Field Applications at DTE Using the Pocket PC

Field Applications at DTE Using the Pocket PC

Daniel Fletcher
Analyst DTE Energy Suite 625 SB 2000
2nd Ave. Detroit MI, 48226
Telephone: (313) 235-7581, Fax: (313) 235-7175
E-Mail: fletcherd@dteenergy.com

Charlie Marlin
Sales Manager Graphic Technologies, Inc.
2729 Deford Mill Road Owens Crossroads, AL 35763
Telephone: (256) 828-6760
E-mail: charles.marlin@gti-us.com

Abstract
DTE Energy is driving IT to the frontier of its service territory in the form of mapping applications on Pocket PC devices that make pole inspections and gas leak surveys more efficient. The primary cost saving for the pole inspection application results from replacing a paper-laden process with a fully digital round trip exchange of data from the AM/FM/GIS system to field workers and back again. 30,000 plots a year are no longer made, and DTE has eliminated costly and error-prone manual data entry. End users have accepted the Pocket PC and prefer it to the old process. An additional benefit of the pole inspection is that distributed engineering service centers can learn about defective poles more quickly and decide whether to fix them with internal resources or contract with external resources. The second project, a gas leak survey, has been implemented as a mobile application to replace the legacy mainframe application which was not Year 2000 compliant. Field workers use digital maps and forms instead of printed cards.

Outline
A. DTE Company Background B. The Pole Inspection Application

The requirement
The old process
The motivation for change
Developing the application
The new process
User acceptance
Evaluation

C. The Gas Leak Survey Application

The requirement
The old process
The motivation for change
Developing the application
he new process

D. Conclusions

A. DTE Company Background
DTE Energy is a leading energy and energy technology provider. It is a developer of merchant power and industrial energy projects. It is a growing leader in energy trading. It sells electricity, natural gas, coal, landfill gas, steam and chilled water. It is one of the nation's largest purchasers, transporters and marketers of coal. It develops and invests in emerging energy technologies such as distributed generation. Detroit Edison, a subsidiary of DTE Energy, is the nation's seventh largest electric utility, supplying energy to 2.1 million customers in Southeastern Michigan. Another DTE utility subsidiary, MichCon, is the nation's 10th largest natural gas local distribution company. It serves 1.2 million customers across Michigan. Together, these operations create a leading energy provider with assets of more than $17 billion. Michigan took an important step toward energy deregulation with the passage of a bill to restructure its electric utility industry. The new legislation, signed into law in June 2000 offers electric choice to all Michigan customers by 2002. DTE Energy announced its merger with MCN Energy, Inc. in 1999 and completed the merger in 2001.

B. The Pole Inspection Application

The requirement
The Detroit Edison has about 1,000,000 poles on its system. Over forty years ago, the company recognized the need to identify the ground line condition of standing wood poles. It has collected pole inspection data since that time, and over the years has developed a comprehensive set of inspection standards, both for ground line condition and for pole tops. Each pole is required to be inspected every five years.
The old process
In the old process field patrollers would carry paper maps and write their inspection results next to the pole symbol on the paper map. The completed maps would be assembled and given to a data entry clerk to interpret and then enter the results on an XLS spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was then converted to a flat text file and e-mailed to the AM/FM/GIS group (GENISYS) for uploading.
The motivation for change
Change usually requires both pushes and pulls. One push was that Detroit Edison printed 30,000 circuit maps each year for use by contractors in the ground-line decay and pole top inspection operations. Reducing or eliminating this number would provide substantial savings. Also, the old process had one manual writing step and another step to manually interpret the writing and enter this interpretation into a spreadsheet. Automating these two processes, perhaps even eliminating one, could reduce costs and improve the accuracy and quality of the AM/FM/GIS data. There was also a pull: a pilot program completed in two Columbiaville circuits totaling about 1400 poles had confirmed the usefulness of the Pocket PC.
Developing the application
The pole inspection application today is really three applications in one. Based on the success of the pilot program, Detroit Edison decided to deploy the ground line condition and pole top inspections throughout the service territory. Development was an iterative process that included end users and contractors. The developer and end users met, discussed and reviewed the processes 2-3 times per week. The contractor was called in as needed. Three people developed the application: two Detroit Edison employees and a programmer from the vendor. In addition, the contract supervisor worked with the developers to refine the process. The process took slightly over nine months, during which one Detroit Edison developer worked half time and another about 10%.

