need to treat the MWM as the conduit to the
mobile workforce requires one to adhere to their generic task types and crew assignments to take
advantage of their auto dispatching functionality. Refining and breaking up abstract task
definitions to be dispatched in the form of a task list can be difficult to automate.
The closed loop integration of the enterprise resource manager with the company's time
recording system would allow real metrics to be collected based on work task types and facility
locations to support refined duration estimates to be used in future scheduling sessions to account
for difficulty of tasks, traffic patterns, and the accessibility of specific facility locations.
Summary
Today's Energy Delivery Resource Planning (EDRP) systems take advantage of best-in-breed
technology providers. This results in many systems performing some scheduling for the
enterprise but no single system performing enterprisewide scheduling. Part of the complexities
come from each system having their own task definitions and crew definitions. Other
complexities arise from how tightly coupled the manual dispatching of tasks to crews are in their
automation of the workflow to handle specific business processes. Aligning the technologies
with the types of work they are best suited for does provide for a reasonable architecture to
integrate the existing technologies. From an enterprise-wide resource manager view, there are
some major functionality shortcomings in the current offerings and some integration issues with
the current technologies to support an enterprise resource manager.
