Considerations for the Successful Integration of an electric distribution geospatial application
with other enterprise solutions
Benefits of system integration
Collecting and maintaining facility data is costly. However, integration can increase the
return on that data investment for many areas within the electric utility. The benefits of
integrating a geospatial application with other software systems within the enterprise are
many.
Designers can have more centralized access to supporting information and can provide
more complete and consistent information to crews. Integration of the geospatial
application with enterprise resource planning (ERP) information can streamline financial,
material and work management processes. Also, entry of facility data in the AM/FM/GIS
system can automatically populate financial records.
Planners have a more consistent and correct data source to use as a basis for analysis.
They can pull data from the facility model and also from customer billing information to
be analyzed by a single application. An integrated geospatial application can also
provide a means for making others aware of long-term plans.
Operations activities can benefit from shared geospatial information. Facility data
collected and maintained in the GIS can be used as a basis for outage predictions and
crew management.
Brief overview of SMUD’S SDIT system
The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD or the District) is in the midst of
developing their Service Delivery Information Technology (SDIT) environment.
SMUD’s SDIT system encompasses several major functional components. These include
an AM/FM/GIS system to store and maintain geospatial facility data long-term, design
and estimating tools to support job design, mobile data dispatch solution to communicate
and manage field crews, electrical analysis functionality, and an outage management
system.
The SDIT system will integrate the components listed above and will also support
interface points with numerous other sources and destinations of data. Landbase graphics
and attribution will be imported from multiple outside sources. Existing hand-drawn
maps are being converted for storage in the AM/FM/GIS system to then be used by the
other components of the SDIT environment. Electrical load and customer characteristics
will be derived from the customer information system, archived SCADA data and
substation demand readings to support robust analysis.
SMUD’s ERP system will provide information, updated periodically, to support job
design and estimating. Information from individual facilities will be populated and
updated in the ERP system as updates are made to the geospatial data. SMUD also has
plans for more integration in areas such as document management.
The system integration in progress at SMUD is expansive. When complete, access to
geospatial data will be available at various levels. Designers, mappers, planners, and
operations staff will be able to manipulate the data through specialized desktop
applications tailored to their use of the data to accomplish their daily responsibilities.
Others throughout the District will have viewing access to the geospatial data via the
web. Thus, the geospatial data has the potential to support in many areas of the District’s
business processes.
Tradeoffs
While system integration can provide many benefits, integration can also involve
tradeoffs as the individual components are being implemented. Decisions of core
functionality vs. interoperability or complexity vs. usability must be made carefully to
ensure the best overall solution.