Once the ground line and pole top applications were in production, it became apparent that the same individuals who were collecting this data could also collect data about joint use. When a company requests to attach to a Detroit Edison pole, Detroit Edison is required to respond promptly and either give permission or inform the requestor that the additional attachment will require replacement or reinforcing of the existing pole, a cost that is borne by the requestor. In order to meet the stringent timeframe for responding, Detroit Edison added the third pole application in July 2002. Once a request to attach to a pole is received, an inspector visits the pole and fills out digital forms that describe the attachments. Based on the results, an analysis determines whether the attachment can be made without pole modifications or replacement, and the requestor is informed. For those who are interested in technology specifics, the application was developed to run on a Compaq iPAQ running the Pocket PC 2000 operating system. It uses an off-the-shelf viewing product called PocketGTViewer from Graphic Technologies, Inc. The inspection forms were built using Microsoft’s eMbeddedVB.
The new process
A Detroit Edison supervisor uses a web application to select the appropriate circuit or circuits. (See Figure 1.) The extract files are created on the GIS server. The extracted data will be in the GTX file format, which was invented by Graphic Technologies, Inc. for optimizing performance and data compression on handheld devices. Both graphic and attribute information, as well as display settings and queries, are in this single file. Each is approximately one-half megabytes in size for each circuit. The web application copies them to the supervisor’s

Figure 1: Process Flow Block Diagram for Pole Inspection
workstation. He then emails them to the contractor supervisor, who schedules the inspection work and copies them to Pocket PC’s for the inspectors. Each extract file has a 90 day expiration stamp, after which it can only be viewed by the Detroit Edison supervisor with a passcode. Contractors may spend several days inspecting a circuit. They only need to visit the office to receive new extract files or to turn in their completed inspections.

Once the inspectors turn in their work, their supervisor collates it (in case multiple inspectors worked on the same circuit) and emails the results to the Detroit Edison supervisor. He, in turn, routes one copy to service center engineering so they can decide which repairs need immediate attention and which can be contracted out. He uses the web application to take the inspection results to the server, where attribute-only changes are made to the GIS model with SQL, and changes requiring graphics work are sent to a batch FRAMME process. Finally, the supervisor archives the extract files with completed inspections onto CD’s for permanent storage.
User acceptance
Once the contractors (users) began to use the Pocket PC they eagerly accepted the new procedure. The digitized data collection process made their job easier because they didn’t have to write notes on paper in conditions not favorable to writing. For the most part, they just picked from lists or selected buttons or checked boxes. These same contractors had resisted using laptops. Since poles are in water, farm fields, woods, bushes and other inconvenient places, the laptops were too heavy and unwieldy.

Although the IT crowd was skeptical about the screen size for use outdoors in a map oriented application, the actual users say it works fine. You can only inspect one pole at a time during the inspection walk down, so the screen size is just right. The Pocket PC has an intuitive gesture-based zoom in and zoom out. The screen shows up well in daylight.
Evaluation
Detroit Edison found that the contractors could work more efficiently. Their fieldwork has been streamlined, and there is no need for end of the day paperwork time. Work could be created, sent and returned digitally, with fewer errors than with two manual steps. Data could be collected more accurately in the field. Perhaps the most significant tangible benefit has been the elimination of the data entry task. This labor savings alone has been greater than the expense of the hardware, software, and vendor development.

One question at the start of the project was how will the iPAQ’s perform? The short answer is “great”. The contractor initially bought 12 units in November 2001, and they are all still in service. DTE has not replaced any Pocket PCs. DTE people are responsible for their Pocket PC’s, and none of them have been stolen.

The users know each inspection is stamped with date and time, so the days of an early quit are gone. There have been many refinements since the original implementation. The GENISYS group has been making these refinements at the request of field users. The number of people using the Pocket PC will increase as new applications go into production Management’s perception of the project is mixed. The IT department is not too fond of the Pocket PC because of the fact that it runs a Microsoft operating system, and the company standard for hand-held devices is the Palm brand. However, the management of operations loves it because it has saved money and improved quality. And the third party contractor loves it because he has a better record of the work that is done. And the end users enjoy the convenience.

C. The Gas Leak Survey Application

The requirement
The requirement to conduct leak surveys comes from the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC). They mandate that the pipe be surveyed for leaks every 3 years. There are special circumstances that require surveys be done on a more frequent basis. For example, prior to a parade, the route that the parade will follow is surveyed for gas leaks. This Thanksgiving when you are at home watching the Detroit Thanksgiving Day Parade, you can rest assured that the parade route was surveyed for gas leaks.

