The work management system (WMS) plays a critical role in today's utility industry. The data output a WMS produces can feed many systems, including geographical information systems (GIS), legacy systems (such as material and financial systems) or the multiple threads of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The data also may be the source of performance reports on anything from crew scheduling, service standards, design standards and skill usage.

Alliant Energy (Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.) recently rebuilt its WMSs, which were only a few years old. As a result of a merger involving three utility companies, and the fact these companies had their own WMSs, Alliant Energy had the opportunity to re-think not only its interfaces and integrations, but also the business process flows it had previously defined.

Work Management Consolidation and ERP

To bring these WMSs together, Alliant Energy began a Consolidation of Work Management project. At the same time, the company began an ERP project that uprooted all of the existing financial, material management, asset accounting and human resources systems.

By the nature of the projects of the work management consolidation and ERP, Alliant Energy had the opportunity to revisit both the good and bad decisions it made the first time it defined and deployed its WMSs.

For many utility companies, WMSs are hot commodities. Alliant Energy's Wisconsin utility subsidiary, Wisconsin Power and Light (WP&L), has had a WMS in place for 23 years. The first 17 years were with a mainframe system, and the last six years were with a client-server WMS.

WP&L's mainframe WMS was a good system and served a productive life. With the old WMS, you could initiate jobs, build a detailed design, schedule the job, report the as-built, and then finally close the job. This system was used for electric, gas and water capital work with a complement of more than 4500 gas, electric and water compatible units (CUs). For many years, this mainframe WMS was very functional. However, in the early 1980s, Alliant Energy began to realize the system's shortcomings. Although the company had a few simple interfaces to its GIS and financial systems, the mainframe system was limited to capital work with financial properties for only one particular job.

Around 1990, WP&L kicked off a re-engineering project. Everything from work definition to closing a job was examined. Several changes were identified, and work management was one of them. Alliant Energy knew it needed a system that offered more features to bring the company into the new world of technology and competition in the utility industry. This WMS needed to be more flexible with easier-to-build interfaces. It needed to be client-server technology and allow easier performance reporting. After several months of shopping in 1994, Alliant Energy found a suitable WMS — Worksuite's STORMS. The company went on to develop this WMS with a total of 34 interfaces, from fleet to human resources and everything in between.

Merging Companies and Systems

Through its WMS, Alliant Energy was fully integrated and ready for the future — that is, until a triple merger came along a few years later. The company immediately knew it would have to consolidate the WMSs from these three companies. With this consolidation, Alliant Energy could save support costs, introduce common practices across the company and reduce general upkeep of the system. The company was just about to start this project when it decided to purchase an ERP system. This ERP initiative uprooted all WMSs interfaces. Therefore, parallel to consolidating three WMSs into one, Alliant Energy also had to integrate its consolidated WMS with the new ERP system. Within the scope of the work management consolidation and integration to ERP, the company also needed to have an interface to its GIS system. Alliant Energy determined the GIS system was to be fed exclusively through work management. The GIS system would feed the company's outage management system, populate data for mobile GIS and tie to the CSS systems. Alliant Energy would keep GIS up-to-date through the WMS where all the work is managed.

As mentioned earlier, the work management to GIS feed is the primary method by which GIS is updated at Alliant Energy. Through “facility” collection in its WMS, Alliant Energy is able to feed GIS the “static” and “dynamic” attributes associated to each item that is installed or removed. The attributes are configurable in WMS, so the company can collect the data and properties of interest. Static attributes are those things that are always the same about that asset. Using a wood pole, for example, the static attributes would be wood and southern yellow pine. The dynamic attributes would be owner (company owned or foreign owned), foreign attachments (yes or no) and usage (is it to be used as a distribution pole, a streetlight pole, part of an H structure or a guy stub pole).

Using conductor CUs as an example, the static attributes would carry information, such as aluminum, three conductor and overhead cable. Again, static attributes are the characteristics of the asset that do not change no matter how you use it. Furthermore, the dynamic attributes of this same conductor if used as a service wire would be: direction of service, upstream transformer location, and new/replace/add. Within the dynamic attributes, Alliant Energy also collects the phasing information for GIS. When the designer inputs primary conductor CUs to a design, the WMS pops up in a window to ask for the phasing configuration. In answering the question of phasing configuration, the designer would answer, for example, A/C/B indicating the conductors on the pole are arranged in an A/C/B order. GIS then posts this information for future look-up of the phasing configuration on that pole. Other examples of attributes the company collects are normally open/close on switches, switchgear configurations, transformer phase connections and gas pipe tap locations.

