We've all heard the statement, if you don't know where you are headed any road will do. This applies to all projects and especially to investments in IT infrastructure. At Hawaiian Electric Co. (HECO), our goal is to first envision where we want to take our company, and then carefully plan and execute to get us there using the best enabling technologies available.

At HECO, we are executing a strategic plan we developed in 2002. Our vision is to transition our company to embrace new technologies and processes to meet our customers' growing needs and expectations. CEO Mike May and Senior Vice President Operations Tom Joaquin share this vision and have supported it by investing in a new dispatch office, a new energy management system (EMS), an outage management system (OMS) and a customer information system (CIS).

We are now integrating our EMS-OMS-CIS systems to create a work environment that provides our frontline — those who deal directly with customers — with access to information that has been gathered from throughout the company.

We now have power plant control room operators, system operation dispatchers and customer service call center representatives who are able to look over the shoulders of their counterparts in a virtual manner to provide world-class customer service. Customers don't care whether the coordination of work between departments is difficult. Rather, they care that their HECO representative provides the assistance they need. The integration of HECO's information systems provides a one-stop information source for our customers.

EXECUTING OUR STRATEGY

To succeed in any integration endeavor, support within the company is required at the highest levels. At HECO, the vision and commitment of May and Joaquin have made all the difference. Our executives closely monitor progress of the US$50 million-plus being spent to build out our new dispatch center, and to install and integrate our EMS-OMS-CIS software systems. At Joaquin's weekly staff meetings, EMS, OMS and CIS project managers provide status updates on the progress being made toward integrating these systems.

Both the operational structure and physical facilities at HECO support the integration vision. The new dispatch center, which became fully operational with the new EMS in April 2006, houses the generation, transmission and distribution dispatchers. The HECO system is relatively small with about 292,000 customers on the island of Oahu. Dispatchers support one another as the need arises beyond their specific generation, transmission and distribution functions. Because all of HECO's dispatchers are located in the same building, every console will have additional OMS screens next to their EMS screens when the OMS goes live in the first quarter of 2007. The coexistence of EMS and OMS screens on each dispatcher console will facilitate the integration of the systems.

Customer service call center representatives presently reside on a different floor in the dispatch center facility. Call center representatives take the “lights out” calls from customers and create trouble tickets that are routed to the distribution dispatchers who send crews to respond to the problems. A new call center facility is being planned so that the call center will be at the same floor level as the dispatch center prior to the new CIS going live in the first quarter of 2008.

Our management made a conscious commitment to design and implement our information systems to be fully integrated. This enables information captured in one of the systems to be automatically populated to other systems as required, eliminating the need for the information to be re-entered into more than one system or a call being made from one department employee to another department employee to obtain this information.

Part of the vendor selection criteria evaluated the ability of each system to be integrated with related systems. HECO selected Siemens (Munich Germany) for the EMS, SPL (San Francisco, California, U.S.) for the OMS and Peace (Miami, Florida, U.S.) for the CIS. All of the vendors had worked with our Mincom ERP system previously, a definite plus.

During the project scoping and budgeting phase, costs and resources were specifically earmarked for integration between systems, which meant that the overall system cost was higher than that of a stand-alone system. We focused on optimizing the overall EMS-OMS-CIS systems rather than each individual element of the system. We looked at total ownership costs as well as installation time when selecting vendors.

We also met the corporate requirement that information residing in each system be shared and integrated with other corporate information systems through corporate-level enterprise application integration (EAI) middleware standards set by HECO's chief information officer.

We hope to complete this overall integration by the first quarter of 2008 when the CIS becomes operational.

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Chris Shirai is vice president of special projects at HECO.