Eastern Utility Forum

Earlier this week Autodesk hosted a forum for large organizations responsible for managing infrastructure networks.  Participants included power, gas, municipal, and railway companies.  The aspect of the forum that I found most interesting was the common perspective on the business problems that companies responsible for managing infrastructure networks are facing.   Lisa Campbell of Autodesk led a discussion of the the most urgent business issues.  For many of these there was a consensus among the participants.  I would single out two key IT issues for which there was a consensus among the participants.  Integration is a major issue for large utilities.  Mark Julian of First Energy in his introductory remarks  emphasized the importance of tailoring integrated IT solutions to the companies business processes and objectives and not the other way around.  A key aspect of this challenge is the integration of solution from different vendors.  For example, all the participants are faced with integrating ERP systems from SAP, Peoplesoft and others, geospatial technology from several vendors, workflow, asset  and outage management systems from Indus, LogicaCMG, and Invensys, as well as other systems form other vendors.   The business benefits are improved customer service, increased competitiveness, greater productivity and reduced costs.

Field force automation is a key issue that is driven by an aging work force at most utilities and telecoms.  Mobile solutions are also driven rapidly improving technology.  For example, reliable wireless communications, either WiFi and 3G, is becoming increasingly prevalent in many jurisdictions.   I've attached a general architecture for addressing the immediate challenges of field force automation, getting reliable facilities data to the field force and enabling feedback from the field in the form of red lines or markups.  This architecture is scalable, general in the sense that it can support a variety of geospatial tools and hardware, and simple.  The key components are a single point of truth such as  an Oracle spatially-enabled RDBMS containing data about the network infrastructure , a field viewer for viewing and redlining in the field on handheld devices, for example an OQO (www.oqo.com), a cache of light-weight design drawings, and an enterprise synchronization tool ,such as iAnywhere's Afaria (www.iAnywhere,com), to automate the distribution of software and data to the field and to post red lines and markups back to the records people in the central office.  At the forum, Brad Lawrence outlined ENMAX's field force automation solution, a key aspect of which was ENMAX's policy of prioritizing red lines and markups from the field by guaranteeing 24 hour turnaround.  Brad outlined the business benefits of  a basic field force automation solution such as this.  One of the most important is improved data quality which means fewer "returns", more efficient cable locates, improved ability to respond to emergencies,  happier regulators, and reduced costs.