GIS is also used as a basis for retirements. As work management feeds GIS, asset accounting is fed at the same time. As property units are retired through STORMS, based on the location of the unit, that item is matched with asset accounting to remove the correct item. This provides the user with the vintage of the item being removed. For those items that do not have a GIS location, the first in, first out accounting method is used.

Like the facility collection functionality for GIS data, data for Shared Facility Information (SFI) is collected as an attribute of a pole installation. With this information, Alliant Energy is able to manage pole attachment billings. Before using this expanded functionality to manage this data, the collection of pole rental fees required a clerk to visually check each overhead job during the closing process for the paperwork that identified the attachment information.

Alliant Energy uses an in-house built system for contractor billing (CBS). While this system is not currently part of the company's ERP system, CBS does get its core information from the WMS. The geography data from the job is passed to CBS so the company can apply the appropriate rates and taxes to the contractor bill.

Alliant Energy uses People Soft for financials, asset accounting, human resources and supply chain. Each of these ERP threads has interfaces to the WMS to receive and send data related to capital work and O&M work.

For an accurate work management database of employees, work management receives daily updates of current employees from the ERP human resources thread. This information includes the employee's name, the skill class of the employee, as well as the employee's work pool and the standard crew HQ they report to. This information is used within the WMS for management of crew availability and scheduling. A batch process updates this information once a day.

Material Management

Material management is an area everyone in the utility business is focusing on to gain efficiencies. Through the use of concepts — including just-in-time delivery, the use of on-site delivery and having materials supplied by a third-party vendor — the WMS is pivotal in the supply chain world. There are several touch points with the ERP supply chain thread and the WMS. At Alliant Energy, the WMS generates a preliminary bill of materials on the front-end of large jobs. This preliminary bill of materials is used for ordering items of long lead-time, such as large padmount transformers, and large volumes, such as miles of overhead conductor. This document includes the approximate date the materials will be needed so the buyers have as much heads-up as possible. To generate this preliminary summary bill of materials, the designer enters preliminary design codes that provide enough material detail without going into the full design detail. The full material requisition is then sent to ERP to generate a sales order. Unlike the preliminary summary, this information sent to ERP will contain every nut, bolt and washer needed to build the job. This document will contain a customer-ready date, which is the key supply chain information needed to ensure the materials are available when needed.

On the administration side of the material management, the ERP supply chain thread provides daily item description and cost updates to the material catalog in WMS.

Critical Financials

Financial information is critical in the life cycle of the job in WMS, and every job that runs through WMS has a set of financial properties. Anyone working on a job, from the designer to the construction crew, uses the job financials to book their time. Additionally, the supply chain uses this same chart of account string to order and requisition materials for that job. The summary bill of materials includes the financial string associated to each of the material items needed for a given job.

Several differences in workflow exist between blanket jobs and jobs with unique financial information. For jobs that require unique financials, the designer clicks on a button in WMS to receive a complete set of unique financials from ERP. In ERP, this type of job goes up to the project level, whereas the blanket jobs are at the activity level.

Asset accounting data is sent to ERP at selected milestones. To keep asset accounting as current as possible, WMS sends a feed to ERP at the time of construction complete. At that point, ERP has the in-service date of those assets, based on the original design, installed immediately upon the crew reporting the job complete. During the closing process of each job, the as-built is electronically recorded and subsequent corrections are sent to asset management, in the case of design changes noted in the as-built design. Again, at Alliant Energy, GIS is the database that holds the continuing property records detail. For this reason, when units of property are retired through WMS, ERP will remove the item from both GIS and continuing property records at the same time.

WMS Plays a Pivotal Role

In the utility industry, the work management role of providing data to ERP is essential. Work management can be interfaced to several points in the ERP system to deliver data such as asset properties and project costing data. To the supply chain, you can provide material forecasts, just-in-time material delivery orders, special handling of previously capitalized items, on-site delivery and material reservations.

The WMS plays a central role in today's progressive utility business. The WMS is the center of most data sent to and from field operations. It is the entry point for data elements ranging from GIS facility properties to the ERP threads of asset accounting management, project costing management and human resources that are managed within the work management process.

Joseph A. Presti is team leader for Work Management Services (WMS) at Alliant Energy. Joining Alliant Energy (Wisconsin Power and Light) in 1987, Presti spent nine years as a field engineer responsible for new customer work and rebuilds of electric, gas and water, and transmission and distribution service. Presti holds AS degrees in electromechanical and electronic technology.
JoePresti@alliantenergy.com