The requirement for what specific data will be collected in order to meet the MPSC requirements is determined by the MichCon business unit. The data can be used to identify areas where there is a higher instance of leaks. Depending on the material type of the pipe, steps can be taken to prevent future leaks.
The old process
The Gas Operations Leak Survey Supervisor would run a mainframe application that would print out a card for each address that needed to be surveyed. The card contained a diagram of the location of the service, drawn with alphanumeric characters. The surveyors would then record the results of the survey on a paper form. This form would then be brought back into the office and the data put into an Oracle database. MCN has approximately 50 people doing survey work. Most of the work is done in the summer using temporary college students.
The motivation for change
The old system was a mainframe system that was not Y2K compliant. Moreover, it was not slated to be rewritten to be Y2K compliant. The business decided to print out 3 years worth of inspection forms and worry about a new system in the future. With the sale of MCN to DTE, this system was ignored until early 2002 when the business realized they were nearing the end of the 3 year cycle and would need a new process put in place.

The decision to implement gas leak surveys on the Pocket PC was influenced by the success of the Pole Inspection application. There are two things to look at, hardware and operating system. The decision to use the Pocket PC 2002 operating system has been made. This operating system supports the GTI software and eMbedded Visual Basic. The decision on the hardware has not been made. The business is looking at Casio, Itronix, and others. The requirement is that they use the Pocket PC 2002 operating system.
Developing the application
Software development was started in mid-August and should be completed by the end of November 2002. The development staff consists of one analyst working 50% of the available time on the project. Development consists of the data extraction from MARS (MCN’s FRAMME implementation), eMbedded Visual Basic applications to collect the data on the handheld device, and applications to populate the data that was collected to a database and update MARS. This process was a little longer because the developer was new to the MARS model. There are seven different survey types. Two of them will be delivered in November, and then the rest will follow. The developer and the business unit have been back and forth about six times, and each meeting brings something new to the table.
The new process
With the new process, the supervisor will extract the survey data from the MARS server using a web interface in a fashion similar to the Pole Inspection application. (See Figure 2.) The supervisor will then assign work to the surveyors by copying the GTX files to their Pocket PC’s. The surveyors will complete the work and return the completed survey files to the supervisor. The supervisor will then check the work and upload the files to a server. The decision was made to store the data in a separate database because the MARS system is in the conversion process and making changes to the MARS rule base would have an impact on that process. The data in the two databases is linked together using a unique address identifying number. The separate database will show new services that were found in the field and not part of the MARS data and services that have been removed from the field and not removed from MARS.

Figure 2: Process Flow Block Diagram for Gas Leak Survey
D. Conclusions
This paper has already described conclusions reached during each phase of deciding on and implementing the applications. But now let’s take a step back and look at some overall patterns.

First, the promise of the technology was realized. The Pocket PC is supposed to provide a new level of portability matched with enough power for serious graphicsbased applications. It did. Second, the pole project paid for itself very quickly. Streamlining the flow of data and eliminating manual steps made the difference. Less immediately tangible benefits such as cleaner and more timely data, although they have positive contributions, are not consistently recognized by non-technical management. But the more tangible reduction of labor cost was noticeable during the year the project was deployed. This reduction was much larger than the amount spent on hardware and software products, and in the second year it should ally the labor cost to produce the application. The pole inspection application also provided a benefit that was unanticipated. Damaged poles are reported more quickly to the service centers for repair, which results in more reliable service and reduced hazard.

Third, user acceptance was good. The two developers met with the crews and asked them how the application could be improved. Suggestions took the form of rearranging items on the iPAQ screens and changing how some lists displayed. There was some doubt whether crews not accustomed to computers would embrace their use, but with no exceptions the end users saw the Pocket PC as a helpful device that made their jobs easier.

Fourth, the reliability of the iPAQ hardware was a pleasant surprise. Out of the twelve units originally purchased, all were still in service at the end of twelve months. Two needed to be sent back to Compaq for repair, which was covered under warranty. These devices are not expensive to replace, and the original expectation was that some would be lost or damaged during the first year. In fact, their reliability has made the business case even more compelling.

Fifth, there were benefits in recognizing how to extend the application. Two examples are the addition of the joint use survey and the routing of inspection results to the service centers. In each case, a few hours of work to extend the application saved many hours of work by field crews. Detroit Edison could get its work done more quickly and provide a more reliable service.