More than 320 users of Intergraph’s utilities and communications technologies witnessed at least a couple of firsts at the company’s international users’ conference this year. A change of scenery was the most noticeable enhancement.
Intergraph moved its annual conference to the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida this year, marking the first time the conference has strayed from the company’s Huntsville, Ala., home. This was also the first conference organized specifically by Intergraph’s Utilities and Communications division. By all accounts, the new twists had a positive impact on Intergraph’s UtiliComms Exchange 2001, which took place April 22-25. More than 320 attendees representing 28 countries were present, both numbers exceeding Intergraph’s expectations, according to Roger Coupland, Intergraph’s Utilities and Communications president.
UtiliComms Exchange 2001 gave Intergraph officials the opportunity to educate users not only on the company’s specific solutions, but on changes in the structure of the company itself. Jim Taylor, Intergraph’s CEO, pointed out that with the company’s transformation from a hardware and software company to a company focused strictly on software and its reorganization into specific vertical businesses (such as the Utilities and Communications group), the new Intergraph is easier to understand than the old. Much attention also was given to the company’s commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software approach, which the company touts as offering users rapid implementation and low cost-of-ownership while still allowing room for customer-specific configuration and customization.
UtiliComms Exchange 2001 also featured valuable user input. On the same day PECO Energy was inducted into Intergraph’s 100 Percent Club for its total conversion of paper records into a digital database, PECO’s Bruce Fluehr discussed the utility’s GIS/OMS project implementation. In April 2000, PECO began replacing its home-grown mainframe trouble management system (TMS) with Intergraph’s InService outage management system, supported by the company’s ActiveFRAMME GIS. Fluehr pointed out that PECO’s old TMS was outdated and offered limited and inaccurate outage statistics and incomplete knowledge of crew locations. InService, which is currently working in parallel with the legacy TMS, is already providing PECO with improved outage analysis, crew tracking and a graphical display of outage and work crew data (the latter being a huge improvement in the eyes of the utility’s dispatchers, according to Fluehr). Fluehr said the project should be complete in July 2001. Future plans at PECO call for the InService system to interface with the utility’s SCADA, AMR and work management systems. PECO intends to eventually migrate to Intergraph’s G/Electric solution for totally integrated geospatial resource management.
Conference attendees gained insight into an ongoing migration from Intergraph’s FRAMME product to the G/Electric solution as Kansas City Power & Light’s (KCPL’s) Ed Hedges outlined that utility’s current geospatial projects. Intergraph’s solutions are among the core components of KCPL’s distribution automation initiative.
Emphasized throughout the conference was mobile computing’s increasingly integral role in the power delivery technology chain. META Group analyst Rick Nicholson pointed out that pervasive mobile computing will play a huge role in a utility’s transmission and distribution operations over the next few years, with more than 50 percent of field staff having access to some type of mobile computing device by 2005.
