Severn Trent Systems (STS, Houston, Texas, U.S.) announces that American Electric Power (AEP, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.), one of the largest generators of electricity in America, and United Illuminating Co. (UI, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.), an investor-owned electric utility, have purchased the Worksuite family of products, which includes the STORMS work-management, Scheduler resource-management and DataMart decision-support applications.

AEP delivers electricity to more than 4.8 million customers in an area of more than 197,500 sq miles (511,523 sq km) in 11 states. In 2000, AEP merged with Central and South West Corp. to bring together two public-utility holding companies suited for the competitive market. After the merger, the new company recognized that it could achieve significant savings by moving to a new enterprise-wide work-management system. In a comprehensive bid process, AEP determined that the off-the-shelf functionality in STS's Worksuite products provided the best match to its future business processes.

The purchase of new work-management and scheduling systems was part of AEP's Enterprise Application Solutions (EAS) initiative. The EAS project will entail the implementation of new financial, human resources, payroll, supply chain and work-management systems that AEP's corporate services, wholesale and T&D organizations will use.

UI services more than 300,000 customers in the Greater New Haven and Greater Bridgeport, Connecticut areas. Its service territory consists of 17 towns in a 335-sq-mile (868-sq-km) territory. UI was looking for a new work-management system to consolidate all job types previously managed in multiple systems, and to enable a more efficient, redesigned work-management process. In evaluating Worksuite, UI found the functionality needed to support its new work-management processes and was confident that Worksuite would help it manage, schedule and account for jobs in a more efficient manner.

In the past, all of UI's crew and resource scheduling was done manually. As jobs came in from the various systems, a supervisor would pick which crews were assigned to each job, and the individual crews would organize which jobs they would complete first and which route they would take. UI selected Scheduler as a crucial tool to manage the allocation of its work crews, improve use of resources, reduce travel time and costs, and raise the level of customer service UI provides.

The Worksuite DataMart decision-support system will provide the ability to analyze business-performance data without affecting the performance of the online STORMS application. DataMart will provide UI with essential reporting on both management data and operational data.
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