Interoperability rules – having vendors provide

Working with
vendors to build
stronger electric
co-ops
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INTEROPERABILITY
RULES
solutions
By John Vanvig
Arkansas’ First Electric Cooperative
Corp. built a state-of-the-art operations system by insisting vendors
provide components that can talk
to each other
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MASTERFILE
I
f there’s a tech-based solution for making
a co-op’s operations smoother, quicker,
and more efficient, chances are First
Electric Cooperative Corporation has adopted it.
“We’ve got quite a hybrid system,” says
Randy Everett, geographic information systems (GIS) manager for the 90,000-meter
co-op, based in Jacksonville, Ark.
Starting with his own GIS specialty,
Everett goes on to list some of the other
systems behind the blinking lights and
icons on First Electric’s computer screens.
There’s a Supervisory Control and Data
Acquisition (SCADA) platform, an outage
management system (OMS), and automated
metering infrastructure (AMI). Interactive
voice response (IVR) handles member calls,
and an automated vehicle location (AVL)
program keeps track of the co-op’s service
fleet.
“We’ve taken the approach of having
the best of breed with software applications,”
Everett says. “They have all contributed to
increased efficiencies.”
First Electric’s key platforms are provided by six different vendors―OMS and IVR
by Milsoft; AMI by ACLARA; AVL by Clevest;
GIS by ESRI; data model by Futura; and
SCADA by Survalent―but their built-in ability
to talk to one another, Everett notes, makes
them work like one system.
“What we’ve done is go out there and
find the best software solution providers who
are most willing to work with other vendors
as seamlessly as possible.”
Co-ops that bring new software systems online benefit greatly from first ensuring that these
platforms can work together.
Tying it all together
he job of tying it all together―for
example, turning connectivity models
into laptop screens that duplicate the
familiar staking sheets or display outages, service orders, and AVL information―falls to the
Partner Software (partnersoft.com) package
First Electric installed.
“Our operations department has come
to depend on the Partner Map Viewer for
everyday use,” Everett explains. “We have
not printed paper maps since around 2006.
Each crew foreman and every serviceman
has a laptop computer with the Partner Map
Viewer installed. We update the maps, usually at least once a week. The map has full
tracing ability so users can trace upstream
or downstream to find open points or generate a list of members from a particular point.
Outages and AVL data can also be viewed
from inside the Partner Map Viewer.”
T
The Partner Software product, he continues, is also “a key component” of the co-op’s
Mobile Field Force Solution from Clevest
(clevest.com), which takes its information from
First Electric’s customer information system
(CIS) maintained by National Information Systems Cooperative (NISC; nisc.coop).
“We work with just about everything,”
says Ashley Bagwell, marketing coordinator
for Partner Software. “I don’t know of a GIS
or CIS vendor we haven’t worked with.”
Those information systems are massive
and expensive, Bagwell continues, and they
can also be cumbersome. “Partner Software
provides the layer in between that makes
your map and GIS data a little more accessible to your entire co-op.”
That level of interoperability, Everett
points out, doesn’t happen by accident.
“There are other vendors that offer products
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with similar functionality,” he notes, “but we
wanted one that offered open integration
and an open-source code base. Partner Software allowed us the freedom to integrate
several applications we already had in place,
so we didn’t have to throw away the time
and technology we had invested.”
NRECA’s 15-year-old MultiSpeak® Initiative―the collaboration among vendors and
utilities to create a common language for
electric distribution software applications―
pioneered this kind of system integration,
Everett points out. But, he adds, it’s the responsibility of every electric utility to keep
integration and interoperability uppermost
in their dealings with technology vendors.
Everett’s been with First Electric since
2005, but his co-op experience stretches back
to 1996, when he began a 10-year stint as GIS
manager for North Arkansas Electric Cooperative. Over the course of his career, Everett says,
there’s been a marked improvement in technology applications that play well together. But
he’s determined to keep the pressure on.
“Back in the ’90s,” Everett recalls, “integration was very expensive―$10,000,
$15,000 just to develop integration points
between vendors. It’s gotten a lot better. But
as the clients, we need to insist that the vendors we use subscribe to that interoperability
and make sure they comply with it.”
Everett would get no argument from
Doug Lambert, who recently joined NRECA
as MultiSpeak program manager. Before he
signed on with the co-ops’ national association, Lambert was IT manager at San Bernard
Electric Cooperative, which serves about
25,000 meters out of Bellville, Texas. There,
he developed a national reputation for bringing technology on line in an orderly―and
tightly integrated―fashion.
“We believed in investing in technologies
that benefit the entire cooperative,” Lambert
says. “We recognized that a software solution
becomes more valuable when you can share
information between enterprise solutions. For
instance, when investing in AMI, we were sure
to include our OMS and CIS in the conversations from the research and pilot stages. We
weren’t just shopping for meter readings. This
new AMI had to play well in our sandbox.”
That threshold requirement earns San
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Bernard Electric―and Lambert―a lot of
respect from Steve Collier, a utility industry
veteran, former Texas co-op executive, and
consultant who’s now director of smart grid
strategies at Milsoft Utility Solutions (milsoft
.com).
Under Lambert, Collier recalls, San
Bernard Electric “did a better job of integrating
technology systems than any customer we had.”
And that’s saying something. Milsoft
supplies OMS, GIS, communications, and
field engineering technology to more than
a thousand co-ops and other utilities, and
Collier himself has emerged as a well-known
crusader for system integration and application interoperability.
“When evaluating new smart grid technologies,” he wrote in the American Public
Power Association’s Public Power magazine
last spring, “these maxims are paramount:
Every new solution should be easy to deploy, interoperate with a utility’s existing
and future solutions, and produce and consume all necessary data, all without expensive customization or manual employee intervention . . . Absent a good technology
integration plan, a utility will likely spend
more on consultants and others to achieve
data integration and functional interoperability than it invested in the original solutions.”
For his part, Lambert returns Collier’s
kudos.
“Milsoft was an early adopter of interoperability and has been an active participant
in the MultiSpeak Initiative from the beginning. I appreciate vendors that advocate
working together with other vendors to find
solutions that benefit the cooperative community,” he says.
San Bernard Electric, Lambert continues, has made its own contributions to finding those interoperability solutions, partly
out of necessity.
“Our success was a convergence of technology evolution, retirement of key staff, and
the evolution of smart grid technologies,” he
recalls. “When I started, we had one computer
dedicated to engineering analysis, paper maps,
and a dinosaur green screen for CIS; meter
readings were called in by our membership
each month. Outage management required a
seasoned lineman who knew the distribution
network in his head. We had several experienced linemen and a key dispatcher retire,
taking the knowledge with them. This exacerbated the need to implement technologies
that could carry us through.”
By the time Lambert left, “every San
Bernard Electric employee had a computer;
every truck had a laptop with mobile solutions. The operations control center was
staffed 24 hours a day, with an OMS that was
fully integrated into the CIS for real-time
billing changes. The AMI meters self-reported
outages. GIS changes from mapping and
staking could be seen in a real-time environment. The trucks had AVL systems that were
integrated into the OMS. This allowed for the
dispatchers to see the live locations of vehicles, assisting them with safety and efficiencies when restoring power.”
None of those advances, he adds, would
have been possible if those systems weren’t
working together and speaking the same
language.
“Co-ops play a crucial role in pushing
interoperability,” Lambert says. “Vendors respond to market needs. I believe that every
co-op should require any technology under
consideration to be using interoperability
standards.” n
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