Virginia is the seventh fastest growing state and its burgeoning population is having an impact on the power supply. During the past five years, Southside Electric Cooperative (SEC; Crewe, Virginia, U.S.) has experienced significant growth in the number of accounts serviced. This growth presents SEC with both business and information technology (IT) challenges.

Founded in 1937, SEC is a member-owned rural electric utility that provides electricity services to 18 counties, five towns and a city in southern Virginia. Only one utility company serves the state's urban areas, while utility cooperatives provide most of the electricity and electricity services to the remaining rural regions of the state. And, unlike a publicly held or government-owned utility, an electric cooperative provides its service at cost with any funds above operating expenses credited back to its customers/members as capital-credit dividends.

THE BUSINESS CHALLENGES

SEC needed a way to maintain high customer-service levels while dealing with rapid growth, or risk dissatisfying customers. Or worse yet, risk leaving them without power in the midst of a severe weather event. Specifically, the cooperative knew that it had to respond more quickly to service requests, even as its customer base grew. To do so, SEC would have to give employees more accurate information in a centralized view, enabling them to dispatch service units quickly and efficiently.

However, the company's IT underpinnings were a combination of legacy, proprietary and home-grown applications that didn't easily “talk” to each other. SEC used six different systems for recording outages, dispatch information, consumer information, geographical mapping, automated meter reading and mobile data. These systems were not connected, so employees manually transferred data from one system to another and accessed several systems to coordinate a single repair trip. The result was often slower customer service and an increased possibility of dispatch error due to incorrect member information. For example, when the cooperative mistakenly sent letters to the wrong batch of customers regarding a planned outage, the ripple effect on the call centers, dispatch teams and the operations department resulted in widespread frustration.

These issues led SEC to evaluate the way its technology investments were aligned with its business goals of reducing costs and ensuring customers are not without electricity. The mission behind the IT strategy is to ensure uninterrupted service to a growing customer base. The resulting decision was to create a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

IT STRATEGY DELIVERS VALUE

A SOA is a business strategy using existing technology resources to more closely align with business goals. This requires a fully integrated and up-to-date view of all operations to enable making better-informed decisions. If the information is trapped in various silos, such as proprietary or legacy applications, it inhibits gaining competitive advantage and improving overall operational efficiencies. IBM, as the leader in SOA, provides the software, hardware and services that enabled SEC to design and implement an SOA specific to the company's business goals.

SEC's strategy was two-fold. The first priority was to bring together the CEO and business leaders with the IT professionals to build consensus on the new direction. The second part of the strategy was to link and recycle SEC's myriad applications and data sources that track customer records, outage reports, automated meter management, geographical maps, billing and accounts receivable records, repair truck dispatch information and internal business processes.

Using IBM WebSphere software and services to build its SOA and integrate its various applications, SEC was able to aggregate information from separate systems, giving employees a single, comprehensive real-time view of customer accounts and engineering resources. When information is updated in one system, the changes now are reflected automatically in the others.

Additionally, SEC's IT strategy enables the company to more easily integrate new applications, including Qualcomm's OmniTracs satellite communications for real-time mobile data and ESRI geographical information system (GIS) maps to connect the field service team to the office. SEC is making it possible to provide real-time location and customer data to the company's linemen. However, just putting a laptop in a utility truck wasn't the difficult part. The challenge was finding a way to get data to linemen working in rural areas without cell phone access and sometimes facing extreme weather ranging from hurricanes to ice storms. The solution was satellite communications.

Before the SOA was in place, however, a SEC worker would take a service order from a printer and place it in a supervisor's tray. The supervisor would sort and prioritize orders and place them in a serviceman's tray. The serviceman would pick up the service order, often the next day, and begin the service call. Upon completion, the serviceman would bring the service order to the office, where a clerk would document that the work had been completed and so on. At a minimum, it was an 11-step process that involved at least five employees.

Now, when a service order comes in, it is displayed on the Qualcomm mobile system in a service technician's vehicle. The serviceman does the work, completes the service order electronically in the vehicle and posts the data immediately on all databases. We estimate that the efficiencies will help decrease an average service order time to two days or fewer. Previously, some service orders took as long as a week to post on all databases.

SEC TODAY

The real-world application of linking satellite communications and GIS maps to the main office proved itself very quickly when a minor hurricane hit Virginia. Cell coverage is spotty in rural areas and prone to outages during extreme weather, which is when linemen have to deal with downed power lines and service restoration. SEC's satellite communications system links the main office and the 100 vehicles out in the field, without any worries about the vagaries of cell coverage. These capabilities reduce outage time while ensuring linemen have up-to-date information to perform their jobs.

The satellite system is part of SEC's SOA that connects the computer in the truck's Partner Technologies GIS map viewer with Daffron and Associates Inc.'s customer information system. These capabilities allow linemen to see both the customer issues and the customer location at the same time. This is a tremendous benefit, because the linemen no longer have to toggle back and forth between the map and the customer information. Now it is all integrated on one screen, even though it is coming from two applications in the main office.

In the event of a disastrous storm, that system would relay data on the number of power outages from the trucks in the field. This information would be immediately available to management and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), so the scope and location of problems can be assessed. In a devastating storm, this data from the field could speed relief efforts.

It's important to note that SEC was looking not only to get data out to linemen in their trucks, but also to link the various software and databases in the home office, so departmental workers weren't wasting their days re-keying information from one application to another. This has greatly improved the process of reporting the location, materials used and labor to FEMA.

TEAMWORK

While SEC has realized tangible benefits through the technology underpinnings of an SOA, it's important to recognize the first critical step on the path to success. This step is the creation of a cross-cooperative team representing each part of the business to ensure various needs are clearly understood, business goals are met and the entire SEC community realizes gains from its investments.

Another important benefit is that prior IT investments have been protected with the recycling of many existing software applications without compromising productivity or customer service. Through standards-based technology and services expertise, SEC was able to integrate legacy applications while seeing dramatic improvements in our overall operations. Now the company's employees are better able to focus on their jobs instead of filling out forms or waiting for information. This has resulted in better service for the coop's membership — our ultimate goal.

MEASURABLE IMPROVEMENTS

To measure the overall success of its new IT and business strategy, SEC benchmarked three aspects of the new SOA model. First, response time to customer service calls has been reduced from three days to one day. The automated service order system is three times faster than the previous paper-based system. The reduced administrative work process benefits customers.

Second, overall staff productivity has increased with streamlined customer service processes. Data entry that previously required 30 minutes is now completed within several seconds. Significantly, this has expanded SEC's capacity for growth.

Finally, the bottom-line impact of SEC's new business strategy helped deliver a US$1.2 million capital-credits dividend to its customers/members in 2006.

Linda Easter Davis is the information systems supervisor at Southside Electric Cooperative (SEC). The daughter of a lineman, Davis has been responsible for overall information technology (IT) strategy and systems during her 20-year tenure at SEC. She is part of the IT team that led SEC's transformation to adopt a service-oriented architecture (SOA). She serves on the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association IT advisory group and frequently speaks on the topic of SOA. Linda.Davis@sec.coop